The discreet murderer of the bourgeoisie: an interview with Claude Chabrol

Rui Nogueira and Nicoletta Zalaffi: Can you talk about your beginnings as a critic, and how you came to be interested in films? 

Claude Chabrol: Oh, God! That’s all far away in the mists of time. My earliest memory of the cinema is Mervyn LeRoy’s Anthony Adverse [1936]. I don’t know if you recall it, but there is a fantastic detail in it: in the duel it is the old man who kills the young one. That had a tremendous effect on me. Then I was bowled over by Errol Flynn in Captain Blood [1935]; and as kids often do, I started to direct my friends: I was a real little Michael Curtiz. After that there was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs [1937]. And I was very struck by Mickey Rooney in Boys’ Town [1938] – the story of Father Flanagan. Oh, that really moved me. Ever since that film I’ve always loved hysterical actors.

But you weren’t intended to go into movies? 

At that time I wasn’t really intended for anything; I was only eight. But during the war, when I was in Creuse [in central France], between ten and 14, I established the ‘Cinéma de Sardantais’ (Sardan is where I later shot Le Beau Serge [1958]), along with another boy who was also evacuated from Paris. With a capital of 75,000 old francs which we’d collected from here and there, we bought a 16mm projector. Our shows took place in a barn, using rented films. Programme director, exhibitor and projectionist: those were my first jobs.

We were obliged to show a certain quota of German films because of some agreement with Goering or Goebbels, but to annoy the Germans we cheated the publicity, just like real exhibitors. Since no one in that part of the country knew anything about the cinema, we made them think that we were showing American films, and would advertise, for instance, “Heinrich George in an American super-production”. After the war I came back to Paris and no longer worked with movies. But I adored cinema; so I went to the Lycée Montaigne, where [the Cinémathèque française head Henri] Langlois was giving his first shows, and then to the cinémathèque in the Avenue de Messine. I also went to the Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin, which was where I got to know [Eric] Rohmer, Jean-Luc [Godard] and then [François] Truffaut.

The legend is that your meeting with the Cahiers du Cinéma group took place at the Studio Montparnasse after the screening of a Hitchcock film; and that your great knowledge of the work and world of Hitchcock earned you a place with the magazine. 

No: that’s a total myth. I was doing my secondary and advanced studies when the others were still in the first grade. I had married well – at that time I had a very rich wife. I was a gigolo; and had to find some kind of work. Coming back after my military service – I had managed to get myself posted as a projectionist in Germany – I met up with my friends again, and they told me I ought to write things for Cahiers. The first piece I wrote was about Singin’ in the Rain [1951]. It was only after the special Hitchcock number that the whole great ‘Hitchcock-metaphysic’ myth started.

And then you did the book on Hitchcock, with Rohmer?

Rohmer did most of it. I did the English period; also Notorious [1946], Stage Fright [1949]… and Rebecca [1940], I think.

Hitchcock apart, your heroes at this time were Wilder and Lang?

I had a passion for Lang before Hitchcock. The Testament of Dr. Mabuse [1933] made a stunning impression on me. Subsequently, as Hitchcock’s films accumulated while Lang was directing less, my affections transferred themselves to Hitchcock. But without Lang, Hitchcock would not have existed.

Staircases play a great part in your films, as they do in William Wyler’s. 

Yes, that’s true: there are a lot of staircases in my films. Why? First because I think staircases are beautiful; and then, as it happens, I have almost always lived with staircases. Before the war my parents had a duplex, so we had a staircase inside the flat; during the war I was stuck in a house with a staircase… So many things can happen on staircases. They are like a spinal column.

And your experience as a projectionist?

Yes, I know: I put a lot of projections in my films, but it’s not at all with an idea of having films within films. Perhaps I simply like projectors.

Were you a good projectionist?

