French auteur Patrice Leconte made his international reputation with the chilly yet emotionally intense Monsieur Hire (which gave French comic Michel Blanc his first dramatic role) and his subsequent string of rapturous, often tragic romantic dramas (The Hairdresser's Husband and The Widow Of St. Pierre), tales of friendship (The Man On The Train), and the sly, stinging satire Ridicule. And those are just the films that make it across the Atlantic.
So it may surprise some of his fans to know that the film school graduate and former cartoonist first made his reputation in France with his second film, Les Bronzes, a goofball comedy released on video in North America as French Fried Vacation. A huge hit, it launched a series of popular comedies that ended when he changed the course of his career with Monsieur Hire.
M. Leconte came to the 2004 Seattle International Film Festival, which paid tribute to the contemporary master with a retrospective, an onstage interview, and the North American Premiere of his new film Intimate Strangers, a "sentimental thriller" (in Leconte's own words) about a distraught woman (Sandrine Bonnaire, as dreamily beautiful as ever) who goes for her first appointment with a new psychiatrist and opens up her heart... to a very surprised tax accountant (Fabrice Luchini). After the festival wrapped and he'd completed his duties as guest of honor, he graciously agreed to interviews with the local press.
Though fluent in English, M. Leconte is more comfortable in French and he relied upon interpreter Jerome Patoux to translate his answers (M. Leconte understood my end of the conversation just fine).
Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche in The Widow Of St. Pierre
Many of your films are very romantic, but they are also about the intensity of love and friendship. In Monsieur Hire it's an obsessive relationship, while in The Widow Of St. Pierre, the Captain and wife (Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche) are so in love that they will do anything for each other. I find that unique in your films. It's not just about friendship but how powerful these emotions can be and how it changes people's lives.
I always thought that cinema was an incredible medium to tell love stories. Moreover, I didn?t really know what else you could tell but love stories. That's what interests me the most. You can take people who are living a love story really, really far. You can take off from reality and then you can be much more intense than you would be in real life. And it's true that The Widow Of St. Pierre is, first of all, an incredible love story. The love story in Intimate Strangers is much more toned down and suggested, but in the end they are all love stories.
In Intimate Strangers, the love story is transformative. It changes his life completely and positively.
It's something that I really like in that project. You realize that there is something that is hovering above their heads, the feeling of love that is over there but never lands, but you know that it's there, a little bit like a perfume. And then, in a sense, you have already smelled that perfume before them and so you know, before [they do], that they are actually falling in love with each other. That diffused feeling is what really touched me.
I think many viewers at the Seattle screening felt that Intimate Strangers had a sad ending, but I find it a happy one.
When I was shooting my previous movie, The Man On The Train, I realized something terrible. Quite often, I had a bad ending in my movies. Monsieur Hire is not very happy, nor The Hairdresser's Husband, and The Widow Of St. Pierre is even less happy, and so on. When I was shooting The Man On The Train, I thought, "Merde, another movie where they are going to die again." And so we invented a different ending, a kind of a "higher" end after the climax, because I really wanted to interrupt that infernal series of dark movies. And so from The Man On The Train on, I swore to myself that I would never make another movie that had a bad ending. Not because I want to do a stupid movie with a stupid, syrupy happy ending; I simply want the movies that I do from now on to slope up rather than slope down.
You can see that in Girl On The Bridge before that, where they get their happy ending.
C'est vrai, c'est vrai. [laughs] That's exactly right. So I haven't done only sad movies.
And it's also another film where the love story is bigger than life.
The famous "bigger than life." You're right, cinema is not done to stick to reality. Otherwise, it's not worth making movies. Reality is right there, all day long, all around you. Imagine somebody leaving reality to go into a theater, and then seeing reality there on the screen. "I spent my money for nothing!" It's true.
Jean Rochefort and Johnny Halliday in The Man On The Train
In The Man On The Train, when Jean Rochefort meets Johnny Halliday - it could be a love story between two men - he escapes his reality through meeting this gangster and living his romantic outlaw fantasy through him.
Each of the two is each other's dream. It's very often like that, that you want to have what you do not have. So the old teacher who has never left his home is dreaming of western movies, and the guy who's been dragging his old bones from job to job all his life, all he wants to do is sit in an armchair and read. You always want what you don't have.
You mentioned that you made all these films with tragic endings, yet your first six or seven films were all light-hearted comedies. How do you explain the transition from making these very light films to making much more serious and dark films?
I felt good doing pure comedies at the beginning of my career because that would correspond to my mindset at the time. I didn't take the risk of being pretentious. But then one day I started to do different things. Not necessarily more personal things, but different. So what's amusing is that right now, today, I really feel like doing comedies again. Just to change my mind and see if I'm still able to make comedies. Maybe I've turned into a curmudgeon. It's interesting because the comedies I made at the beginning of my career were very popular and met with a lot of success. So am I still able to that today? That is the question. We'll see.
You once said that Johnny Halliday always wanted to make a comedy. Are you going to make a comedy with Johnny Halliday?
[Sucks in his breath and laughs nervously] That's more difficult. I would have to use Johnny Halliday for the character that he really is, and then I would have to put him in comic situations, but he wouldn't have to do anything, not even move his little finger. I think it's very amusing when someone very serious winds up in a comic situation. I'll have to think about it because I don't have an idea about that right now.
You also said that you were thinking about making Les Bronzes 3. Are you moving ahead with that or is it just an idea?
No, we are actually writing the script right now and will shoot in the spring. With the same team, of course, with 20 years more under their belt.
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