Jean-Luc Godard: Fortunately, We Have Books and Films

Jean-Luc Godard: “Fortunately, we have books and films”

Interview by Pierre Assouline. Originally published in L’Express, May 1, 1997.

Translation first published on the WeChat account beinggeneration.

—The Cannes Film Festival is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. What does that mean to you?

—I don’t care. I owe it nothing. I’ve never got anything from it, either. And yet I go there often. When I have a new film, I can take it there and let people know about it. But today a film festival is like a convention of dentists: speeches, cocktails, lavish meals, banquets, mayors and the mayors’ wives… It is so dull, and yet so fashionable.

—For you, though, everything began with books rather than films, didn’t it?

—Of course. Only someone like Claude Lelouch can remember seeing Citizen Kane at the age of five. For me, it was The Immoralist (Les Nourritures terrestres). It was a present for my fourteenth birthday. That was how I discovered literature. You have to understand that I had a very strict upbringing. Gone with the Wind and Maupassant were forbidden to me.

—On the literary side, did you inherit more from the Godards—your father’s family—or the Monods on your mother’s side?

—More from the Monods. My mother read a great deal. But my taste for German Romanticism came from my father, who was a doctor. From the ages of thirteen to twenty, thanks to him, I devoured Musil, Broch and Thomas Mann. My grandfather also had a profound influence on me. He was a banker at the Banque de Paris and a friend of Paul Valéry. He owned all of Valéry’s books. We called his study the “Valérianum.” On their wedding anniversaries, I had to recite “The Graveyard by the Sea.” I also like Ainsi. It is less wild than Cioran, but the times were different. It has those beautiful Valéry-like turns of phrase, too.

—Who else did you read?

—Gide, who wrote The Counterfeiters; Julien Green, author of Midnight and Leviathan; almost all of Bernanos; then Chardonne and Jouhandeau. They all influenced me. I nearly forgot Malraux: his Psychology of Cinema, The Voices of Silence, The Walnut Trees of Altenburg, and then Man’s Fate—a kind of novel that, I think, has been unfairly maligned. His essays on Baudelaire are unforgettable, too. Malraux was terrific…

—He had excellent taste, though he made only one documentary…

—Very few writers make films, because it is exhausting. In general, a good writer has no reason to make films. But there are exceptions, such as Marguerite Duras, whom I’ve known over the past two or three years. She was somewhat rigidly bound to her original texts. She tried every tone. And then there was her greed, her desire for recognition. Still, she made a very good, truly cinematic film, India Song, on a tiny budget. It is my favorite. Isn’t one good film in a lifetime enough? Especially when the work was originally a thoroughly literary one. Writing was what she knew. Writing, not making films, was her basic vocation.

—Did Bernard-Henri Lévy’s failure surprise you?

—Of course. We already have plenty of writer-directors. Surely there has to be room for an editorialist, too.

—Finally, the famous Cocteau–Guitry–Pagnol trio is an exception. It is rare for a great director behind the camera to also be a great writer.

—Cocteau handled both effortlessly. I prefer him as a director to him as a writer. The same goes for Pagnol. By imagining the familiar face of the king stamped on a coin, he discovered the secret behind the Man in the Iron Mask.

—Do you have any memories of your youth?

—I read a lot. Then I grew up. But as an adult, I never again found the amazement Gide had once given me. At twenty, Dashiell Hammett and Thomas Hardy knocked me sideways. It was the Surrealists who led me to Jude the Obscure. Few things amaze me as much as rereading the classics.

—Have you read any recent novels?

—No. That’s terrible. I like history, memoirs, science, philosophy, and especially literary biographies. I’m interested in little things about people, such as Joyce’s or Conrad’s attitudes toward their families. Before I read George Eliot’s biography, I thought she was a man… I also like nonfiction written by novelists, such as Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Norman Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago. In France, there is practically only Gilles Perrault. My favorite is A Man Apart, about Henri Curiel’s life in the resistance.

Contempt (1963), directed by Jean-Luc Godard, starring Brigitte Bardot.

—By the way, have you read Brigitte Bardot’s memoir? She describes you as a “filthy intellectual and leftist” and says you were very conservative on the set of Contempt (Le Mépris).

—No, I haven’t read it. Especially now that she has made that statement… I used to think she was kind to animals. The shoot for Contempt went very smoothly. We never argued; it was a pleasure. What she writes today is her business. But Bardot’s memoir? Better not to read it. Nor Nadine de Rothschild’s. I like Jean-François Revel’s memoirs. Or John le Carré’s latest book; it suits my taste for double agents. I have always felt that I have two sides. We don’t come from the land, but we do live on it. Le Carré is not as good as Graham Greene, and Greene is not as good as Conrad. I recently reread Brighton’s The Rock. People often say that a writer’s first novel is usually the best. I’ve wanted to film this one for a long time. Impossible: it is too good. I couldn’t do it. It has a strength I don’t have. It gave me strength. When I adapted Moravia, I had that strength: I used its weaknesses as my foundation.