Better than the projectionists around here, I have to admit, because down there the audience yelled when it was out of focus. Perhaps nowadays audiences don’t know when it’s deliberate or not, because of the ‘new look’. If someone says, “Here – it’s all out of focus,” you reply: “Oh no: the idea is to isolate that leaf down there.” Then people exclaim: “Ah! It’s intentional!” There is even a film which stays very hazy quite intentionally from beginning to end: Elio Petri’s A Quiet Place in the Country [1968].

Does the fact that you have acted yourself help when you direct actors?

A little; but indirectly. I can assess the feeling which it is possible to experience, first in rehearsal and afterwards in shooting. And I have learned to recognise the moment when you have to stop an actor rehearsing and to start shooting a scene.

I’m told that you are a big ham and always try to steal scenes.

Yes. I know who told you that. Stéph [Chabrol’s then wife Stéphane Audran]. It’s true. We played together and I quite outshone her in my sketch in Paris vu par… [1965]. In La Muette [Chabrol’s contribution to that portmanteau film] you only notice me, and I am very much better. I do more than she does as well. I do marvels in 15 minutes…

How did you feel about acting in front of the camera a scene of having a meal together, as in real life?

But we’ve never had that kind of row, ourselves! On the contrary, I remember Barbet Schroeder came to call on us one morning and said he wanted some little background noises. Stéphane and I were in bed, having breakfast, and we were just like a couple of dead fish in front of the microphone. It was very odd. We had a lot of fun over that.

Do you think that Les Biches [1968] marks a turning point in your career?

Yes, in that it was the first film which I made exactly as I wished. Although the first film I made with [producer André] Génovès was a frightful experience – the thing I made in Greece, The Road to Corinth [1967] – he kept to my making Les Biches. I was able to have the actors I wanted, and I made it just the way I wanted. Since the film did well, Génovès said to me, “We may as well do a third…” and we’ve just kept on.

To what extent were you involved in Project No. 4 of the Estates General of French Cinema [a consultative assembly plan to establish films and TV as public services independent of state control]? In La Femme infidèle [1969] you refer to this period of May-June 1968 by showing an inscription, “Vive le projet IV”, scrawled in red paint on the roof of a car parked outside the King Club. 

I frankly believed in the project at that time. No, I didn’t really believe in it, but I told myself, “After all, you never know; perhaps we’ll get rid of these bastards and it will become possible to organise things seriously. So why not look at things in a healthy way and in a completely new light? It doesn’t matter if it is utopian.” So we devised a scheme for cinema exhibition which was really irreproachable. It could be put into operation tomorrow. It is childishly simple. You replace the road tax by a cinema tax; and there you are. The project did not get a majority vote – only 100 votes – but if the Estates General had lasted a month longer it would have been carried, because people would have realised that it was the only one that made sense.

We reckoned that there was only one possible drawback: the beggars. They might have come to take up a cinema seat simply to have somewhere to sit and snooze.

Have you followed the CNP [the National Popular Cinema film society] experiment?

A bit, at the start, but it was clobbered before it began. The moment there is a programme, a thing has no more interest. The cinema ought to be like a public urinal or a café, with free admission. And exhibition ought to be automatic, rather like television. That would do away with critical selection, which is always misleading, since critics inevitably go wrong all the time… So good films would get as much chance of recognition as bad ones.

What is your current position in relationship to the nouvelle vague?

The nouvelle vague has become a rather dirty word these days. First of all, what is the New Wave? The new wave of what?

I’m talking about the group which was built up around Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, you… 

Each has evolved in his own particular direction. Jean-Luc, who is a hardened celibate and suicide, commits his suicide in different countries because he loves to make film after film and didacticism after didacticism. That is fine, that’s what he wants. François wants to stop now for a couple of years because he has just killed off [his cinema alter ego] Antoine Doinel. That’s fine too… I don’t say he’s right to stop, but… Rohmer, on the other hand, never wanted to have an important position in the French cinema. He just wanted to make his moral tales, which is what he did.

