Finally, the screenplay was complete. But Alatriste ran into some unfortunate financial problems during the shoot, and I had to cut a full half of the film; a meeting under the snow, some pilgrimage scenes, and a visit from the emperor of Byzantium all wound up literally on the cutting-room floor, which explains why the ending seems somewhat abrupt. Yet, such as it is, Simon of the Desert won five awards at the Venice Film Festival, a record unmatched by any of my other movies.
In 1963, the French producer Serge Silberman came to Spain, rented an apartment at the Torre de Madrid, and sent word that he wanted to meet me. It happened that I was living in the apartment directly opposite his; so he came over, drank a bottle of whiskey with me, and we’ve been friends ever since. After a lot of talk, we agreed to do an adaptation of Octave Mirbeau’s Journal d’une femme de chambre (Diary of a Chambermaid), a book I’d read many times. But to make the story more accessible, we decided to set the film in the 1920s—a change that also allowed the right-wing demonstrators to shout “Vive Chiappe!” at the end, in memory of L’Age d’or.
It was Louis Malle, in Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, who introduced the world to Jeanne Moreau’s incredible way of walking. I myself have always liked to watch the way women walk, and filming Jeanne in Diary of a Chambermaid was a great pleasure; when she walks, her foot trembles just a bit on its high heel, suggesting a certain tension and instability. Jeanne is a marvelous actress, and I kept my directions to a minimum, content for the most part just to follow her with the camera. In fact, she taught me things about the character she played that I’d never suspected were there.
The film was shot in Paris and in Milly-la-Forêt during the fall of 1963. It was the first time I’d worked with Pierre Lary (my assistant), Suzanne Durremberger (an excellent script girl), and Jean-Claude Carrière, who plays the priest and with whom I’ve continued to collaborate on all my French movies. One of the highlights of the shoot was meeting Muni, a singular actress with a very unconventional life-style who became a kind of mascot for us. She played the part of the most menial servant, but had one of the best exchanges in the movie.
“Why are you always talking about killing Jews?” she asks the fanatical sexton.
“Aren’t you a patriot?” he retorts.
“Yes.”
“So?”
After Diary of a Chambermaid, Silberman told me to keep right on going, so I decided to try adapting “Monk” Lewis’s marvelous gothic novel, The Monk. The book figured prominently in the surrealist canon and had been translated into French by Antonin Artaud. I remembered talking to Gérard Philipe about it several years before, as I had about Jean Giono’s wonderful Le Hussard sur le toit, another consequence of my old weakness for epidemics and plagues. Philipe listened with only half an ear, since at the time he was more interested in “political” films like La Fièvre monte à El Pao—a well-made movie all in all, but one about which I’ve nothing much to say.
The Monk was soon abandoned, however, and in 1966 I accepted a proposal from the Hakim brothers to make a film based on Joseph Kessel’s Belle de jour. The novel is very melodramatic, but well constructed, and it offered me the chance to translate Séverine’s fantasies into pictorial images as well as to draw a serious portrait of a young female bourgeois masochist. I was also able to indulge myself in the faithful description of some interesting sexual perversions. (My fascination with fetishism was already obvious in the first scene of El and the boot scene in Diary of a Chambermaid.) In the last analysis, my only regret about Belle de jour was that the proprietor of the famous Train Bleu at the Gare de Lyon refused to allow me to shoot the opening scene on the premises. It’s a spectacular restaurant on the second floor of the railroad station, designed around 1900 by a group of painters, sculptors, and decorators who created a kind of opera-house decor devoted to trains and the countries they can take us to. I go there often when I’m in Paris and always sit at the same table, which overlooks the tracks.
Belle de jour also brought me together again with Paco Rabal, of Nazarin and Viridiana, a man and an actor of whom I’m very fond and who calls me “mon oncle.” He needs very little direction. In fact, now that we’re on the subject, I don’t use any particular technique when I work. My direction depends entirely on how good the actors are, on what they suggest, or on the kind of effort I have to make if they’re not suited to their roles. In any case, all direction depends on your personal vision, a certain something you feel strongly but can’t always explain.
