Bernardo Bertolucci

Bernardo Bertolucci in conversation with Gilbert Adair and David Thompson. The interview took place at the National Film Theatre on 10 November 2003.

As the highpoint of our season 1968 we were extremely pleased to follow a preview screening of Bernardo Bertolucci's acclaimed new film, The Dreamers, with an interview with the director and Gilbert Adair, whose screenplay is an adaptation of his novel The Holy Innocent'. The film evokes the heady spirit of rebellion and renewal that swept Paris in the spring of 1968; when a young American meets and befriends a brother and sister who share his passion for the movies, he finds himself caught up in an intense relationship as unsettling as it is seductive... A sensuous, elegant, provocative study of sex, cinema and politics, the film provided ample material for discussion.

• Before the revolution
• The Nouvelle Vague and the Cinémathèque
• The ghost of Godard
• From book to film
• On the set
• Beauty and learning
• New films and 'La Mer'

Interview © BFI 2003

Before the revolution

Geoff Andrew: In the 1960s a lot of new film-makers started enlivening the cinematic scene, first in France and then in places like Japan with Nagisa Oshima and in Italy with Bernardo Bertolucci. The general enlivening that went on culminated in 1968 with lots of turmoil on the political front but also lots of creativity on the cultural front. At that time Bernardo Bertolucci was making Partner, so he wasn't in Paris when the riots happened, but Gilbert Adair, the writer, was. And tonight you're going to be able to hear both of them talking about the '60s, about The Dreamers, the film they've made about 1968 and about lots of other things.

Before we start the film, I'd just like to say a few things. Throughout the evening, please keep mobile phones turned off; please do not use photographic, video or audio recording equipment during the interview because we will be covering it and you're not allowed to, I'm afraid. There will be a brief interval after the film, of about 10 or 15 minutes, so listen out for the announcements and hold on to your ticket stubs so you can take the same seat. I'd just like to thank Twentieth Century-Fox and Recorded Picture Company for the preview of the film, which won't be released for some time, so you're seeing it way in advance of most people, apart from the few who saw it in the London Film Festival. And please do come along to some of the other films in the season of movies about 1968 which David Thompson has compiled - he's the person who's going to be interviewing Gilbert and Bernardo later. It's a very fine season with some real delights in it and quite a few rarities - like the complete Hour of the Furnaces [Fernando Solanas, 1968]. But, that's for another time. Just enjoy this evening... have fun. [applause]

[Film: The Dreamers]

David Thompson: Good evening. Welcome to tonight's event, or the second half of tonight's event. For those of you who have popped out and told all your friends how wonderful The Dreamers is, please switch off your mobile phones now - I've been obliged to ask that. My name is David Thompson, I've had the privilege of programming this season of 1968-themed films. I was only 12-years-old in 1968, so I'm no way an expert on the period, but I think the two gentlemen who are going to join me later are: Gilbert Adair, the screenwriter of The Dreamers, and Bernardo Bertolucci, the director.

So we'll be on stage in a few minutes, talk for about half an hour, then we'll open it up for questions and at the end of the evening we've got a little treat for you, a 10-minute treat which we'll tell you about later. So when we finish and leave the stage please do stay behind - it's well worth staying for. We're just going to open with a short clip to put this evening in context. It's from Bernardo's second feature, Before the Revolution, and I don't think I need say much about it. You'll see, I think immediately, a connection between what you saw earlier, The Dreamers, and the atmosphere and feelings and ideas of this particular film, which was made in 1964. So we'll join you again in a few minutes. Thank you.

[Clip: Before the Revolution]

DT: Thank you. Perhaps we could start by talking about the clip we've just seen. Bernardo, could you say a little about how close that was to your life and feelings at the time, the '60s?

Bernardo Bertolucci: That would take five hours... The scene already, I think, expressed a kind of confusion: a feeling of being a film buff, with all the guilt attached to that. At the same time, it represented in my mind a very strong political declaration. I shot the film in '63/64, just in time to go to La Semaine de la Critique in Cannes, in '64. It's sad - I mean, what we thought then was that to make a political movie, it wasn't enough to have a political story, a political plot and a sense of social engagement. For us, political cinema was cinema that also talked about the language of film, the style of a film, and to be politically correct - the expression didn't exist then, thank God - but to be politically correct you had to think about cinema as in some way a declaration about language, about how a dolly or a 360 degrees pan could be a political statement. Everything was about language, about style, about thinking and reflecting about cinema and about the history of cinema, about the cinema that came before us.