People are always eating in your films. Do you know [Italian filmmaker] Marco Ferreri who also likes gastronomy? 

He’s a great chef, Marco.

Do you agree with him that gastronomy is really a neurosis for neurotics, allowing an escape from reality?

Gastronomy? What a funny idea! What a weird argument! I’ve just one question: what would Marco do if he didn’t eat? Would he or would he not escape reality? He would starve to death. He would die. So he would escape reality promptly and without delay. Quite the contrary, gastronomy is one of those rare things which are not neurotic. Marco loves eating. I don’t know if he likes it in a neurotic fashion, but faced with a good cassoulet, he’s never given me the impression of a neurotic.

Why, contrary to your usual habits, do you make everyone eat so stingily in La Rupture [1970]?

You are quite right, they don’t ‘eat’ in La Rupture. It’s awful. For me that contributes to the uneasiness of the atmosphere. But in my next film, Ten Days’ Wonder [1971], there are going to be some very fine and elegant meals. I ought to say that La Rupture is a straightforward film which does not aim at any reverse twist in the ending. The good stay good. The villain stays bad. The only thing that has a twist is the conspiracy, which turns back on the one who plans it rather than on the victim. But these are things which happen, aren’t they? I wanted to make a melodrama, a real melodrama. I wanted to stop people saying: “The film reveals melodramatic tendencies.” If there are tendencies, you might as well make a melodrama, which is to say, a tearjerking drama with music. And the music covers the words… Then the people who don’t like melodrama are going to say, “It’s grandiloquent.” Well, it’s not grandiloquent. It’s melodramatic.

You always like to follow things through to their conclusions.

Always. I like nuances, but underneath. I would be awfully shocked to read, for instance: “The film ends happily with these images.” I always go a bit beyond the point where it ‘ends happily’.

There is no filmmaker more fervently anti-Nazi than Fritz Lang. Yet he was fascinated by Nazism. Well, I find that in a certain way you are fascinated by creeps. 

Yes; because I am so strongly anti-creep. Something which always annoys me in films is when supposedly intelligent people are made to act in a thoroughly stupid way just for the convenience of the scenario. You must know whether the character is stupid or intelligent, and make him act accordingly. My next film – supposing that I find Orson Welles [who starred in Ten Days’ Wonder] again – will be interesting from this point of view, although it is not based on stupidity but on intelligence. The trap is just the same.

There is another of your films which I like very much, exactly because of the treatment of creeps: Line of Demarcation [1966]. I know you don’t like it at all, but… 

Actually I like it more and more. I’ll explain. I hated it for a long time because it really made me suffer physically to see all those creeps – even though I ate very well, and it was a nice place. They really were an absolutely extraordinary bunch of characters, but it took place in a context in which I would rather not have shown their awfulness. 

I have a great respect for the Resistance of those [WWII] times, but I only had two solutions for the treatment of the scenario by Colonel Rémy: either to send it up completely – which wasn’t impossible – or to treat it absolutely seriously, saying: “OK. Here’s a bunch of characters. Let’s enjoy it!” – and it was real deadpan stuff. There’s not a second of humour in Line of Demarcation, and at the same time there’s not a second which is not a second of humour, because it is a film which is entirely serious and totally stupid. You know that the old French Resistance fighters – the film was promoted by Rhine and Danube, a veterans’ association – came to all the showings with their berets, their medals and their flags, and stood up and joined in when ‘La Marseillaise’ came on at the end of the film? They were thrilled. And Colonel Rémy cried. “Oh, how beautiful it is! How true it is! This is really France!” Much of the Resistance was lunatic romanticism. In those times they were absolutely heedless. Networks were dismantled as fast as they were built up. Colonel Rémy was… It was Groucho meets the Gestapo. He is very, very nice, but an old reactionary.

Why did so many of the Resistance people gravitate towards the right? 