One other thing I do regret about this film are the cuts I had to make to please the censors, especially the scene between Georges Marchai and Catherine Deneuve, whom he addresses as his daughter while she lies in a coffin in a private chapel after a Mass celebrated under a splendid copy of one of Grünewald’s Christs. The suppression of the Mass completely changes the character of this scene.
Of all the senseless questions asked about this movie, one of the most frequent concerns the little box that an Oriental client brings with him to the brothel. He opens it and shows it to the girls, but we never see what’s inside. The prostitutes back away with cries of horror, except for Séverine, who’s rather intrigued. I can’t count the number of times people (particularly women) have asked me what was in the box, but since I myself have no idea, I usually reply, “Whatever you want there to be.”
Belle de jour was shot at the St.-Maurice Studios (another place that no longer exists) while my son Juan-Luis worked on the neighboring set as Louis Malle’s assistant on Le Voleur. It was my biggest commercial success, which I attribute more to the marvelous whores than to my direction.
From Diary on, my life was inextricably bound up with my films. I no longer had any serious problems or dilemmas to contend with, and my life followed a very simple pattern: I lived chiefly in Mexico, spent several months each year writing screenplays or filming in Spain and France, where working conditions were far superior to those in Mexico City. Faithful to my old habits, I stayed in my usual hotels and went to my usual cafés (or, rather, those that hadn’t yet disappeared). With time, I finally discovered that nothing about movie making is more important than the scenario. But, unfortunately, I’ve never been a writer, and except for four films I’ve needed a collaborator to help me put the words on paper. My writers have been far more than mere secretaries, however; they’ve had the right—in fact, the obligation—to discuss and criticize my ideas and offer some of their own, even if the final decision remained mine. During my lifetime, I’ve worked with twenty-eight different writers, including Julio Alejandro, a playwright with a fine ear for dialogue, and Luis Alcoriza, a sensitive and energetic man who’s written and directed many films of his own. The writer closest to me, however, is undoubtedly Carrière, with whom I’ve written six screenplays.
The essential thing about a script is, in the last analysis, suspense—the talent for developing a plot so effectively that the spectator’s mind doesn’t wander for even a moment. You can argue forever about the content of a film, its aesthetic, its style, even its moral posture; but the crucial imperative is to avoid boredom at all costs.
The idea of making a film about Christian heresies first came to me just after my arrival in Mexico, when I read Menendez Pelayo’s Historia de los heterodoxos españoles. Its accounts of martyred heretics fascinated me—these men who were as convinced of their truths as the orthodox Christians were of theirs. In fact, what’s always intrigued me about the behavior of heretics is not only their strange inventiveness, but their certainty that they possess the absolute truth. As Breton once wrote, despite his aversion to religion, the surrealists had “certain points of contact” with the heretics.
Everything in The Milky Way is based on authentic historical documents. The archbishop whose corpse is exhumed and publicly burned (when personal papers tinged with heretical ideas are found after his death) was in fact a real Archbishop Carranza of Toledo. We did a great deal of research for this film, primarily in Abbé Pluquet’s Dictionnaire des hérésies. Carri?
?re and I wrote the first draft in the fall of 1967 at the Parador Cazorla in the Andalusian mountains, where the road ended at the door of our hotel and where the few hunters around left at dawn and returned at nightfall, bringing back the occasional corpse of an ibex. We spent days discussing the Holy Trinity, the dual nature of Christ, and the mysteries of the Virgin Mary, and we were both happily surprised when Silberman agreed to the project. The script was finished at San José Purua during February and March 1968, and although filming was temporarily delayed by the commotion of that May, we finished the shoot in Paris during the summer. Paul Frankeur and Laurent Terzieff played the two pilgrims walking to Santiago de Compostela who meet, on their way, a series of characters from all ages and places representing the principle heresies of our culture. The title comes from the idea of the original name of the Milky Way—Saint John’s Way, so called because it directed wayfarers from all over northern Europe to Spain.