So there was this friend of mine, a film buff called Gianni Amico. He collaborated with me on the screenplay of Before the Revolution and was a great, great film buff... and, to some extent, we were making fun of ourselves. If you can believe it, we already thought that, in '64, being a film buff was something expendable; that it was already finished. Yet here it is, something like 40 years later, and I'm afraid we're still here. [laughter] For example, we'd cite Francesco Rosi, a director who had made beautiful films, like Salvatore Giuliano [1962], and we'd tease him, as if he wasn't really as political as we thought he should be. You will see in this season Z [1968] by Costa-Gavras, and we were so snobbish that we thought it wasn't really a political film, and many years later I remember seeing Missing [1981], another film by Costa, about Pinochet, about Chile. I saw it with Clare, my wife, Clare Peploe, in Los Angeles, with this audience of students in Westwood. And I remember coming out, silent, walking to the car park, and Clare suddenly bursting into tears. And I couldn't stop her, and finally, she told me why she was crying. 'It's because I thought of how silly we were, with Costa, at the time of Z.' Silly and a bit racist, because he didn't belong to the Nouvelle Vague.

The Nouvelle Vague and the Cinémathèque

DT: Speaking of the Nouvelle Vague, we see, at the beginning of The Dreamers, this young guy arriving, very expectant of great things at the Cinémathèque. Does that also mirror an experience you went through at the Cinémathèque and the importance of French cinema at that time?

BB: I remember going to Paris when I was 18 or 19 because I'd passed my final school exam, the maturità, and my parents paid for very little, but they did pay for a trip to Paris, and we went, my cousin and I, in a Cinquecento car from Parma to Paris. It was all very heroic, but soon we ended up in the Cinémathèque Française and a few years later [Henri] Langlois saw Before the Revolution and invited the film, which in Italy had been booed by critics - I would like to say by critics and spectators, but only by critics as there were no spectators. So, as I say, Henri invited the film to the Cinémathèque Française and in a way it was adopted by Cahiers du cinéma and I felt that I was becoming a bit French... Anyway, I went back to the Cinémathèque Française, on stage with Langlois, and, as you saw in The Dreamers, the Cinémathèque screen occupies the whole of one wall from top to bottom, and I asked him why the screen was so big. He said it was for certain shots in Rossellini's films - you never knew when they would expand on the top, on the bottom, on the left, on the right. You know, that was the kind of temperature we were breathing in the '60s.

DT: Gilbert, can I bring you in here about your experience of the Cinémathèque and why it was so important to you?

Gilbert Adair: Well, I went to Paris at the very beginning of '68 because I'd always been a francophile. It wasn't only a question of francophilia, though; there was another 'philia' in the air - cinephilia. It seemed to me that, if you were a film buff in the '60s, you went to Paris, the way that, if you were a painter in the 1920s, you also went to Paris. In fact I ought to be in The Guinness Book of Records, I think, because I was a subscriber to Cahiers du Cinéma when I was 15 and I'm sure there existed no other teenage subscriber to Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1960s - at least in Britain. So, when I got to the Cinémathèque, I already knew all about it, I knew all about the great directors, directors whose films I'd never seen. I'd never seen a film by [Kenji] Mizoguchi or [Max] Ophüls but I knew all about them because of Cahiers, which meant that the moment I saw their films I was able to contextualise them.

I was also familiar with the critical theory of Cahiers du Cinéma, the so-called auteur theory, and I remember the very first time I saw Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar [1954]. It was at the Cinémathèque, and it had French subtitles, and this may sound very pretentious, very pseudy-posey now, but I can't tell you what a thrill I got to see those French subtitles on Johnny Guitar because this was one of those films that had been championed by the French. The Americans probably thought of Johnny Guitar as a kind of lurid, kitschy Western, but the French had said, 'No, it's a beautiful, poetic masterpiece', and the fact that each image had these French subtitles forced me, as it were, to look at the film through French eyes, forced me to see it as they saw it, and it somehow became a more authentic experience. Even now I get a thrill watching an old American movie with French subtitles. At the beginning of The Dreamers, for example, when Matthew goes to the Cinémathèque and sees Shock Corridor [Samuel Fuller] and it's got those French subtitles - to me that's a little Proustian thing. Watching old American movies at the Cinémathèque was a French experience, not really American - it was American culture filtered through a French sensibility.

DT: Why did you choose Shock Corridor?

BB: I think we chose it together, no?

GA: I think we felt that there were a lot of corridors in the movie. The characters are constantly walking along corridors, no?

