INTERVIEW WITH PATRICE CHÉREAU

THOSE WHO LOVE ME CAN TAKE THE TRAIN is a catchy, disturbing title. How did you decide on it? - This phrase soon became one of the basic elements of the film. Danièle Thompson and I started with a real story that subsequently dissolved itself and became something else. A man, an artist, who has spent his whole life in Paris, decides to be buried in Limoges. His statement: 'Those who love me can take the train', is a posthumous injunction to the sur- vivors: if you love me, you can at least sacrifice a day of your life to accompany me to my last resting place. It also implies a division between those of us who will take the train and those who won’t. I heard this sentence and wanted to use it as our title: it is long, but mysterious, it sounds like an order - but actually a rather gentle order - it instils a competitive spirit in the survivors that is present throughout the film. It doesn’t say much about the person who has died, but it says a lot about the living, especially his heirs, descendants, spiritual sons, and the family that this man has forged for himself against all odds and that he has dominated like a tyrant. The film, in which a dead person is so prominent, is actually a manifestation of life. - The dead man bullies the living but, at the same time presents them with a fabulous gift: his disappearance. He stops encumbering them with his obstinate, weighty allure. He offers them, by dis-appearing, a day that obeys to no rules, and where problems get solved one by one, a day that will enlighten all of them. Funerals, as everyone has found out at sometime or other, are both magnificent and horrible days, days that can suddenly become incredibly joyful, days where the living re-establish contacts, and develop a new appetite for life that is honed by the proximity of death. Let’s say that THOSE WHO LOVE ME CAN TAKE THE TRAIN is a film that says a lot about the positive side of funerals... Why are the lives of all the people who attend, and who have competed for the love of the deceased, going through such crises? - Because the film wouldn’t be interested in them if they weren’t. And they are our crises, those of our times, that we have to cope with every day, the burning questions of filial love, of conjugal love, of how to make sense of them, to deny them or reinvent them. These crises emerge, criss-cross and become superimposed because this journey on a train is a kind of forced cohabitation. A lot of these crises are related to paternity. What does it mean to be somebody’s son? To be somebody’s father? How biological paternity can be substituted by a great deal of other forms of paternity. Paternity, also means to transmit something to the next generation, be it a code for living, or knowledge. Thus in the film there are, of course, real fathers, fake fathers, fake children and un- worthy sons. And other questions arise: how can a son be sure of his father’s love? How should one love a father? May one drop him for another father, a more ideal of fantasised one? And when this love is bestowed on us, why do we suddenly refuse it? Then, there is the question of "marriage" (or of couples) that we all have to grapple with. The conventional marriage (whose high-priestess is Viviane-Frédéric) and all kinds of 'marriages'. What does it mean to love someone, to share one’s life with someone and how should one go about it? Making and breaking of couples, that was the starting point of the scenario; paternity and marriage have become its guidelines. It doesn’t matter whether one is married or not, of the same sex or the opposite sex, love, jealousy, frustration, disappointment or hope are seen here through people of various ages, conditions, situations. They are all the people that the painter knew and loved. The man who is being accompanied to the cemetery is a painter, like your father. People will interpret the film as being autobiographical. - Let’s say that, when it came to the portrait of Jean-Baptiste, I was inspired by my father, who incidentally had the same first name. Maybe that’s why I didn’t show the character’s paintings. I was wasn’t much interested in what he had painted as in what he had taught his students, his friends, all his sons. But I feel that I am everywhere in the film and not only there where I seem to be. Part of me is also in the couple made up of Charles Berling and Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, I am also in the diabolical triangle of Pascal Greggory, Bruno Todeschini and Sylvian Jacques. The man being buried had students: so did I. In fact, I’m in it all over the place. The two main stories, that of the couple breaking up and the story of the three boys contain fragments of my life, that I have modified and blended. I don’t recognise myself do much in the situations as in the consequences and resolutions of the crises that they all go through. There were two or three improbable things that I wanted to tell, for example how two persons who have broken up, can, nonetheless, get together again for part of the way. For a long time I didn’t know if Claire and Jean-Marie would get back together again. I said to myself: as long as they’re getting pleasure out of their crisis, nothing will be resolved, but once one of them lets go, then the right conditions may prevail for them to be able to start something again. But first they have to go through that important line Valeria says: 'I’m going to leave you, I’m going to leave...', she has to agree to pull out, that’s what unblocks the situation. Similarly, to conclude that hopeless but very beautiful threesome: I knew from the start that François (Pascal Greggory) was the one who that day wants to be in mourning for everything, who wants to get over his relationship with