Meeting: Arnaud Desplechin pays tribute to the spectators

Cinematographic meeting –

Arnaud Desplechin pays tribute to the public

“Spectators!” is a sort of essay on cinema peppered with extracts and references.

BotTalk

• Arnaud Desplechin offers a cinematographic essay entitled “Spectators!”.
• The film explores the often overlooked position of cinema spectators.
• Desplechin uses the character Paul Dedalus as the main thread of the story.
• The director wants to reaffirm the nobility of the position of spectator.

How can we define film? Can we say that it is a fiction around cinema or the matrix of your own cinema?

I define it as an elegiac essay on the position of the spectator. Who is always either criticized or passive, in the best case scenario. By following the journey of an imaginary character, Paul Dédalus, I wanted to pay homage to the spectators. Give them back their nobility. I was often told, when reading the script, that Paul was going to become a filmmaker. But as you know, it is recurring in most of my films. In “How I Argued… (My Sex Life)”, we see him at the age of ten.

Exactly, how was this Paul Dédalus born? In reference to Joyce and his hero, Stephen Dedalus?

Yes, absolutely. Except that at Joyce, he has a terrible relationship with his mother. This is not the case with my Daedalus.

Not everyone has read Joyce, that said.

That’s why I gave people who have never read it a chance. By leaving this parallelism between the two Daedaluses, but without insisting. If you like, in Joyce, the hero is lost among all the women. At home, he is lost in the middle of all the films.

Apart from a few examples, the film extracts found in “Spectators!” do not interfere with the story. How did you choose them?

It was extremely heavy work. And long, because of the rights to negotiate for all these extracts. Which meant I couldn’t take everyone I wanted. In the end, this doesn’t necessarily reflect my tastes. For example, we see an extract from “The Street of Shame” by Mizoguchi because I wanted a Japanese film to appear in it. What was important to me was to affirm that, in my eyes, there are no differences between popular cinema and scholarly films. Besides, there is art in industrial objects. My goal was to reflect the point of view of the average viewer.

Why does the title end with an exclamation point?

To proclaim something, as its definition indicates. This is about affirming that being a spectator is a noble position. For me, seeing and doing are two aspects of the same thing. We take images and show them. Only my position as a spectator allows me to affirm this. There are filmmakers who don’t like other people’s films, like Robert Bresson. He once said that he had seen and loved a James Bond. To tell the truth, he had no cinema buff. And then there are those who remember everything, like Quentin Tarantino.

The idea of ​​“Spectators!”, however, is more about the theaters than the films shown there.

It was the producer’s order, if you like. Charles Gillibert suggested I make a documentary. For three days, I collected bits of memories. Which resulted in an essay film. A sort of praise of the room.

How would this film fit into your work?

I would say it’s more of a coming-of-age film. An addition of flashbacks which is of the order of melancholy. If we return to Paul Dédalus, who is a sort of common thread in all my films, “Spectators!” corresponds to his old age. It’s Mathieu Amalric who passes the baton, in short. He who keeps saying he doesn’t want to play anymore. He says he now directs his own films and it fulfills him.

What kind of director are you on set?

I like people to have fun. In the large book published by Taschen and dedicated to Bergman, we see photos from the set of “Communicants” and we recognize him among the actors. They seem very happy. On a set, I like to play all the roles. This opens up the actors, then gives them freedom to play. To be honest, I do exactly the opposite of what is prescribed in cinema books. I am very lavish, I cannibalize actors, before then disappearing like a badly groomed bear.

Over the years, has your cinephile taken on different faces?

Enormously. I could mark all the periods of my life through it. I had my different golden ages. The New Hollywood, and earlier in my life the New Wave, with Godard and Truffaut. What’s different today is that everything is dominated by money, which makes moviegoing more complicated. Cinema is in the hands of insurance companies. Films like “Top Gun: Maverick”, or the various Marvel films, are made by banks. As Godard said: “Culture for me is the rule, while art is the exception. Culture is diffusion, and art is production.” One of those formulas that seem to have it all figured out but can be interpreted in 1000 ways.