BB: I don't think so. [laughter]

GA: Maybe I thought so and didn't say so.

BB: No, because the title was already in the screenplay before we built the set. We made some changes in an old flat in a Haussmann kind of building in Paris and I think maybe the opposite was true: that we built so many corridors in the film because of Shock Corridor.

GA: Oh, I see. Okay.

DT: This was also a film that was much beloved by the Cahiers critics, the Positif critics and so forth...

GA: Fuller wasn't taken seriously in the States, but in France he was considered one of the most important American directors.

BB: More than Jerry Lewis...

DT: Don't even get me started on Jerry Lewis... [laughter] So both of you feel very strongly, then, that there's a kind of perspective that the French gave to American cinema or cinema in general, which fed you both, and that's what feeds into this film - the novel and the film.

GA: The Cinémathèque was really a very special place. The National Film Theatre is an admirable place to see films, but the Cinémathèque in those years - you were very conscious of Langlois, he was like the director of the Cinémathèque in the sense that we refer to a movie director. It was like an auteur's Cinémathèque, a Cinémathèque d'auteur, and when you watched movies there he was present, if not always in person, then in spirit.

The ghost of Godard

BB: We shouldn't forget the NFT also because I have a memory of - I think in this very room, this very theatre - the '68 London Film Festival. I remember I was there, at the back, and there was Godard on stage, introducing One Plus One, the film on the recording of 'Sympathy for the Devil'. And because the producer, who was there on stage with him, had remixed the last minutes of the film, had made an alteration to Jean-Luc's version -

DT: He had put the song at the end, I think - that was what it was all about.

BB: Yeah, I think he'd put the song at the end... First, Jean-Luc said to the audience, 'I would like everybody to go to the box office, return their tickets and ask for their money back, and we'll put all the money together and send it to the Black Panthers.' And, in this English audience, I heard someone say 'I came from Manchester to see the bloody film, I want to see it!' So it wasn't a very politicised audience. [laughter] And, in the end, Jean-Luc shouted at the audience, 'Vous êtes tous des fascistes!' and turned to the producer and punched him. I think it was the most intense moment of political cinema ever in England. And I remember that, with my friend Gianni Amico, whom you've just seen in the clip of Before the Revolution, I was in a state somewhere between ecstasy and embarrassment. I remember, too, that Richard Roud, who was actually the director of the festival - my beloved Richard Roud was a critic and he invented this festival, I think - stood up and said, 'I've just received a note telling me that the counter-festival, which is actually taking place under the bridge, is showing One Plus One after you see it here, and they're asking for electricity because they don't have any, themselves so we're going to send a cable down to the counter-festival.' That's just un peu l'air du temps, I mean the atmosphere of '68, to remind you of those great moments.

DT: Speaking of Godard, he's quite a presence in The Dreamers, isn't he? He's almost like a ghost who's there all the time.

BB: I used a few seconds of À bout de souffle [1960] - Breathless - and a few seconds of Bande à part [1964] - in fact, what is called by French film buffs le sprint du Louvre. We had the permission of the current owner of the rights, I don't know, Pathé or something, but I sent Godard a letter saying, 'Dear Jean-Luc, I haven't seen you for a long time, but I would also like your permission before using the clips.' And Jean-Luc wrote back, 'Ça va sans dire, you can do what you like, but remember: il n'y a pas de droits d'auteur, il n'y a que des devoirs, there are no rights of auteurs, only duties', which is a beautiful, coherent, consistent Godardian reminder.

DT: But are you paying back a debt to Godard in this film, in a small way?

BB: I don't know, you seem obsessed with paying debts... By the way, when we were sitting in the green room waiting to come on stage, I asked where the NFT bookshop was and I was told it had gone, because they never sold any books. I replied that I used to go to the bookshop, which was wonderful, and I know I bought a few books... [laughter]... But the NFT should still have it... they should put back the bookshop. [applause] Anyway, it was because of Godard that I decided I wanted to make movies, because I'd seen À bout de souffle on my first trip to Paris and I would have been ready to kill for a shot of Godard - maybe even more to be killed. I believed that there was cinema before Godard and cinema after Godard, which I still think is true in a way. But about Godard I can speak forever.