Once again, I worked with Pierre Clementi, Julien Bertheau, Claudio Brook, and Michel Piccoli, but I also discovered Delphine Seyrig, whom I’d bounced on my knee when she was a little girl in New York during the war. And for the second and last time I also put Christ himself, played by Bernard Verley, on camera. I wanted to show him as an ordinary man, laughing, running, mistaking his way, preparing to shave—to show, in other words, all those aspects so completely alien to our traditional iconography. It seemed to me that in the evolution of contemporary religion, Christ occupies a disproportionately privileged place in relation to the two other figures in the Holy Trinity. God the Father still exists, of course, but he’s become vague and distant; and as for the unfortunate Holy Ghost, no one bothers with him at all anymore. He must be begging at roadsides by now.
Despite the difficulty of the subject, the public seemed to like the film, thanks largely to Silberman’s superlative public relations work. Like Nazarin, however, it provoked conflicting reactions. Carlos Fuentes saw it as an antireligious war movie, while Julio Cortázar went so far as to suggest that the Vatican must have put up the money for it. These arguments over intention leave me finally indifferent, since in my opinion The Milky Way is neither for nor against anything at all. Besides the situation itself and the authentic doctrinal dispute it evokes, the film is above all a journey through fanaticism, where each person obstinately clings to his own particle of truth, ready if need be to kill or to die for it. The road traveled by the two pilgrims can represent, finally, any political or even aesthetic ideology.
Just after the movie opened in Copenhagen (in French, with Danish subtitles), a caravan of gypsies—men, women, and children—who spoke neither Danish nor French drove up to the theatre, and everyone piled out and bought tickets. They returned several days in a row to see the movie, until finally, beside himself with curiosity, the owner of the theatre did his best to find out why they kept coming back. He tried several times to ask them, but since he didn’t speak their language, they couldn’t communicate. In the end, he let them in free.
After The Milky Way, I became interested in Galdós’s epistolary novel Tristana. Although it’s certainly not one of his best, the character of Don Lope is fascinating, and I thought I might be able to switch the action from Madrid to Toledo and thus render homage to the city I loved so much. The first actors I thought of were Silvia Pinal and Ernesto Alonso, but since they were busy with another project, I thought about Fernando Rey, who was so marvelous in Viridiana, and a young Italian actress I much admired, Stefania Sandrelli. Later, I engaged Catherine Deneuve, who, although she didn’t seem to belong in Galdós’s universe, turned out to be absolutely perfect. The film was shot entirely in Toledo, except for some scenes in a studio in Madrid where Alarcon, the set designer, constructed an exact copy of the Zocodover café. If, as in Nazarin, the main character is a faithful copy of Galdós’s, I made considerable changes in the structure and atmosphere, once again situating the action in a more contemporary period. With Julio Alejandro’s help, I added several personally meaningful details, like the bell tower and the mortuary statue of Cardinal Tavera. Once again, I haven’t seen Tristana since it opened, but I remember liking the second half, from the return of the young woman with the amputated leg. I can still hear her footsteps in the corridor, the scrape of her crutches, and the febrile conversation of the priests over their cups of hot chocolate.
Whenever I think of the shoot, I remember a joke I played on Fernando Rey. (As he’s a very dear friend, I hope he’ll forgive me this confession.) Like so many actors, Fernando had a healthy appreciation of his own popularity; he loved being recognized in the street and having people turn around and stare when he walked by. One day I told the production manager to bribe some local high school students to wait until Fernando and I were sitting side by side in a café, at which point the students were to come up to me, one by one, and ask for my autograph. They were instructed to ask only me and to ignore Fernando. When the scene was finally set, the first young man appeared and asked for my autograph, which I gave him happily. As soon as he walked away, without so much as a glance at Fernando, a second student arrived and did exactly the same thing. As the third stepped up, Fernando burst out laughing. When I asked him how he’d figured it out, he replied that the idea of someone asking me for an autograph and not him seemed so utterly impossible that he knew it had to be a joke.