—But at least you have tried reading contemporary French novels?

—I have. At Lausanne station, I often buy paperbacks from the revolving rack. Look, I even found Léon Daudet, Alexandre Vialatte and Fernando Pessoa. I read them at night. In fact, I rarely go to bookshops.

—What did you think of Pig Tales (Truismes)?

—Since the publisher was a friend, I thought about taking a two-year option on the film rights. It wouldn’t have cost much. I thought I might become interested in it later.

—But had you read it?

—I’d just finished it. I found it a little hard to read. I tried to sell the rights to someone else, but no one was interested. It’s a shame Marie Darrieussecq isn’t a director. She is very inventive. She should have made it into a film instead of writing it as a novel.

Marie Darrieussecq (born 1969) is a French writer. Pig Tales (Truismes), her debut novel, was published in 1996 and became a bestseller.

—But every newspaper says you’re going to start shooting soon!

—Not now. I read the book three or four times as a producer, not a director. Then I realized it would be difficult and expensive to film. Perhaps it should be a play, or a fable. I have some vague ideas about its form, action and scenes. It is so unusual. The more I think about it, the more I think it might work better as an animated film.

—Because of the transformation?

—Not really. The story is simply about a woman turning into a pig. But is that enough to keep a narrator talking for an hour? That is what cinema and theatre have in common: concern for the gaze of others, and for the setting in which something is presented. We have no right to make fun of it.

—Make fun of the world?

—Of ourselves.

—You clearly think you can’t adapt it?

—In the end, perhaps that proves it is a good book.

—Is that your theory of adapting novels for the screen?

—That’s my theory.

—Has no great novel ever been made into a great film?

—Let me think… No, I haven’t seen one.

—What about Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita?

—So-so. Anyway, Nabokov wasn’t a great novelist.

Madame de La Fayette (1634–1693), a French writer. Her best-known novel, The Princess of Cleves, published in 1678, is considered the first major French psychological novel and a landmark of European literature. It tells of courtly love during the reign of Henry II in the mid-sixteenth century.

—Then who counts as a great novelist?

—Madame de La Fayette. I’m rereading The Princess of Cleves at the moment for a film project about love and the West. Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Dickens, Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, Virginia Woolf, and the other great American writers… There are no more than twenty of them. They have style—in other words, a soul—whereas Günter Grass or John le Carré have talent.

—The way you put it, if Godard’s Contempt is a great film, then Moravia’s Contempt must not be a very good novel…

—His only good book was his first, The Time of Indifference (Gli indifferenti). It anticipated Antonioni’s cinema. But why did we choose Contempt? Because producer Carlo Ponti owned the rights.

—Was it a film made to order?

—I asked to make it myself, as I have with all my films. The novel excited me. I could do a lot with it. If it were too good, I wouldn’t be able to do anything. Take Volker Schlöndorff’s Swann in Love, James Ivory’s adaptation of Henry James’s The Bostonians, or E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View: none of them works. Masterpieces are meant to be read, not filmed. There is no point making a film of Journey to the End of the Night. Average novels like Hammett’s and Chandler’s can be filmed. Erich von Stroheim’s Greed is a good film because Frank Norris’s novel is not worth much. John Ford conquered Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, but not because he made it better. Once, King Vidor was able to draw inspiration from Babbitt, because Sinclair Lewis was no Faulkner.

—So cinema can never completely escape literature’s hold…

—Yes. But we can also say that literature is often cinema. I understand… I know… Obviously… When a novel says something, who is speaking? A magistrate, a sage, an investigative reporter, Saint Paul on the road to Damascus… Those are the subtitles of an inner film.

—But have you never seriously wanted to bring a work you admire to the screen?

—I’ve been thinking about Faulkner’s The Wild Palms. I used to think about it often. I gave up because I might not do it well. I could only take the story of the mad couple who sacrifice everything for pure love and leave out the old man’s story.

—Then where did your theory come from?

—I read books and watch films. Then a system of thought emerges. When a novel isn’t written with much depth or creative struggle, cinema can take over and use it as a foundation without destroying it. That’s why we don’t touch The Red and the Black.

—When you read a novel, do images come into your mind?