GA: May I add something, Bernardo? You said in some interview or other that you took a particular pleasure in quoting from Godard because he himself is the cinema's great quoter. He never stops quoting from other directors and now you've quoted from him. But there's something else, something trivial but interesting, I think, which is that the Bande à part quote was in the script but I hadn't actually seen Bande à part for many years - it was one of my favourite films, but for a long time it was very difficult to see. Then I saw it again, and I had never forgotten the race through the Louvre and, to my astonishment, what I'd remembered lasting four or five minutes turned out to amount to four or five shots. Just flash shots, incredibly short. I watched it on video and even freeze-framed the tape to make certain I hadn't had some kind of aberration and missed something. So your quote is actually, I think, longer than the work from which it quotes, which must be a first in the history of the cinema. The Louvre scene in The Dreamers is actually longer than the Louvre scene in... [laughter]... just thought I'd mention that.

From book to film

DT: Can you say a bit about how you came across this novel and why you were so interested in filming it?

BB: For some time in the mid-'90s I thought of making a sequel to a movie I'd done in the '70s called Novecento - 1900 - which ended in '45, liberation day, with the feast of the peasants. It was a kind of utopia, the end of the padrone, the master, and I thought of extending it to the end of the century. Then I realised it wasn't possible because Novecento had been inspired, in some way dictated, by the atmosphere in Italy in the mid-'70s, when the head of the Catholic Party and the head of the Communist Party were very, very close and almost able to bring about what was called the Historical Confirmation, the union between communists and Catholics, with Catholic workers going on strike, arm under arm with the communists. It was an incredible utopian idea, which is why I think Aldo Moro, in the end, was kidnapped and killed, to put a stop to that possibility. It was, politically, a very special moment, one that inspired 1900.

So I looked around in Italy in '95/'96 and I realised there was no way of filming the third act of 1900 because there was nothing any longer of that kind of collective passion for politics. It was perhaps the very last gasp of a real utopia, at least in my country. So I gave up the idea and then Clare came to me with The Holy Innocents which she'd read earlier and was very attracted to... She maybe thought it wasn't right for me, or maybe she wanted to make it herself. Anyway, I read it and fell in love with the details and the atmosphere of '68 which was so... right. The way the writer, Gilbert, talked about '68 went straight to my heart. Also, I was fascinated by how close the book was to Cocteau's Les Enfants terribles. So I decided to date Gilbert [laughter] and he was very reticent at the beginning, maybe he will explain why, though I'm also like that, I try to play hard-to-get on a first date. [laughter] But, in fact, he gave in well before the end of the first meeting. You can tell them more about why you didn't want your book to be filmed.

GA: The book was written in the '80s, and '68 had marked me for life - I had been in Paris for the Cinémathèque affair and then '68 itself - and when I came to write my first novel, in a way it was inevitable that that would be the subject I'd choose, especially as it struck me that nobody seemed interested in celebrating '68 in fiction. I'm thinking of French literature more than British, obviously, but even in France there was nothing, there were no novels about '68. There were lots of books, lots of studies of '68, histories of '68, but nothing fictional, and the same, with a few marginal exceptions, applied to the cinema. There had never really been any films about '68, which was amazing. I'm not comparing May '68 in France to, say, the whole experience of the Vietnam War in America, but there had been a number of films about the Vietnam War, about actual combat experience, about returning vets, about a lot of the different ramifications of Vietnam. '68, though - somehow nobody was interested. Anyway, I wrote my novel, it was a very important novel for me, but it was also my first, I was a tyro, a newcomer, I hadn't written fiction before and I thought I'd botched it. It wasn't the novel I'd hoped it would be.

Yet almost immediately we began to get offers from film companies because it seemed, evidently, to lend itself to treatment in film. It was about the cinema, about sex, about politics - it just interested and attracted producers. And I said to my agent, 'I don't want you to sell this novel, I'm unhappy with it.' By then I'd written other books I was prouder of and I wanted him to sell those but not The Holy Innocents. I was so determined that I told him, 'I don't even want to know who's making the offer.' I find it much easier to say no if I don't know that an offer's been made in the first place. After all, there's a lot of money to be made in the cinema, there's a lot of prestige, you know. Then, one day, some years later, my agent phoned me to say, 'Gilbert, I have to let you know, an offer...' and I said, 'I don't want to hear - I told you.' He said, 'No, no, I just think you should - ' 'I don't want to hear!' And then he said, all in a rush, because otherwise he'd never have got it out, 'It's Bernardo Bertolucci!' And I must say that did make me just a little bit speechless. Also, something clicked in my mind. I thought 'of course'. I suddenly recalled Bernardo's films and the themes of those films and how close some of them were to those of The Holy Innocents. Anyway, I couldn't resist. As Bernardo said, I was a little shy on our first date, but I soon capitulated. I also decided to rewrite the novel at the same time as I was writing the script. This was an opportunity for me to write the novel I'd always wanted to write. So my reticence was simply because I just didn't want it to be made into a film, any film, but then, when I was told who wanted to film it, I had to say yes.

