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Ray Pride

By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Lunch with Jacques Doillon, Chicago

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An informal lunch with the charming if melancholic-in-the-moment French filmmaker Jacques Doillon, with critic Ben Sachs, courtesy of the French consulate, the day after Doc Films’ presentation of his as-yet-undistributed in the U. S. Love Battles. His post-screening Q&A had run over an hour. “I had no sleep the night before. I have no idea what I was saying. I hope I was bright and amusing.”

Doillon vin

Doillon pours his ice-cube-heavy water into the red wine in front of him. The table wine when he was growing up was usually so terrible, he got into the habit of adding water ever since. He says his more proletarian background does not match the bourgeoisie origins of much of the Nouvelle Vague. “Marguerite Duras was unclassifiable, you cannot just describe her as that kind of writer. I am for Stendhal, not the Nouveau Roman. I am a reactionary cineaste! I find no poetry in the abyss.”

Doillon sunglasses

“There are French filmmakers who matter, who matter to me besides my own films? Pialat, Eustache, Duras, Garrel. Garrel and I have been friends for, I don’t know, thirty years? I acted in one of his films, but I never saw it, I was afraid. I never wanted to act. I don’t want to mess up other peoples’ films, but I’m not concerned about my own. The first half hour of Maman et la Putain, I think the acting is not very good, but after three-and-a-half hours, there is only magnificence. I only met Eustache a few times. I don’t watch new movies much anymore. My learning is past. And I don’t live in Paris, I live in Normandy. The theaters show movies just like the ones you can see on television. A new generation can’t tell the difference.”

Doillon has hoped to mount a new film for months now, but he says the system no longer works for a filmmaker like himself, the “cultural exception” applies to films that fit a slot on television, not the work of an auteur. The dance of money between producers, distributors and actors stymies his efforts at the age of 70.

Doillon Wabash Chicago

“None of the new cineastes know Mizoguchi! I have affinities for filmmakers west and east and north, the French, we worked in our own corners.”

Then Jacques Doillon leans over, says, “Let me tell you how I met Pialat…” A pause. “Entre nous…” and he continues…

All images © 2015 Ray Pride

Les lunettes Jacques Doillon

A video posted by Ray Pride (@raypride) on

 

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon