PASCAL BONITZER - INTERVIEW

How did you come to write the script of your third film, PETITES COUPURES? - After 'Rien sur Robert', I wanted to start again with something which interested me in the sequence with Michel Piccoli, the arrival of the character, played by Fabrice Luchini, in a house he doesn't know, among people who, he realises, are hostile to him. I wanted to take again the core of this situation, to begin a story with a character who gets lost, and lengthen the journey. I thought of the first verses of the Divine Comedy: In the middle of our life, I found myself in a dark forest, as I had lost the straight path... Straight away I wanted to develop this core as a detective script. Then, I broke my leg, which allowed me to think a bit and call Emmanuel Salinger for help. But I was already working on another idea, finding in my files a scene written ten years ago, which became the first scene of the film. It's the scene between the two women, Nathalie (Ludivine Sagnier) and Gaëlle (Emmanuelle Devos), with the lipstick exchange. - Yes, and they talk about a third character named Bruno, who is a communist. I had suddenly two new female characters, an idiot or so-called idiot and a communist. I decided to go with it. You do like transitional objects: the ring, the lipstick or the gun. A ring, as Béatrice (Kristin Scott Thomas) says, isn't worthless, it creates the link between two people. And this is Bruno's exact problem: To have a link with a woman. - It's what the ring symbolises: In principal it is a token of faithfulness or love towards a woman, but the funny situation is that the ring passes from hand to hand, from one woman to another. The characters exchange objects: the lipstick, the ring, the letter and the gun circulate and are used as currency between them, and run their course as inanimate objects, intertwining with the journey of the characters; which is like a second way of reading the story. It reassures me in the writing process: as long as an object like the ring can be a link between the characters, I tell myself that there is a continuity and a logic. Even if the characters act foolishly, the action still makes sense. The film's title, SMALL CUTS, has several meanings. In the first place, it relates to the physical wounds that Bruno inflicts on himself, or other people inflict on him. - Yes it refers to the injuries on himself more or less deliberately at various times, but also to other splits and break-ups: everyone in the film is facing or undergoing a divorce of some kind, or else breaking with their own beliefs. But I didn't calculate it; it's not theorised or premeditated. It just came out like that, the way themes and motifs recur and interlace when you write a piece of music. It's significant that everything that happens to Bruno in the film leaves a physical mark on him. - Yes. They're small cuts, actual little wounds that mark his face and body. His character has a likeable side to it, or at least I hope so, but he can also be so irritating that you want to smack him. It's better that he should get smacked in the film, rather than by the audience or the critics. At the same time, it adds to his vulnerability, the "little boy" aspect that gives him his charm, the charm that Daniel Auteuil brings to his role, at any rate. How did Daniel Auteuil react when he read the script? - He called me almost immediately and asked 'How come you know me so well?' We knew a bit of each other since MA SAISON PREFEREE that I co-wrote with André Téchiné. We met again two or three years ago, we both thought of each other. Though I wasn't sure of what would come out from this exchange. I was so drained from writing the script that I even didn't read it before sending it to my producers. They sent it to Daniel. I thought they were mad. Daniel answered two days later and then I thought HE was mad. Did he agree straight away? - He said on the phone that he'd do it whenever I liked. After a tough film like Nicole Garcia's THE ADVERSARY, he may have seen it as an opportunity to move on to something lighter, less dark. Not that SMALL CUTS isn't dark, but only in parts. A key scene in Bruno's trajectory is when he goes through the forest at night in the fog. The film's narrative register shifts and it becomes a kind of mystery tale. - Yes, he arrives at a sort of castle. I deliberately wanted to give it the tone of a fantasy story. I'm trying to get closer to fantasy, although I know it's not easy, especially in the French film-making and cultural environment, which isn't too receptive to fantasy. There isn't much a fantasy tradition in French cinema, or at least there's never been a mainstream fantasy genre. I'm not saying my film is a fantasy film - my characters are realistic, up to a point - but I'm trying to find a way closer to fantasy. On his painful journey, Bruno meets four different types of women. Your film portrays various female types: the partner, the young girlfriend, the ideal woman and the easy woman you don't get attached to. - Given that I don't change subjects much from one film to the next - I tend to stick to the same line - I wanted to include more women than in RIEN SUR ROBERT, which only had two: the blonde and the brunette. I put four women in this story. I wanted to make it thicker and richer. The image of the forest sets the tone of the narrative: I wanted everything to be bushy and obscure: all the characters, both main and secondary, have their own complicated, inextricable stories. Also, the big adventure for me was to get out of Paris at the beginning of the film. I normally have my characters leave Paris halfway through the