DT: But it didn't just end with the script, did it? Because you kept him on board for a long time.

BB: Yeah. I always thought while we were working - and it didn't take too long to get to a script which was more or less ready to be shot - I always thought I didn't want to have the scriptwriter on the set while I was actually shooting, because too often I see a kind of horror on the writer's face because what I do is often so different from the script. I make lots of changes and I have to tell all the writers the same thing, you know, 'To be faithful to your script I have to be unfaithful,' etc. etc. And I think he swallowed that and, okay, he accepted that I was going to have all the fun. But then, a few days before starting to shoot, I said to him, 'Gilbert, here's something new. I'd really like you on the set all the time because I know I'm going to make all sorts of changes and I want you to represent the physical continuity between your story, the story that you wrote, and what I'm inventing.' Because there's a lot of improvisation in this film, as in all my films, and this is the first time that I improvised with a kind of life-vest - the presence of the writer, next to me.

So, together, we invented new scenes and cut some old ones. It was a new experience for me, having rewritten dialogue when I needed it, dialogue that would have taken me some time to write. I'd speak with Gilbert, then he'd just go to a room at the back of the apartment and return 10 minutes later with new dialogue - it was fantastic. Also, I thought it would have been too cruel to deprive him of the pleasure of experiencing the materialisation of his ghosts, his characters, first real, then completely transformed in his book, then transformed again in the screenplay. So, I believe for the first time in his life, Gilbert Adair had the experience of being on a set from the first day to the last, the chance to know the splendeurs et misères of a movie set.

On the set

DT: And, in this film, there was one major set, wasn't there, which is the apartment, which becomes like a fourth character. You've done apartments before, of course, most famously in Last Tango [Last Tango in Paris, 1972]. Is there something about them that strongly attracts you?

BB: No, claustrophobia is something I've really never felt in life,. So, when I film in an apartment, I try desperately to feel claustrophobic. A lot of Last Tango in Paris was shot inside the apartment, but there were also lots of exteriors. I mean, we switched all the time between inside and outside. For The Dreamers, we found this building which was completely empty, and the first floor became the offices of Recorded Picture Company - Jeremy Thomas and his co-producer Hercules Bellville - on the second floor there would be the AVID and some of the officina, I mean, where the production designer, who is called Jean Rabasse - I really liked him very much, I liked very much what he was able to do with the apartment - was preparing things...

DT: And the editing room?

BB: The editing room, too; and then the third floor was the set itself, the apartment; and the fourth floor was costumes and make-up. So we were a kind of monad, all together, as in a mini-studio, but nevertheless real, which was very important for me. I've shot almost all my movies in real locations, places where somebody else lived and stayed, with all their pain and joy - for me that's essential. Which is probably why my next movie will be shot inside a studio, just for a change. But there we all were, and I told the crew that it was like Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel - we couldn't possibly leave. In fact, it was a great feeling going back where you'd been the day before... because your own presence and your pain and your sweat merged with the ghosts of the apartment ... les fantômes et les fantasmes.

You know, if I want the camera to draw back and I say,: 'Go back, go further back, back, back,' and then there's a wall, in a studio you pull down the wall, it takes half-an-hour, then you go where you want with the camera, and then you put the wall back again. Not being able to do that, because the set is a real apartment and, if you did pull down the wall, the building would fall down means that you have to solve problems... you have to invent... it's a limitation that produces ideas. Since you can't draw the camera back, you have to invent a movement which is like going back - and is actually more interesting. Only in this way do you come to feel the spirit of the place.

DT: And the other thing, I suppose, which was a given, considering the source material, was that you had to have a very young cast, who would inevitably be unknown actors, precisely because of their youth. Was that a liberation for you as well, not to have to deal with 'name' actors any more?

BB: I like both... I mean, shooting with actors - having to use close-ups in order to contain the prosthetic egos of certain famous actors - or shooting with newcomers, like our three, who were like little pets, little animals, both can be extraordinary experiences. I asked the three of them, just as I asked many of the kids I interviewed in Paris during the casting sessions, 'What do you know about '68?' Louis Garrel knew a lot - he plays Théo, the brother, and is the son of Philippe Garrel, a very good French director who blossomed in '68, not terribly famous but film buffs know him - but the others, Eva Green and many of the kids I interviewed, not to mention Michael Pitt, who's from New Jersey, would say, 'Uh... weren't there riots then?' So the question I asked myself was how it was that their parents, who were probably on the barricades or, anyway, chanted slogans in the streets, hadn't told their children the story of the adventure of '68, of May '68. And then when, after the Venice Film Festival, the movie opened in Italy, there was a whole polemic around '68. People who had been kind of leaders in '68, would say, 'Oh, '68 was a failure' which is an injustice, I think, a horrible historical mistake. Why? Because it's a kind of revisionism, to say, 'Oh, '68 was shit, nothing, zero.'

Everything in our life today, the way we live our relationships, in particular how we relate to women's rights, was a consequence of '68, was imagined and, in a way, planned in '68. Yes, there wasn't the revolution that these kids - kids then and revisionists now - wanted, maybe thank God. But almost everything related to the way we now live, at least in Italy, where the movie has already opened and - thank God again - is very successful, derives from '68. I went to schools, I spoke to kids - 16, 17 and 18-year-olds - and, from what I understood, they were very excited about the fact that these three characters have a sense of the future, and I would tell them that, when we went to bed in '68, we believed we wouldn't wake up the next day, but in the future, and what the future meant was a place where you could actually change the world. That was the fundamental idea of '68 - to change the world. The world would change and we would all be part of that change.

Beauty and learning

DT: It's probably time for some questions from the audience, if you have any.

Audience member: Why did Mr Bertolucci cast such good-looking actors?

BB: Maybe I should do a remake with very ugly actors... [laughter] You know, I've always been an aesthete and I don't see why I suddenly shouldn't be one any more. [laughter and applause] But there was something about these three kids which I think goes beyond that. I think that the contrast between the naïveté of the young provincial American, his innocence at the beginning, and the sophistication of the two kids, brother and sister, was something that, for me, worked very well. Maybe, anyway, going for what is not beautiful represents another kind of aestheticism. Gilbert, what do you think?

GA: Well, I'd just like to add something. In fact, the characters are already beautiful in the novel, and apart from anything else that was something necessitated by the plot. These two French kids are very fascinated by a young American who, in his turn, becomes fascinated by them. And, after all, it tends to be that what first attracts you to a stranger is his or her physical beauty. It would be very strange for the two French kids to take an interest in Matthew if he were ugly or even just plain; it simply wouldn't be credible. So just in order to get the plot going, in a way they have to be beautiful. All that's rather prosaic but, you know, it's also part of what it means to invent a narrative.

BB: Can I ask you, why did you ask this question? [laughter and applause] I mean, it's interesting.

Audience member: Because you seem to be still trying to make a political statement. For me, personally, it seems as if you're trying to speak to, maybe, a young audience today. And, for me, the aesthetic argument doesn't seem to go with the political one... you did ask me...

BB: No, no, thank you for your answer. But, in fact, I think that the idea that politics has to forget beauty is really unacceptable. When you look back, for example, at what has come to us from the October Revolution, etc., etc., and especially if you go to '68 and look at the icons of that period, you'll see, really, that there was a great aesthetic care - I don't want to say, a major preoccupation, but... So I think that, today, hearing something like that reminds me of... a long time ago... ... a kind of Stalinism...

Audience member: Where does it come from, the idea of making films in which the place and even the time are so important for the story. As in Sheltering Sky [1990] and Little Buddha [1993]. In The Dreamers the era is 1968.

BB: You know, I went to the desert after I'd shot The Last Emperor [1987] in China, which was a film which made me realise that there were incredibly fascinating and enriching cultures I didn't know about. So I looked around and I went on to make two more movies, Sheltering Sky and Little Buddha, exploring different cultures, cultures I didn't know, the north-African culture, the Saharan culture, then Buddhism. That's what really took me there - a movie is a way to learn. And in China I learned that we are students all our life, and that, till the day we die, we have to learn, and so I go on learning, if I can. And that's why I move around so much.

DT: I was just going to add that in this case, though, you weren't actually in Paris in '68, you were filming in Rome. So this was a kind of imaginary space as well for you.

BB: But Gilbert was there... [laughter] I was in Rome shooting a movie which, I've seen, is being shown here, called Partner, which was the most openly Godardian of my movies. I disappeared into it, a bit like the way Tarantino disappears into the genre of the Hong Kong movie in Kill Bill.

