Interview with Richard Grenier and Jean-Luc Godard
by James Blue
The following text is an excerpt of an interview held in 1965 by James Blue in Paris with Richard Grenier, freelance American writer living in Paris, and Jean-Luc Godard. The place: Café Washington, next to 3, rue Washington where Godard was making Pierrot le Fou. Grenier, in the course of working on an article on Belmondo was spotted on the set by Godard and asked to play a smal1 role in the film. The interview is part of an interview project by Blue which includes more than 75 interviews. One of Blue’s focuses was the use of non-actors in film – as he had done in Les 0liviers de la Justice.
The text was first published as “Excerpt from an Interview with Richard Grenier and Jean-Luc Godard,” in: Toby Mussman (ed.), Jean-Luc Godard: A Critical Anthology E.P. Dutton and Co., New York, 1968, pp. 245-253.
Grenier:
He rarely makes more than about two takes. But he would make ten if he needed to. If it were particularly difficult.
Blue:
What kind of alterations does he ask for between takes? How does he go about putting things in place for the scene?
Grenier:
He gives you the vaguest of indications. First of all, in this film as in many of his films, they make up the dialogue as they go along. He’ll tell you about two or three words of what you are supposed to say and then you are supposed to make the rest up. And so I say, “What do I say after that?” and he says, “Well, you just keep on talking along that line.” He gives me two words I’m supposed to say and I’m supposed to talk for about a minute and a half. He shoots in live sound, and I’m sure talking a lot. You can hear what I’m saying.
Blue:
What did he do to prepare you for the scene?
Grenier:
Nothing. He just saw me there and came up and said: “You speak English, don’t you?” He didn’t know whether I would be bad or good. Then we did about three takes. He had given me just two words to go on. “Jolly good!” Which I never used anyway.
Blue:
Didn’t he know that an American would never say that?
Grenier:
He’s not very finicky on things like that. He’ll run through a scene and he doesn’t seem to see the details. He’s thinking or he’s very abstract. You’ll go through it the first time and you think, “He must want to change this or that.” No, he’s happy with it.
Blue:
What about his directing of Anna Karina?
Grenier:
He fusses about her more. Oh, there’s one thing I forgot to say: he did one take on me. And going through on the first take I see he’s starting to go like this – making gestures, and facial pantomime – while I’m talking. I didn’t understand a thing he was saying. you know? In the middle of saying something with the camera rolling, I’m supposed to figure out what this guy.. he’s giving me suggestions for dialogue as the scene is being shot! Well, there was no hope I could get it while Im in the middle of a scene. So when the take was over he said: “Oh,I know what you should say” and so he gave me two more words. A new turn of the thought that hit him, as he was watching me.
Blue:
Did he ever tell you who you were or what you were doing there?
Grenier:
No. I knew roughly what the situation was. The star of the film was puting on some kind of sidewalk entertainment. I’m the person being
entertained. That I could see by the setup. But how I was supposed to take this was entirely up to me. I felt undirected.
[Note: The sidewalk entertainment was developed in the film as a sardonic comment on the Vietnam war. This was not apparent to Grenier at the time]
Blue:
How much of the dialogue of the main characters was improvised?
Grenier:
I saw one passage of a philosophical nature that he had actually scribbled down, the night before. He gave that the same day to Belmondo and Belmondo was learning it. But for the most part, with the exception of very rare written dialogues, he doesn’t show it to them, he tells them what to say. And even then he doesn’t give all the details, he gives it bit by bit. As he shoots, he tells them ahead of time. The shots are not particularly long ones. If the passage is not philosophical, he just tells them: “You say this then you say that then you say this ..” I think partly, he’s not a good judge of acting and what’s more he is not very interested in it.
[Immediately after my chat with Grenier I met Godard in the screening room of La Salle Washington where he was working on Pierrot le Fou]
Blue:
Although my project is on the directing of non-actors and you work almost exclusively with actors, I wanted to see you because I feel that the results you obtain from them is something different than acting. I find that you obtain from them a substance of life – they live and breathe on the screen – in a manner which is quite apart from the action of the film which is very often schematic, unrealistic.
How do you approach the direction of a performance?
Godard:
The first thing that comes to mind: when you look at people in the street whom you don’t know at all, there are those you find interesting and others that you don’t.
And those who interest us, it’s because we find there’s “something about them. All of a sudden, they have a way of walking, or laughing, a bizarre gesture, or something that makes them stand out while all the others we don’t notice. But the first group we can look at all day.
