Bertrand Blier, the director of “Valseuses”, “Buffetfroid”, and even “Tenue de soir”, has died at the age of 85. In 2017, the Nantes duo Cabadzi was inspired by the director’s film dialogues for their album Cabadzi X Blier.
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He is at the origin of several cult films of French cinema. The director, writer and screenwriter Bertrand Blier(New window)known for having notably produced Les Valseuses, Cold Buffet et Evening weardied at the age of 85, his son announced to AFP on Tuesday January 21.
We met him in 2017 in his Parisian apartment. Bertrand Blier was then like a kid when talking about the concert he had just seen, that of Cabadzi, even if he had admitted to having watched it quietly while sitting in the room!
We suggest you reread this interview during which he discussed his collaboration with the Nantes group.
They are not the same age, they come from different worlds: the circus and music for Cabadzi, cinema for Bertrand Blier. But the three get along like thieves through the record and the Cabadzi x Blier show.
The man with the pipe is very proud of the work carried out by his protégés Olivier Garnier and Victorien Bitaudeau.
In 2016, the two artists from the Nantes region who came from the circus decided to give a new musical direction to their group. They then gather their courage and knock on the director’s door.
Their project: to adapt the dialogues of the filmmaker’s films into songs and beatboxes against a backdrop of electro hip-hop music. Not just the cult Les Valseuses, but all of his cinematographic work, a total of 18 films! With the result sometimes on a single piece: 7 or 8 lines from as many films.
The imperturbable Bertrand Blier didn’t think long and gave them the keys to the truck.
“They came to me one day very kindly with a demo of a song or two demos. They made me hear it and I said okay straight away. That is to say, I left them the keys. “
Bertrand Blier is both seduced by their approach and convinced that he shares with these two young people the same scathing vision of society through words filled with despair and black humor.
-At their age, he remembers that he started filming Les Valseuses with Depardieu, Dewaere and Miou-Miou; a film that has shaken several generations since its theatrical release in 1974.
For more than a year, the three friends worked together in a good atmosphere… often around a drink, “we meet around a beer, a bottle of white wine. Because they like it when there are things to drink. They’re musicians.”
Together, they validate one by one the models of the songs appearing in the credits of the album released on September 22, 2017.
“I don’t know how they fudge their history. These are thug methods. That is to say, they take pieces of my texts, they tamper with them, they rewrite them, they mix them. So I agreed with that.”
We are in another world
Bertrand BlierDirector
“There is something that remains from my films, which is the soul of my films. That is to say this kind of anger that is constantly released, constantly evacuated, that there is in most of my films. Because you can’t say that I’ve made too many tender films.”
“It comes out really well in their music. Because their music is sometimes tender, sometimes brutal, sometimes aggressive. Like what I do.”
It’s a meeting on a project that had never taken place and which we suddenly see is possible.
Bertrand BlierDirector
“What’s important is to do dark things, that’s where we laugh the most, well, it seems to me, but their music is not made to make people laugh while my films yes”.
Find the completeness of this interview between Bertrand Blier and Denis Leroy
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