Audience member: I remember the '70s more or less as a hangover of '68 - a very oppressed time, a very conservative time. And many things begin with a revolution. Would you be interested in making a movie about a scientist - someone like [Pietro Angelo] Secchi, who lived in Italy in the 19th century?

BB: What kind of scientist?

Audience member: He was interested in stellar spectra... There are many interesting stories. I remember a story of a man who married a woman only in order to build an observatory so that he could actually search out the stars for the rest of his life. So would it be interesting for you to a movie about a scientist?

BB: Are you proposing one to me?

Audience member: Many scientists did actually come from Italy.

BB: Do you have the script ready? I never thought of it because I can hardly handle a mobile phone, so my relationship with science is a bit timid.

New films and 'La Mer'

Audience member: What do you think of contemporary art films, and particularly Italian ones?

BB: I think that the cinema, in the last few years, has been through one of its cyclical mutations - like from silents to the talkies; from black- and-white to colour. And I realise that each time it's a shock. Now we are in the middle of another big mutation, that of digital technology - the fact that I already can no longer enjoy the smell of film when I'm cutting it because we use the AVID, we don't use real film any more. In fact, film is becoming this very precious thing that just sees reality and then disappears. So the change has been quite dramatic in the last, let's say, ten years.

Now, for example, I think that something is happening in Italy which is very new. Italian cinema has been agonising for a long time. I think that in the '80s, with the end of the commedia italiana, which was a very local phenomenon, sometimes good, and with the end of the spaghetti western, Italian cinema didn't know where it was going. Now, in the last few years, something has happened and there are a number of movies, I think, that are really very, very good. My feeling is that young Italian directors are finally freeing themselves from the influence of neo-realism and Italian comedy and doing something different. Because the heritage of neo-realism has been very strong, very oppressive, and many Italians film-makers felt obliged to confront reality in that one way - or else via Italian comedy. And their movies at this very moment are different. I can even name a few titles. There's one movie I love, it's called L'imbalsamatore [Matteo Garrone, 2002] - The Embalmer? Or Respiro [Emanuele Crialese, 2002], which was shown last year at the London Festival. Then there is this film of [Marco] Bellocchio - of course, he's not young, he's my age - which is very good, Buongiorno notte.

DT: Good Morning, Night.

Audience member: Ricordati di me [Gabriele Muccino, 2003] - Remember Me?

BB: There are also Italian movies I don't know. But I think it's a good moment. I could never say that in the past because I would have been lying. There was nothing - a desert - and there are now these flowers.

Audience member: Mr Bertolucci, thank you very much for your film. In this country we don't seem to be very good at revolutions, and I wonder if you think there is any prospect for a revolution in this country's cinema.

BB: I think that Hollywood has become in the last few years more and more present and heavy in this country, where the cinema is concerned. But I realise it's not only cinema. There is such a strong presence of the US here that I don't see how any revolution is possible - in cinema or in anything else. You are so invaded by Hollywood... [applause] It's sad.

Audience member: Is there any special significance to the fact that it's Charles Trenet's 'La Mer' that signals the split between brother and sister?

BB: It is obviously their song. Something that they listen to together, a bit snobbishly because 'La Mer' in '68... just as you had le cinéma de papa, well, it was la musique de papa. I mean, young people rejected Trenet, but some young people were snobs, like those twins, brother and sister, and they use it as their own personal flag, in a way. And obviously it's something they listen to together, and when Isabelle is in her room and she knows there's a girl in her brother's bedroom, and she hears him put on a record of 'La Mer', she loses her mind, she becomes hysterical. As for the reason for that particular song? Maybe because I like it. I used to listen to Trenet in those days, and maybe there is no other reason. In the original book it wasn't 'La Mer'...

GA: It was another Trenet song, 'Baisers volés'.

BB: The one that 'Baisers volés' comes from.

GA: Yes, it's called 'Qu'est-ce qui reste de nos amours'.

BB: 'Que reste-t-il'...

GA: 'Que reste-t-il de nos amours', which was in the original because, as I remember very well, when the Cinémathèque reopened -

BB: With Langlois...

GA: With Langlois, who'd been reinstated, because the demonstrations had been effective - we realised that going into the street could actually change something. Well, it happened that the very first screening held at the Cinémathèque was of Baisers volés, Truffaut's film [1968], and the very first shot of Baisers volés was of the Cinémathèque gates, chained, closed, and there was a brief title card, 'This film is dedicated to Henri Langlois', and we heard Charles Trenet's 'Que reste-t-il de nos amours', and it was an incredibly moving moment for all of us who had supported and defended Langlois, and perhaps Bernardo preferred -

BB: I didn't want to do a remake of Baisers volés...