Jean-Baptiste (Jean-Louis Trintignant) with whom he had been madly in love, and to end things with Louis (Bruno Todeschini), whose lover he is, and to wind things up with Bruno (Sylvian Jacques), with whom he’d had an affair. He ends up alone in the film, as he intended to, and I wanted to show his loneliness. Let me say, in passing, about my film L’HOMME BLESSÉ, that one of the benefits of that film was that, at a given moment, it helped people because the film didn’t present the homo-sexual character as a case. There was no explaining: he liked boys, period. In THOSE WHO LOVE ME CAN TAKE THE TRAIN, the notion of being HIV positive is introduced. I thought it was important to show that this HIV positive boy (Sylvian Jacques), was going to meet someone, that they were going to live together,without it being a big deal, simply because now that’s become part of life. The film seems to have three parts. Can one see them as the movements of a concerto: the allegro staccato of the train, the largo in the cemetery, the allegro furioso in the family home? - Possibly. The parts are not the same length. I just know that the coffin being lowered into the earth occurs about half way through the film. But there is undoubtedly a musical element to the film, yes. It’s something I worked on in the screenplay first with Danièle Thompson, then with Pierre Trividic. We started with fifteen characters and little-by-little dropped some of them and wound up with a series of two-character scenes with dialogue that came to terms with the basic issues and said what had to be said. I like this funnel-shaped structure where things get sifted and become more essential. But shaping films always means dealing with problems that are strictly musical. Constructing a film means making choices about where time jumps, or where it gets compressed or drawn out. You move at a leisurely pace for a while then, suddenly, you abandon that and everything speeds up like a heartbeat. My obsession, was not to be too mechanical since we were compelled to track everyone from one place to another and that the "schedule" was very linear, pre-planned: Paris-Limoges and return. It’s what the characters say and experience that makes the film head off in unexpected directions. Technically speaking, isn’t it very hard to shoot in a train? - Quite hard. Especially as we had fourteen shooting days on the train. We left in the morning at 7AM for Mulhouse - that’s the line that the French railroads always rent for film-shoots - and we only got back by night. This also made for an extremely dynamic shoot. Films that take place on trains are always very dynamic, even when they are shot in a studio as NORTH BY NORTH WEST or THE LADY VANISHES. There’s always tremendous élan: you move toward problems, or toward solutions,you’re always going toward something. A train is a hermetic space that is on the move, the perfect motor to accelerate a story. It travels at the speed of thought. A train is truly like thought; thought in motion. We only shot two of the train scenes in a studio: one was the toilet scene because we couldn’t pull back far enough to film the action, and the other was when we follow the little girl as she moves through the cars. It wasn’t much fun. No, the real pleasure was shooting on the actual train with a real land-scape rushing by outside on both sides of the cars, and real light changes on the actors’ faces. It was truly thrilling to capture that. And I never could have achieved this somewhat insane project without Eric Gautier (the lighting cameraman), who enabled me to shoot two thirds of the film in hand-held cinemascope, which is a real technical feat. This gave me an incredible and risky sense of freedom, and enabled me to capture and control the sudden changes of mood in my film. All the actors in the film are extraordinary, and seem to take great pleasure in their roles. - I feel like saying a bit pretentiously that generating this kind of happiness among the actors, at least as far as their work goes, is what I know how to do. In this instance, even more than usually, there was a real cast-spirit. That is, everyone had a role - be it big or small - and usually something to fight for. The project was self-evident. And even if it concerned a funeral, yes, it was joyful to act out, as much for the actors with whom I had already worked as with those who were working with me for the first time. Be it Jean-Louis Trintignant, or Charles Berling, or Sylvian Jacques, whose first movie it was. After the shooting of LA REINE MARGOT, weren’t you a bit tired of the cinema? - No, why? I wanted to start all over again, even with a film as complex as this one. I couldn’t have made this film without the freedom and the confidence that the previous one brought me. The making of LA REINE MARGOT had the same effect on me as did directing Wagner’s 'Ring' in Bayreuth. These are undertakings that are so huge that one emerges from them stronger, hardened, at home in all aspects of production, and better at weathering crises. I now know what the cinema beings me, what I can find only in cinema. The cinema and the theatre should not be such distinctly separate worlds as they are, even thought I know this is a country where it’s hard to cross borders. So when I meet people who ask me what my plans are, and I reply that I’ve just finished a film and am writing another - which happens to be the case - 'What about the theatre', they say, 'No, no immediate plans.' 'What a pity!', they say. But it’s not a pity at all. The cinema and theatre are not incompatible or separate worlds, whatever people say. With all due respect, I’d rather remind myself of CITIZEN KANE, whose credits at some point include the lovely statement: 'Filmed with the actors of the Mercury Theatre'...