It comes from the fact that they were really nationalists. They didn’t resist for the sake of their liberty, so much as against the occupation of French soil.

Before Les Biches, if you had asked anyone which of your films he preferred he would probably have singled out Les Bonnes Femmes [1960]. But the film did not do very well. 

Yes. Not many people have seen it… There’s no mystery about it, it’s the first film over which I was really roughly handled. Recently Janine Bazin very much wanted me to do a broadcast in the series Cinéastes de notre temps [1964-72]: and then, it’s stupid, but I simply couldn’t face it. She had sent me some contemporary reviews of Les Bonnes Femmes. To my astonishment most of them said that it was an odious film. Lots of left-wingers found it simply fascist. It was a film which insulted the working class, and I don’t know what else.

Some critics decided also that in this picture I was trying to be a Fellini. There they were as wrong as they could be. While I love Fellini, one of the films I detest above all others in the world is Nights of Cabiria [1957]. It seems to me a completely untruthful film. The basic idea of Les Bonnes Femmes is exactly the same as that of Nights of Cabiria, but it is treated in a completely contrary way. By definition, there is no film further from Fellini than Les Bonnes Femmes. Well, there are critics who have found it ‘Fellinian’, which is to say that one has found oneself face to face with total, astonishing incomprehension.

At a certain point, Cahiers du Cinéma, in which you had made your start as a critic, dropped you… to take you up again… and now again drop you.

It doesn’t worry me, because in any case you never know these days if Cahiers likes you or not – it seems to me to have become quite impossible to understand what they think or what they write. They’ve succeeded in abandoning a bourgeois way of writing, but I think they have not yet achieved a proletarian style in compensation…

In your films you like to trace the relations between appearance and reality.

Yes: as Claudel says, “The worst is not always certain, and things which appear to be are not always true… You have at one and the same time to show things as they appear, and then as they are. Appearances are; and the inverse must also be true.

There are often quotations in your films: T.S. Eliot in La Femme infidèle, Balzac in Le Boucher [1970], Racine in La Rupture… 

I’ll be truthful. It’s to give them substance. I need a degree of critical support for my films to succeed: without that they can fall flat on their faces. So, what do you have to do? You have to help the critics over their notices, right? So, I give them a hand. “Try with Eliot and see if you find me there.” Or “How do you fancy Racine?” I give them some little things to grasp at. In Le Boucher I stuck Balzac there in the middle, and they threw themselves on it like poverty upon the world. It’s good not to leave them staring at a blank sheet of paper, not knowing how to begin… “This film is definitely Balzacian,” and there you are; they’re off. After that they can go on to say whatever they want.

What is a character for you? At what point does a character begin to interest you?

It isn’t the character which interests me at the start – a character you can always fabricate. It’s a sort of… not the plot… What interests me is to tease the audience along, to set it chasing off in one direction, and then to turn things inside out. 

Throughout your career you’ve shown noticeable loyalty to your collaborators, whether producer, cameraman, editor – to say nothing of the actress.

That isn’t loyalty. It’s selfishness. I can’t conceive changing cameramen and editors from film to film. It’s hard enough to make yourself understood without having to start again from scratch on every picture. If you take the same people each time, they know what you want, and they are able to make much more of a contribution to the film. With the producer, it’s even more a matter of selfishness. He leaves me alone. It’s marvellous.

And how do you work with [the cinematographer] Jean Rabier? Do you have much discussion before shooting?

Not any more. Now, he reads the script, then he finds out what he wants to know. I give him points of reference to American cameramen: “Wong Howe this bit.” “Fine.” “Ernest Laszlo.” “OK.” It’s exceedingly practical.

It may seem paradoxical, but your films do seem to betray a respect for the family unit. 

Ah! I like the family very much. I think it’s a much misunderstood thing; very beautiful, and very delicate, like all beautiful things. So, I am for it. For! The bourgeois family is a farce, you realise? It doesn’t exist. But a real family, that is something wonderful.