Everybody has got a friend

DT: Okay, we have just time for about two more questions.

Audience member: The film's really a celebration of a classic period of cinephilia, and both of your lives were marked by that cinephilia. Do you think there is a future for it?

GA: Not the kind described in the film, for all sorts of reasons, but principally because there was an edge to that cinephilia. I remember a friend of mine, a regular at the Cinémathèque, whose dream, which he never thought would be realised, was to see Henry Hathaway's Peter Ibbetson [1935], with Gary Cooper, a film which had never come his way. And the Cinémathèque, one summer, screened Peter Ibbetson, and this friend of mine was in somewhere like Bolivia, and when he came back to Paris and heard that Peter Ibbetson had been screened in his absence, I thought he was going to kill himself [laughter]. All his friends had seen Peter Ibbetson and it had been his dream. Nowadays, if you miss a screening of Peter Ibbetson, you simply wait for the next one, or you buy the video or the DVD, or else it turns up on television. We had the sense in those days that there was only one way to see films, and if we missed a rare film, that was it, forget it. And that somehow intensified our passion for cinema, something that's impossible today.

BB: Everybody has got a friend - I had a friend. [laughter] He was a cinephile, and his obsession - he was French - was to mourir en projection - to die during a screening at the Cinémathèque Française. I myself almost once did - but during a shoot. There is a shot in Last Tango in Paris, in the Salle Wagram, which is this dance hall where they dance the tango. Maria [Schneider], the girl, was coming downstairs, running away from Brando and Brando was following her. And there was this big crane - the camera was on the crane - which was following all of the action, and it was an extremely heavy thing, a great big machine. And I had one leg outside and one leg inside the rail, in front, and I forgot what was about to happen... and somebody, I think a grip, took me like this... and I saw this train passing by. If he hadn't saved me, I don't think I would be here. But they could have written on my tombstone: 'Died, killed by a dolly'.

You know, film buffs are terrible people, which is why - for I think I was a film buff - why I started making movies. Because when you make movies, or maybe if you become a critic, you're no longer a real film buff. Because a film buff is somebody who is so pure that purity becomes the most important thing. When you make movies, you have to get down into the dirt and the mud and everything, and there's a kind of corruption, which is why I can describe cinephiles with love, because I'm no longer one of them.

DT: I'm afraid I think we're going to have to wrap it up, but before we do, a few plugs. The novel, formerly known as The Holy Innocents, now titled The Dreamers, comes out in February, the same time as the movie The Dreamers, 6 February. A documentary that I made behind the scenes of the film, called Cinema, Sex, Politics, should be showing on BBC4 around that same time, so if you want to know more about The Dreamers there are plenty of opportunities. Also, please tell everyone you know that the film will be opening in February.

We're going to end now with, as I said, a little treat for you. It's a 10-minute film that Bernardo made just prior to The Dreamers for the compilation film Ten Minutes Older The Cello. The Trumpet selection of these short films has already been shown; The Cello is coming up at the NFT in December. They're all 10-minute films on the subject of time, and perhaps, Bernardo, you could just say a few words about it because it does have a connection with Before the Revolution, one I discovered just the other day.

BB: A few years ago, these two English friends of mine - young people - came to see me and said, 'We want to make a film made with several episodes and we would like to have Godard, Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, Wim Wenders...' And I said, 'What's it about?' and they said, 'It's about time.' And so I immediately thought of a little Indian parable about time that is mentioned in the movie Before the Revolution, which was shown... today?

DT: Friday, and it will be shown again later in the season.

BB: And so I decided to film it. I haven't done many shorts in my life, but it's fun, to be able to shoot years and years of a person's life in 10 minutes. And it's in black-and-white... which makes it very '60s, so that it's really part of this event.

DT: And very cinephilic, to make a movie in black and white...

BB: I don't know, I wanted it to have the feeling of an Indian movie, because it's an Indian story, even if the film is set in Italy. It's called Histoire d'eaux, not 'O' as in the novel Histoire d'O, but 'eaux', as in water.

DT: Which becomes apparent when you see the film.

BB: Thank you very much.

DT: So please, you keep your seats, as we leave ours. Will you please thank Gilbert Adair and Bernardo Bertolucci.

[applause]

[film: 'Ten Minutes Older The Cello' (segment: Histoire d'eaux)]