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Interview with
harmony. You make films because you project yourself
on to others. All actors are in some respects part of oneself,
but in some films it shows more than in others. It’s
weird and magical. It’s like people who fall in love with
film that Anne is making. The vector that takes a spectator
from one to the other is a magical vector. There are no
mechanics. There isn’t a scene to tell you we’re going from
one to the other. All of a sudden, it just happens and
Catherine Breillat
people who look like them. Films are a form of love-making.
Making a film is desire. For instance, the Actress
(Roxane Mesquida) in the film Jeanne (Anne Parillaud)
is making, is totally insignificant in the film when she’s
not being filmed. But when she’s being filmed, she’s
that’s what’s voluptuous.
I make films, but I don’t know how I make them. I only
know that I make them as best I can, that means with a
lot of anxiety, a lot of joy, a lot of pain. Of course, actors
magical, because the looks of others are upon her. can give you a lot of trouble. But it’s like love affairs. It’s
An actor is someone who is made of other people’s looks. desire. But it’s a physical desire that only materializes
It’s something that the media don’t understand when in the film. It’s very strange and disturbing for everyone,
they say that I’m such a tyrant with actors. It’s a form of but at the same time, it’s magnificent. You know once
possession, but you’re possessed by the film you’re you’ve got the scene, that everything that you had to
How did you get the idea for this film?
After Perfect Love, I wanted to write something about the
shooting of that film. A film-shoot is a story in itself, a
strobe-light view of life. A film is fiction, you tell a story,
the filming itself is a microcosm where all the passions
of life are played out very intensely over a short period
of time that is shorter and denser than normal life.
I wanted to do that project as a book. But I dropped it
because at the time I went to see a publisher who
But as one has to search within oneself for inspiration,
and as it’s about oneself making a film, it winds up by
simply being about oneself! The filming became so completely
schizophrenic that it wasn’t very pleasant.
My relationship to the actors was
pleasant, but not my relationship
to myself.
making. A film is a kind of alien that lives in us and
possesses us. A film-shoot is a trance. From the outside
it looks very violent, but from the inside it’s a violence
that is like a passion, it’s a magnificent violence. At the
end-of-shoot party, Anne was beaming. Yet, she should
have been exhausted. We worked fourteen hours a day,
she had tons of dialogue, she had just had a baby and
yet she was radiant. All that doesn’t show because
being an actor is definitely a
put up with and impose on others is over, and you move
on to the next scene. There’s a kind of immediate
rebirth. Of course, it’s like wild mood swings. But our
lives are full of wild mood swings. Films are story-telling
too. A story you tell is obviously a portrait of yourself.
The story you direct is always
your own story.
You have to project yourself into the story. When you
advised me against it, and told me I should write a “real
book”. Later, when I was commissioned by Arte to do a
Sometimes, the people on the set were lost: they didn’t
know anymore if they were film technicians, or if they fakir’s job. You have to walk on hot
make a film, you’re at the heart of a fictional story and
everybody identifies with what you’re shooting.
segment of Masculin-Feminin, I first thought I’d use a
small camera to film a big camera, and that what I couldn’t
do in feature films, I’d do for TV, that is to say a
“making of”. A shoot is a magical and very strange thing.
I wanted to show that, and I started writing it without
knowing what I’d end up with. As always, one has a few
ideas and no ideas, and what one really has is something
that gets you going. So that’s how I wrote it. In fact,
I wrote that script and Pornocratie in the same month.
When I reread both, I realized that the project on a filmshoot
couldn’t be done for TV because it had to be shot
in a studio, that I wanted to cast an actress who was a
bit more famous than those I usually had, and that
I wanted two cameras. It was much too big a budget for
TV. So I made Brief Crossing for TV and I decided to make
were playing a part. It was very strange.
Did the desire to make this film take place at a time when
you wanted to focus both on a method and on yourself?
A self-portrait isn’t an autobiography. I wondered what
the difference was and I went to look at Rembrandt’s selfportraits
in Vienna. Why do these self-portraits interest
other people? Because a self-portrait isn’t showing
others a view of oneself. On the contrary it’s questioning
yourself with a world interface. Because the world only
exists through your perception of it. A self-portrait isn’t
a portrait. It is done from the inside, not the outside.
This film became a self-portrait
coals, without getting burned.
It’s a magical moment in life. You could also say that
you’d kill your father and mother to make a film.
That’s the negative side. Yes, you’d kill your father
and mother to make a film because you’d also kill
yourself to make it. It’s the most important thing.
A film is utopia. That’s also why it’s magnificent. Maybe
there are people who’d rather make films from shooting
schedules, who know exactly what they’re going to
do, who are never astounded by their own films.
I never know what film I’m going
to make, but it astounds me.
Besides, when I’ve just finished it, I can hardly say what it’s
Especially when it’s a sex scene! What is called a sex
scene, is a scene that everyone treats like a secret,
that they’re both excited about and ashamed of.
There is this object that is the forbidden representation
of the male sex-organ. In the film, it is so forbidden
that it’s a fake. But moving from the fake to the
illusion of reality is what brings back all the taboos,
but also all the emotion, the human aspect. When
there are no taboos, there’s no humanity, there are
only dirty jokes, barrack-room humor. That’s when
the sex-organ becomes a costume.
What you say makes one feel that you didn’t make
this film as a theatrical feature. It’s a script that I never
reread and when I really got going on it, I wasn’t at all without my realizing it.
about. I realize that the film is the result of a kind of incomprehensible
and completely delicious movement back and
this film to explain anything, but rather to comment
on a mystery.
aware of what was at stake, of how much of a self-portrait Anne Parillaud isn’t my clone. She’s herself. I didn’t try
forth between the film that I’m making, and the film that Yes. It’s a mystery and it remains one when you see
it was. For me, it was just filming the shooting of a movie. to turn her into me. It’s more like symbiosis, a kind of
the director played by Anne Parillaud is making, and the the film. But I wanted it to have a light tone, so one
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