Starting from the sketch of La Muette it would be possible to imagine the following. The mother does not die when she falls down the stairs. The little boy grows up, becomes the character played by Jean-Claude Drouot in La Rupture, and kills his mother, by making her fall downstairs. The circle is completed. 

Absolutely. It’s the same world, no shadow of a doubt about it. There is a direct connection of social milieu between La Muette and La Rupture.

In La Femme infidèle, it is only through a lie that the husband and wife can find each other again…

Yes. You talk about appearances. They break at a given moment, and then each one goes half of the way towards rediscovering the other. Whereas the characters in La Rupture are just caricatures of families. They are all prison warders, vampires…

Why do you never give a film a really conclusive ending?

Simply because it’s never completely finished. You begin at some point, and so you have to stop at some point.

You begin La Rupture with a hospital sequence, which could make one think back to the last scenes of Le Boucher.

But I only noticed that afterwards. What is terrifying is that my next film will begin with spirits, like a reminder of La Rupture, yet it really is pure chance.

Why are all your heroines called Hélène?

It’s a name which goes quite well in most countries and is familiar to most people; then it’s a name I like; and moreover it comes from mythology… And finally I tend to keep to the same names to make things easier. There’s not only a Hélène in my films. There’s always a Paul and a Charles as well… And Charles will never kill Paul. That is a basic postulate, and it really started with Les Cousins [1959]. One of the cousins was called Charles and the other Paul, and they were two completely contrasting characters. Now when I return to this duality of characters, I tell myself that it is unthinkable, given that I started off with a Charles who could not possibly kill a Paul, not to continue in this same way. One may do away with the other, but you’ll never see a Charles kill a Paul. Never.

What importance do you attach to editing?

Editing, in general, is the assembly of the watch – as far as I’m concerned, at least. There’s a chap who puts the watch together. If he doesn’t put it together well, the watch won’t go. And if it comes into his head to change the positioning of the pans, it’s quite certain that the watch won’t go at all. I don’t think that it is possible to retrieve films in the editing. And I shoot very little footage, so there are not many alternative solutions. In fact there is only one way.

American film producer Hal Wallis told me that, for him, a film cut in the editing is a mutilated film. Do you agree?

Yes, but I also agree with Samuel Goldwyn, who said that once a scene is shot it always figures in the film, even if it is later cut out in the editing. That’s a very interesting theory. Anyway, though I don’t much like the second solution, it is as true as the first one.

What stage have you reached with your current project, Ten Days’ Wonder?

I still have to hear from Orson, which is not easy since he only communicates by cable. Things were going all right, but we have had no reply from him for a week. We don’t even know where he is any more. The project is still on, but I think we will probably have to delay the shooting. I’ve already cast Orson and Catherine Deneuve. I wanted Tom Courtenay as well, but he is acting in the theatre. The English are always acting in the theatre. They’re always busy playing Shakespeare, which leaves me busy trying to find actors who are free.

I’ve left it all very late really; but I went to sleep on it a bit because I was thinking about it. I am rather at the mercy of time, but not of money. The film is going to be expensive, but André Génovès and I have managed to set it up ourselves. There are no big American companies to come along and recut it or anything like that. We’re completely free.

Your films tell stories that are very easy to follow. Should we deduce a reaction against the rather ‘elusive’ manner of a certain type of new filmmaker?

I don’t much care for the ‘new look’, the ‘focusers’, the focusing in the course of a shot, the mistiness. It must come from a great failure in the sense of composition. When you have two people in a room, and one of them has to leave on tiptoe, morally on tiptoe, you have to know how to shoot it. There’s another solution: to get the camera behind a vase of flowers, and focus on the vase… I like sharp, clear films. And understandable stories. There are films of which you might say: “This shouldn’t be shown to a dog.” The very least you can do is to try to be simple when you want to say complicated things. And you should never complicate something simple.