film and come back to it at the end. Here, I wanted Bruno to go to his uncle Gérard, the Communist mayor in distress, early on. Bruno is a Parisian who gets out of Paris. Everything that happens to him can put him in danger. True, he finds himself in situations he hasn't chosen. He's a character who is led by events. He has very little autonomy or willpower. He's not looking for anything specific; he's not a hero in search of the truth, he's someone who gets carried along by events, and as it happens, they take him a long way. To what extent is the Bruno character an extension of the male characters in your first two films. RIEN SUR ROBERT and ENCORE? - He's a variation on the same character, in which many men can recognise themselves: the difficulty of being faithful, the difficulty of living up to the choices one makes, and a big weakness for the opposite sex. Plus a fair dose of cowardice, although I don't judge the character. He's neither a great warrior nor exactly a coward. He reminds me of something that Godard once said: 'Cinema should tell us why men are cowards and women are beautiful'. It's a line that stuck in my memory. The role of Béatrice needed an actress like Kristin Scott Thomas, who has a natural aura of mystery and brings prestige to the character. - Yes, it needed that mixture of distance, oddness and classiness with a touch of craziness, plus the fact that she is a stranger to Daniel Auteuil. She and Daniel had never met and their acting careers and cultural backgrounds are worlds apart, not to mention their different native countries and languages. What made you choose Kristin Scott Thomas in particular? - I've liked her a lot for a long time, ever since I saw her in a wonderful film, AN UNFORGETTABLE SUMMER by Lucian Pintilie. We sent her the script and she too recognised herself in it. She felt that the Béatrice character was talking to her. That was a good sign, and from then on I knew we could work together. The differences between her and Daniel Auteuil didn't make it easy, but I think they add something that makes their meeting work. The great thing about Kristin is that she's capable of going very far and doing very audacious and crazy things. And I think she liked the dialogue. The dialogue is very important in the way the scenes are constructed. The dialogue gives each scene its unity. - As a scriptwriter and author, I pay great attention to dialogue. It's dialogue that gives me the idea of the characters and their truth. For me , a scene works well when the dialogue takes you somewhere unexpected, like in the opening scene between the two women, when you start by thinking they're complete strangers and the lipstick is a neutral object, and you realise at the end that it's something quite different. If the dialogue hooks your interest, you can build a situation. I like it when there's a twist in the scene that takes the audience to a different place, they're not sure where, and things flip in an unexpected direction. So basically you like the structure of comedy. - Yes, it's the structure of comedy with the surprise twist. The principal character, Bruno, is communist. Regularly, there is this mention: How can you be communist after the fall of the Wall? - I proceed by literal repetitions, which can be comic. For a realistic treatment of communism, I would have written another script. Above all, I wanted to find contemporary details in a timeless story, I wanted a disorientated character. Nowadays who is more disorientated than a communist? They have literally lost the reference to the East. Finally, communism is part of my personal life but I don't want to talk about it. Jean Yanne plays an overpowering figure. - The characters played by Jean Yanne and Hanns Zischler, both antithetic and rivals, are full-on, desperate personalities. I wanted several generations in the film such as Simon (Jérémie Lippmann) needling his father about Yugoslavia and Chechenya or the young Russian girl (Dinara Droukarova). In the story, Bruno has to give a letter from Gérard (Jean Yanne) to Verekher (Hanns Zischler). We never know what it contains. - This letter is the film's Macguffin. So according to the Hitchcock definition, very important for the protagonists and meaningless for the spectators. There is a moment of mystical elevation in your film, which is the scene of the kiss between Bruno and Béatrice in front of Notre-Dame de la Salette. - Since I read La Vocation Perdue by Klossowski, in Raoul Ruiz's adaptation of which I played the hero, I've dreamed of this place. While location scouting, I discovered the Notre-Dame de la Salette chapel and a real mountain at the same time. Then I wanted the kiss scene there. It is a summit in all senses: a summit at dawn and Bruno's attempt to reveal love. The Salette close by allowed more spirit and mystery to the scene. It was also a way to anchor the story into a physical reality. The ending is anything but happy. - It's not a happy ending but it's not sad, either. I prefer open endings for this kind of character. In ENCORE, my character ended by saying to his wife, when she asks him to kiss her better, 'I'll try'. Here, Bruno has the last word: 'You never know'. In some ways it's true, as Béatrice says to Bruno, that nothing happened, but at the same time the possibility has to be left open that something could happen. That was how I felt it. I don't like deliberately gloomy endings. I like it when Béatrice tells Bruno that his beard makes him look Russian, in a jokey, light-hearted reminder of his Communist beliefs, which are, besides, completely undecided.

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