And all I try to do with my performers is to arrange things so that the spectator might have the desire to watch them and be interested. For doing that, of course, there are several ways: generally, in cinema, they get the spectator interested because of the story, but I personally feel that the story – all stories – are more or less [….] usable depending on who lives them and how they are lived.
Someone hammering a nail has to be extraordinary if the guy doing the hammering is extraordinary himself. That’s my feeling, that’s what I try to do, and I try to do it with actors rather than non-actors because the “non-actors,” if you like, theoretically, are not made for that (performance].
It’s like in war. When we hire a soldier, first, we cho0se between one who shoots well and one who doesn’t. We choose the one who does shoot well, theoretically. Then afterwards we try to arrange it so that the man who shoots well will develop his other qualities that may be of use to us in addition to his marksmanship. Just because he is a soldier is no reason to forget everything that makes him a person, everything that makes him interesting; with an actor, it’s the same. Being an actor, being paid to be in a film, is no reason for him to forget his own life.
It’s the same thing [the film and his life). The moment when the actor is the most alive will be the moment which is recorded on film. But, for the nonprofessional, it’s not the same. You must look for something else in him.
Blue:
Renoir uses non-actors from time to time.
Godard:
Renoir is different. When he takes a non-actor, it’s because he is a born actor and Renoir reveals his talent to that person. When Bresson takes a nonprofessional it’s for totally different reasons. He’s looking for something else. Just like Rousseau thought that man was naturally good, without a trace of civilization or anything, Bresson thinks a non-actor is better for his needs.
Bresson takes a non-actor for the same reason I use actors, because a good part of our work is done because there are actors or non-actors. If Bresson takes an actor he has to cut him down to the condition of a non-actor. But since the streets are full of non-actors, he doesn’t have to do it. At the same time, he doesn’t take just anybody. It’s not at all like Italian neorealism. That’s different. In Italy everyone knows how to act. In France nobody does.
Blue:
Why did you choose Eddie Constantine for Alphaville?
Godard:
He’s not really an actor, I admit, but he’s someone who has a presence on the screen. If we place four persons, immobile, without doing anything, standing next to each other and among them is Eddie Constantine, it will probably be Eddie Constantine that you will look at. If you or I were standing there next to him, everybody would still say, pointing to Eddie Constantine, “Ah, look at that one there, see how he is!” That phenomenon is really something! So all you have to do is use that factor (look at him how he is!) and add to that “What does he do” in order to interest people. What you do then is simply try to create a kind of object out of the person, like in painting or sculpture.
Blue:
You want to use the presence and qualities of the person of the actor to create a kind of object that fascinates the spectator.
Don’t you find it difficult to put these people into action, into movement without “killing” them?
Godard:
Well, I’m always surprised by the fact that I never succeed in obtaining what I want. And it’s perhaps not such a bad thing [….] Perhaps Renoir or Bresson succeed little by little in what they want in eliminating all the rest Me, l don’t succeed at all. I say to an actor: “You walk like this” and he doesn’t walk that way. “You laugh at that spot,” and he doesn’t laugh. But each time l am struck by the fact that that person exists nevertheless. He exists independently of me regardless of his performance being good or bad. So I try to make use of that existence and to shape things around it so he can continue to exist. Nothing should be sacrificed to the film. The idea of the film is nothing, just a few lines.
Blue:
Bardot in Le Mepris (Contempt)?
Godard:
She exists! She has possibilities! There are other girls who exist much less. She has her own personality.
Blue:
How did you work with her?
Godard:
Like with Eddie Constantine. It was the same thing. It was even easier. She had done so many bad things in her career that all that she needed was to keep her from doing them. It’s not that she can do many things. She can only do certain things, just don’t ask her to do more.
I remember one moment when she was supposed to enter into the front room. I told her: “there you’re supposed to say ‘Ah, the curtains aren’t up yet!” and as she said it she produced a gesture which came very naturally, and I said, “Good, you redo it exactly like that.” So then she redid it and it was very bad because she acted it and she doesn’t know how, something another actress would have known, but not her. Hence, you shouldn’t require it of her. So I said, “All right, don’t say that, you can say something else”; she did and it went well. She had done it once but she couldn’t redo it. She couldn’t think about what she was doing, then do it and make it work. She is what she is. What is necessary is to keep her that way, not put her into a situation which will change her.
