Outtakes with Christopher Honoré and Louis Garrel

Christophe Honoré and Louis Garrel, the director and star of Love Songs talk about French cinema.

You said in a previous interview that French cinema has lost its sense of adolescence. What did you mean?
Christophe Honoré: I get irritated by the lesson-giving aspect of some French cinema, where you feel like it wants to teach the audience something—usually clichés and platitudes. What I like best about the Nouvelle Vague films are their roughness, their teenage arrogance. They’d go from one thing to another without getting bothered by too much formality. I like that sense of something being unfinished, of films that search for themselves as they go along.

But your own movies are formally sophisticated, with that fixed traveling shot on Ludivine Sagnier in Love Songs, for instance.
Honoré: It’s a reference to Cocteau’s Orphée as well as Umbrellas of Cherbourg, a traveling of people coming back from the land of the dead—or going there, as in Love Songs. I admire directors who make internally consistent films. A Bresson movie impresses me, and at the same time I’m completely unable to work that way. If I stage a sequence I’m pleased with, the next day I’ll take a completely different approach.

I hear Love Songs happened really quickly.
Honoré: Yeah, it was done quickly and on the cheap, which can make things complicated when you shoot in Paris. It made us a little anxious. The very first day, we had a permit to shoot on a particular sidewalk, and I decided to shoot on the opposite one. The police arrived within five minutes. We had to argue with them for an hour, and we were only on the other side of the street!
Louis Garrel: Plus, locals don’t really like film shoots in Paris. They are perceived as something done by privileged people, some show-business thing. People don’t welcome filmmaking, as if it wasn’t made for them. It’s perceived as something aggressive.

The musical numbers don’t involve dancing per se, but they are very fluid, as if choreographed. Were they complicated to stage?
Honoré: They were extremely rehearsed. In the scene with the two boys in bed, for instance, every single gesture was mapped out. When actors had to sing, we’d either play the recorded music out loud on speakers, or they’d wear small earphones if we had to keep things quiet. The actors couldn’t walk to the music’s rhythm, for example—I find it unbearable when actors do that.

You had originally written Ismaël as being in his forties. How would that have impacted his relationship with the character played by Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet, who’s in high school?
Honoré: It would have been more transgressive. What’s funny now is that the teenager picks Ismaël, who falls for it like an idiot. [Laughs] I like that character a lot. Normally in a French or American movie, there would be something about his coming out: You introduce a young gay guy, so he has to make a statement, whereas what I like about the way it is in the movie is that he doesn’t care—he’s already moved beyond that. All the characters have some kind of sexual freedom. It may be a little utopian. I hope it’s not too harmonious—I’m always wary of harmony in sexuality, like, people at ease in their bodies are a little boring. I get that from movies by [Olivier] Ducastel and [Jacques] Martineau.

Their musical, Jeanne and the Perfect Guy, is pretty hard to watch.
Honoré: Yeah, they were on a kitschy trip. And that really was an “in the manner of” movie, very close to Demy. That’s why the Love Songs threesome is fun at first: Ludivine doesn’t enjoy it all that much, Ismaël doesn’t know what to do, and then you have the girl who kinda imposes herself. They’re not all that happy with their sex life.

Another connection with the New Wave is that you shoot fast: You just made three films in a year and a half.
Honoré: The thing with French cinema right now is that you either wait for a comfortable budget and then you make a movie every four years, or you just forge ahead and resign yourself to making films in precarious financial conditions. Honestly, it can be tiresome. But I’d like to do a movie a year; it’s not that intense. Godard used to say, “I don’t understand why you’d entrust a movie to a director who hasn’t done anything in five years. It’s as if you gave a plane to a pilot who hasn’t flown in five years.” It’s true: Filmmaking is about experience. You need to make a lot of mistakes to understand how it works.

Louis, is it the same for actors?
Garrel: I have this theory about acting: I try to apply in my work what I like in others’. I don’t enjoy seeing actors too often—when I see them in too many movies, it’s difficult to go along with their screen stories. So that makes it complicated for me, because I don’t want to be omnipresent.
Honoré: It’s important to be rare. On the other hand, it was really interesting when Depardieu would work with Bertolucci and [Marco] Ferreri at the same time. If you’re working with very different directors, it’s fine. What’s a pain is to see Isabelle Carré 20 times in the same movie. That’s terminally boring.
Garrel: When you make a movie, you put everything that happened to you in it: your memories, your thoughts, your gestures. If all you do is make movies, you recycle things you did on other shoots. It becomes a mirror reflecting a mirror reflecting a mirror. Life isn’t the main inspiration anymore.

Tell me a bit about La Bonne Personne, your modern-dress adaptation of La Princesse de Clèves and fourth collaboration with Louis Garrel.
Honoré: I think it’s going to function as the last part of a trilogy with Dans Paris and Love Songs. They all cast a cinephilic eye on Paris. In Dans Paris, we revisit some of the locations we saw in New Wave movies; Love Songs is more like a documentary on the tenth arrondissement. The new one is more timeless, with the idea of a city after curfew. Two thirds of it take place in a high school, and the rest is in the embassies neighborhood, the 16th arrondissement, an empty area where you never see anybody. The only time there’s a bit of life is when some of the kids go to the Cinémathèque, to watch Yaaba, by Idrissa Ouedraogo. I picked it because there was an African-film retrospective at the time, and there’s adultery in both that movie and La Princesse de Clèves. It’s really depressing overall, because the film is about young people in dead places. The city is like a ghost town; I’m showing a provincial side of Paris, as if it were a spa town.

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