—Rarely. If they did, I’d be a bad filmmaker. What would be the point of seeing a young woman leaning against a pillow when you read The Fugitive (Albertine disparue)? If I saw pictures, like in Paris Match, I’d be a bad reader, too. Only Lelouch imagines shots while reading Les Misérables. You know, he removed Victor Hugo’s name from the poster. He must have thought it would put people off—that a famous name would shrink the audience! He was afraid it would seem too old-fashioned. It’s sad that it has come to this.

Alberto Moravia (1907–1990), an Italian writer. His works include The Woman of Rome, The Conformist and Roman Tales. Several were adapted for film, including Vittorio De Sica’s Two Women (1960), Godard’s Contempt (1963) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970).

—The dilemma that has long troubled screenwriters—betrayal or fidelity—does it seem outdated to you?

—I do what I want. Moravia was generous about Contempt. He told me, “It’s nothing like it, and it’s very good.” Whatever he thought, I didn’t care. I wouldn’t have worked with him anyway.

—But many of your films are adaptations. The source novels include works by Benjamin Joppolo, Dolores Hitchens and Lionel White…

—You see, any book has…

—And Hail Mary, of course, is connected to a book by Françoise Dolto…

—But The Gospel According to Psychoanalysis (L’Évangile au risque de la psychanalyse) isn’t a novel. I just borrowed an idea. My recent film For Ever Mozart also came from a book review in Le Monde. Philippe Sollers wrote that, while Sarajevo was being bombed, someone was still putting on plays and planning to stage Marivaux’s The Triumph of Love rather than Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

—What are the two books you’ve just published?

—They’re not books. More like film memoirs, without photographs, with tedious little details such as “the car came…” How empty that sounds. They may have a small effect. There are also things outside film that are worth putting into memoirs. They are neither literary works nor books about cinema. They are records of films, rather like passages in some of Duras’s work.

—Are you, like all your New Wave friends, a failed writer?

—Truffaut was more of a failed bookseller, and a critic in the line of great critics with their own style, from Diderot to Malraux. Rohmer and Astruc did write. But when we see their films, we feel at last that we have escaped the terror of writing. We are no longer haunted by the ghosts of great writers. I once dreamed of writing. I had the idea, but I didn’t take it seriously. I wanted to publish my first novel at Gallimard. I tried: “Night was falling…” But I didn’t even finish the first sentence. I also wanted to be a painter. Now I make films.

—But still through writing?

—Yes, because I started writing before I made films. I wrote quite a lot of criticism for Cahiers du cinéma and Arts. But I don’t think cinema is a form of writing. It remains a visual art.

—What about screenplays?

—You have to write notes to direct a film, but that isn’t writing. Some screenplays written by American novelists before the war are worth publishing as a form in their own right. Not today’s. These are just theatrical dialogues that alternate between “interior, day” and “exterior, night.” They’re pointless. They only show them to film investors, to guess what the investors see as they read. Besides, they don’t actually read them.

Emil Cioran (1911–1995), a Romanian-born French philosopher, was a major twentieth-century skeptic and nihilist. He wrote aphoristic works in Romanian and French, known for their refined language and fierce, profound ideas. His books include On the Heights of Despair, The Book of Delusions, A Short History of Decay, The Trouble with Being Born and The Fall into Time.

—You used to be more combative. At sixty-six, has your hatred of culture weakened?

—It comes over me less often and less violently, but it’s still there. You know, the New Wave never spoke ill of people. It only spoke of works and the evidence supporting them.

—Did reading Cioran make you more peaceful?

—His work fits my love of aphorisms, generalizations and proverbs. That taste may be a kind of scientific formula for me. An aphorism sums things up without preventing them from developing in other directions. It is like a knot: tie it from any direction and your shoe is still fastened. It is not thought itself but a thread leading to thought. I always read Cioran from every angle. He writes beautifully. He can transform the material into spirit. Cioran lets my spirit draw nourishment from matter.

—What is so appealing to you about those aphorisms?

—They’re like a railway switching yard. We can enter, leave and come back. When we find a good idea, we can stay with it for a long time. Then we can’t get away. You don’t have to read everything. I also like Pessoa, but he is too dark, whereas Cioran helps one live. It is another form of thought, one with a beginning, middle and end. It does not tell a story; it is a moment in history.

—Could we look at the notes you made in your collected Cioran?

—For instance: “Every thought should call to mind a smiling ruin”; “We are all actors in a farce, escaping our problems”; “A question profanes a mystery, and then its answer profanes it”; “Pallor shows us where the body can understand the soul”; “Sooner or later, every desire meets its fatigue, its truth…” And this one, which I love: “Against science: the world is not worth knowing.” That is not the same thing as Georges Charpak’s joke. It isn’t that scientists who dare to write don’t know how to write! François Jacob’s The Logic of Life is beautifully written. I agree with Buffon: style is the man himself. Levinas has good ideas, but language keeps him from conveying them. The same goes for Popper and Einstein. The ability to write has declined. But Cioran… I’ve forgotten the line: “I have lost my appetite for the neuroses of mankind.”