It’s a very different work than with another actor. Another you might have to make him work like a pianist who rehearses until he knows his movement perfectly. Others can’t do that. It makes directing extremely difficult. Some actors are good at the seventh or eighth rehearsal or take, and others, after five takes, grow worse because they are no longer inventing anything.
Blue:
Do you help them reinvent?
Godard:
Each case is particular.
Blue:
Jack Palance?
Godard:
He was very disagreeable. A spoiled child, at least he reasons like one. I tried to explain my way to him at first, but he didn’t want to listen or didn’t try to understand. My way of working upset him very rapidly. At any rate, his physical appearance was good and that was sufficient for me. But he wanted to act, too! So with the body he has, in the role he was playing – it wasn’t that of a Western bandit – he didn’t have to act, just the fact of his being there was already a kind of performance. But that was something he couldn’t understand. Often I would shoot takes of him without turning on the camera. I would do a real one for myself until I was satisfied, and then afterwards I would do one or two to make him happy, but the camera wasn’t even running. All I needed from him was his presence. He satisfied me totally. He is in the film as he is in life.
Blue:
Have you ever consciously acted upon your performers in a way that you hoped would condition or prepare them emotionally for a scene?
Godard:
I don’t think so. No, I always tell myself that I should do so, but finally I do it less and less. What I mean is, I don’t ever tell them “Do such and such.” I let them. I would like them to find things at the same time as l do. That’s more difficult. I want them to find what they have to do. Then I only have to say: “Ah, that’s good, let’s do that.” Renoir is a real actor’s director like Cukor. He pushes the actor and gets him to give himself. The actors love that. Me, they like me because they like themselves on the screen when they see the film, but they don’t like to work with me very much.
Mainly because I never say much to them. In fact, I usually bawl them out. I say, “No! Not that!” but they don’t know why. I don’t know either! I just have a feeling. They say to me, “But you never tell me anything!” I reply, “No, but I don’t know what to say! I can tell you when it’s good, but I can’t tell you what to do to make it good!”
Blue:
Let’s retrace your work in staging a scene from A Married Woman, which is a favorite of mine; the scene of the maid who talks about sex as she does the dishes.
What were your first contacts with the actress, how did you choose her, how did you obtain this hilarious performance which appears almost accidental and spontaneous?
Godard:
It was done practically in a technical fashion. I wanted to put a text of Céline into the film because I felt I needed that certain way of speaking French that would be different from the other ways of the wife, the child, etc, a way more working class, more popular. Céline corresponded to that.
I thought of having a maid in the film so we thought of two or three actresses. Finally, I took a woman who was just an extra and completely terrorized by the idea of acting the part. I said: “OK, you’ll be the maid.” She was thrilled and then I gave her almost three ages of Céline to learn by heart! She almost died of fright.
Blue:
What was she in everyday life?
Godard:
I don’t know. She could have been a hairdresser, absolutely anything, a barmaid, or whatever. I don’t know what she is, and since she was incapable of learning by heart, the more she learned the more she mixed things up. It was a very difficult text.
Finally I stuck a tiny earphone behind her ear and I had a little H F microphone and I whispered the text and she repeated it, but even with that she was so scared that she repeated it badly!
Blue:
I had the impression that it was completely improvised!
Godard:
No, it was a text of Céline that she halfway fouled up. Finally she was so bad, so bad that the scene became something very good.
You know, I think that I needed either a sublime actress for that or else someone not very good at all, and even a sublime actress would have created a lot of “effects.”
Blue:
You whispered it in a microphone!
Godard :
I whispered and she repeated it. All I said to her beforehand was simply: “You take the cups and then you bring them here and then you go get the knives and put them away there, and while you’re doing that you repeat what I tell you.”
But she was so mixed up that from time to time she would just stop suddenly and I would be there whispering desperately! She was so bad, I think, that the scene has a certain charm. She has a certain personality in her own way. All of a sudden she would say a phrase in a way that no actress could have ever invented!
Blue:
And you had said nothing to her which touched upon her manner of delivery?
Godard:
No, nothing at all. No, it was just things to do and a text to say.
Blue:
Don’t you find it remarkable that such a woman could have responded in this way?
Godard:
I often compare things to war, but here it’s the same. You take a guy who has never run in his life, you stick him in war, the machine guns begin to fire, it’s life or death, you have to run, well just see if he doesn’t run! He runs fast, and you are astonished how this enormous guy who always drags his feet can all of a sudden run like a rabbit. That’s what I like to do above all, place people in situations like that, where they… you don’t know if it’s good or bad, but you know they exist.