When I finished work on Tristana, I returned to Silberman’s fold, rediscovering Paris, my old Montparnasse hangouts, the Hôtel l’Aiglon where my windows overlooked the cemetery, my early lunches at La Coupole or La Palette or the Closerie des Lilas, my daily walks and my solitary evenings. One day, when Silberman and I were talking about uncanny repetitions, he told me a story about the time he’d invited some people for dinner but had forgotten to tell his wife. In fact, he forgot that he’d been invited out to dinner himself that same evening. When the guests arrived, Silberman wasn’t there; his wife was, however, but in her bathrobe, and since she had no idea anyone was coming, she’d already eaten and was about to go to bed. This incident became the opening scene in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, and from there we repeated the pattern, inventing all sorts of situations where a group of friends keeps trying to have dinner together but can’t seem to manage it. It was long, hard work, particularly because it was crucial to maintain a sufficient degree of realism in the midst of this delirium. The script went through five different versions while we tried to combine realism—the situation had to be familiar and develop logically—and the accumulation of strange, but not fantastical, obstacles. Once again, dreams helped, particularly the notion of a dream within a dream. (I must confess, too, how happy I was to be able to include my personal recipe for the dry martini.)
The shoot itself, which took place in Paris in 1972, was marvelous; since the film dealt at length with food, the actors—Stéphane Audran especially—brought all kinds of wonderful things onto the set to eat and drink. I also learned to work with a video setup, or television monitor. Old age had crept up on me, and I was no longer quite so dexterous in adjusting the camera. Now, however, I could sit in front of my TV screen, see the same image the cameraman saw, and correct angles and positions without moving from my chair, a technique that saved me endless time and energy.
In my search for titles, I’ve always tried to follow the old surrealist trick of finding a totally unexpected word or group of words which opens up a new perspective on a painting or book. This strategy is obvious in titles like Un Chien andalou, L’Age d’or, and even The Exterminating Angel. While we were working on this screenplay, however, we never once thought about the word “bourgeoisie.” On the last day at the Parador in Toledo, the day de Gaulle died, we were desperate; I came up with A bas Lénine, ou la Vierge à l’écurie (Down with Lenin, or The Virgin in the Manger). Finally, someone suggested Le Charme de la bourgeoisie; but Carrière pointed out that we needed an adjective, so after sifting through what seemed like thousands of them, we finally stumbled upon “discreet.” Suddenly the film took on a different
shape altogether, even a different point of view. It was truly a marvelous discovery.
A year later, when the film had been nominated for an Oscar, four Mexican reporters tracked us down at El Paular, where we were already at work on another project. During lunch, they asked if I thought I was going to win that Oscar.
“Of course,” I replied between bites. “I’ve already paid the twenty-five thousand dollars they wanted. Americans may have their weaknesses, but they do keep their promises.”
A few days later, headlines in Mexico City announced that I’d bought the Oscar. Los Angeles was scandalized; telexes poured in; Silberman flew over in a rage from Paris. I assured him it was all a joke, but it took quite a while for the dust to settle. Ironically, the film did win an Oscar three weeks later.
The Phantom of Liberty (a phrase that had already appeared in The Milky Way, when one character tells another, “Your liberty is only a phantom”) was invented in homage to Karl Marx, to that “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism” at the beginning of the Manifesto. The first scene was inspired by the return of the Bourbons, when the Spanish people had really shouted, “Long live our chains!” out of pure hatred for the liberal ideas Napoleon had introduced. Soon after, however, the idea of political and social freedom took on an additional dimension—that of the artist and the creator, a freedom every bit as illusory as the first. It was an ambitious film, difficult both to write and to direct, and finally rather frustrating. Although certain episodes are more vivid in my memory than others, I still have to admit that it’s remained one of my favorite films. The technique is intriguing, as is the love scene between the aunt and her nephew in the hotel room. I’m also very fond of the search for the little girl, the visit to the cemetery (shades of the cemetery of San Martín), and the ending in the zoological gardens with the unwavering gaze of the ostrich, which seems to be wearing false eyelashes.