—Are you a melancholy person?

—I’m a dreamer. And very lonely.

—Whose fate as a creator feels closest to yours?

—Novalis, Nicolas de Staël… tragic people who died young. These days I feel closer to Antonin Artaud. I’ve always liked him. When I was a student, I rented a room on Rue d’Assas in Paris, in Jean Schlumberger’s house. One evening in 1947, André Gide came to take Artaud to a gathering. “Can I come with you?” I asked. I went to the Vieux-Colombier Theatre and found myself at Artaud’s famous lecture, “To Have Done with the Judgment of God.” He said he didn’t know how to write, but he kept writing and wanted to publish it. I’ve always felt that I don’t know how to make films, either. People don’t believe me because I’ve succeeded once or twice. Artaud was more or less the same. The difference was money.

Antonin Artaud (1896–1948), a French playwright, poet, actor and theatre director. His major work The Theatre and Its Double was published in 1938 and included his 1931 First Manifesto of the Theatre of Cruelty. Artaud also wrote about and took part in cinema, including the screenplay for Germaine Dulac’s landmark Surrealist film The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928).

—Do you suffer from loneliness?

—Loneliness is not isolation. The two often go together and contain one another. When loneliness turns into isolation, it becomes unbearable.

—Is that what happens to you?

—A little.

—But do you suffer?

—A little…

—But that’s how you want it!

—Yes. It is hard to find someone at my level who can play tennis and talk. I need exercise, but not in an active-minded way. The mental side matters most. When we think about the fact that we are playing, we play badly. It’s like Porthos’s death in The Man in the Iron Mask: he sets the explosives and then goes back underground. When he thinks about putting one foot in front of the other, he can no longer walk. He becomes conscious of what he is doing. The castle collapses. Though he was strong and held out for days, he was crushed by the rocks.

—Does Alexandre Dumas help you play tennis?

—Fortunately, we have books and films. Still, it is hard to find films; they are poorly distributed. Books are true friends. They are unique. A film is only a companion in thought. You have to go to it and watch it through a machine. Books are spread around you; you can touch them.

—What can literature give you that cinema never can?

—Books, to be precise. We can return to them. Literature contains a lot of the past and a little of the future, but no present. In film, there is only a present that is passing. On screen, “now” means showing you what is happening. Writing, painting, thought… They are siblings in the great family of art. Cinema has always been an outsider, an immigrant, a servant. It became a friend of the family. That is what I am. But I consider myself inferior to the creators I love. It doesn’t matter. I know I have entered their world. They have the right to enter the house; I stay on the porch. Not because I make films. Cinema is one of a kind, while the others form a whole. It comes from somewhere they have never seen.

—Is that why a film and a book will never have the same status?

—I don’t know. Mediocre films and terrible films belong to the same category as the greatest films. They are all cinema. But a mediocre novel does not stand on the same literary level as a great one. I can’t explain it; that is simply how I feel.

—And in the end, what has literature given you?

—A way of thinking that is the most experimental of all. Filmmakers think with their eyes and ears; painters think with their hands. Literature is a refuge. It deepens my perception of the world. Books tell me things that living people cannot. Literature examines the world. In that sense, it gave me a lesson in artistic ethics. I owe my conscience to it. It is a discourse against the state, government or power. Not the discourse of this or that party, but of this or that person. One book after another was written, and I made one film after another, because Kafka asks us to create the positive through the negative. Literature is my godmother. Whenever I read intensely, I find her. Cinema no longer has that relationship with reality.

—When did that begin?

—Cinema announced the concentration camps. Remember The Rules of the Game and The Great Dictator? But it did not show them. Literature did. Cinema did not do its duty; it did not fulfill its mission.

—Which is better at expressing happiness?

—Today, cinema immerses people in error and satisfaction. There is nothing to look forward to. People don’t really need these things. They go to the cinema because they can leave home. It gives them romance without effort, and it is far inferior to reading Graham Greene.

—You are always on the edge. Aren’t you afraid of falling out of fashion?

—I am on the edge. It is a way of looking. There is a possibility of falling off, not of falling out. There is still a choice between suicide and dying in poverty. I’m not there, but I’m not far away. Tomorrow, it could all end. For now, whether I am seen as a margin on the page or a blank sheet, I am still inside the notebook.