We often talk about Balzac with Jacques,
and it's a permanent feature of his...
...of his world.
I remember very well shooting La Bande des Quatre,
the scene where Benoit Regent is talking about
dealing in stolen paintings,
it's one of the rare scenes that Jacques insisted on rewriting himself.
He thought it was lacking in detail, it wasn't rich enough.
He put in some of his own dialogue...
- And he said as a joke... - That's right, then he said
the next film we'll make...
it will be the Unknown Masterpiece
and so, if nobody sees it, it will really be the unknown masterpiece.
It was a joke then and he ended up taking it seriously.
Maybe it wasn't just a joke.
Did he say that during the making of La Bande des Quatre?
Yes, he did.
Well, it takes Jacques some time before...
He doesn't start anything new before finishing a film...
Some filmmakers can have several ongoing projects
in the developing stage while shooting another film,
but it's not at all how Jacques Rivette works.
It all started after finishing La Bande des Quatre, that was shot in winter in Paris
he wanted to make a film... Even though The Unknown Masterpiece by Balzac
takes place in winter and in Paris...
Quai des Grands Augustins.
Yes... He wanted to make a sunny film, set preferably in the south of France
and about painting, for a change...
...The Beautiful Troublemaker.
That title is not accepted in every edition of the novella
but it's the title of the painting
in "The Unknown Masterpiece" by Balzac.
And here it became something else.
So we drew from Henry James, "The Figure in The Carpet"
and from all sorts of other sources
to...
I had written a draft ostensibly to secure funding in advance of box office takings
jotting down all the...
all sorts of different ideas about modern art, about artworks in general.
It was almost an attempt to... No script as usual.
It was a definite attempt.
Our main challenge,
the result of which wasn't totally effective
from a screenwriter's point of view,
was to give a specific meaning, different from Balzac's,
to the painting itself, La Belle Noiseuse.
We interwove the memories of our individual literary experiences...
- There was the... - It became something...
it became a Jamesian principle.
Yes, we drew a lot from James
and in particular from a novella called The Liar, I think.
It's about a painter
who decides to paint the portrait of a liar
whom he met at a dinner in town.
So he did and the wife of this liar bursts into tears at the sight of the portrait.
She discovers something that...
Whereas the liar himself can't see anything.
As opposed to the subject of the painting in our film...
who peers into the depths of her soul.
This is what I mean, different reading of different texts,
mythical texts like The Oval Portrait by Edgar Poe,
where the painter takes on the life of his model in the painting
thus taking the life of the model in reality
And so on.
All sorts of things which are hard to represent and so made it impossible, for us
to show the painting.
The film size was 1.33
which is very rare for the films of Jacques Rivette
who usually uses 1.85 but because of the many vertical shots of the paintings
we had to consider that space,
that picture space as opposed to...
1.33 is a wonderful size.
- Unfortunately... - Nobody shows films in that size.
- It's not used in projection anymore. - There is no adjustable matte.
A film shot in 1.33 is mutilated on screen.
At the top and at the bottom
which means that the DP-and that's what Lubtchansky certainly did-
that he must work with both sizes 1.33 and 1.66 in mind.
He makes sure that the film can be shown in 1.66.
Because that is the standard size everywhere now.
Even if old-fashioned cinemas that don't exist anymore should show it in 1.33.
We had characters that could be transposed to the present day very easily,
the great painter and the young one, we still have those today.
The art dealer.
We have even more of them today.
Porbus. At the time, in the novella by Balzac
Porbus is another painter.
- But here, he's an art dealer. - We made him an art dealer.
There would have been too many painters.
And then the young painter's mistress
who becomes, as in the novella, the old painter's model
which will affect
the relationship between the young man and his girlfriend.
So we kept that original story arc.
For the rest, we just did as we pleased, in some ways.
Or rather, as we as
The thing that wasn't in the novella
but was very important in the story of La Belle Noiseuse
was the relationship between Frenhofer and his wife, played by Jane Birkin.
And in the short version of the film called Divertimento,
it almost becomes the main plot-line of the film.
The reason why we wrote it that way
is because we didn't want to make Frenhofer an old hermit.
We wanted him to have a normal...
a normal family life, as it were... at any rate, a wife.
Jacques had been wanting to work again with Jane Birkin since...
L'Amour par Terre.
As it happens, it hadn't been a very happy experience, for Jane.
It had been quite hard and quite painful, for her
to submit to his directing approach...
to learn her lines at the last minute, and with me being a bit inexperienced,
I used to give her pages of dialogue, without any qualms, at the last minute.
Even so, she agreed to do the film
and it was her idea, for instance here...
We offered her the opportunity to develop her character a bit
...and it was her idea to make Madam Frenhofer an amateur taxidermist.
I think she used to do it a bit herself or at least, liked the idea of it.
The way Jacques Rivette includes the actors
in the development of the script
can be very nice in a way, but also quite worrying, for the actors
because sometimes they don't like to be...
An actor in principle is someone
whose job is to give life to someone else's words.
So if you say to the actor "you could also bet he writer"
it changes the game a little bit.
And I think that...
the anxiety that comes from it
I think Emmanuelle did feel it quite strongly.
She was very enthusiastic about the whole film, I think
but at the same time a bit scared, which is normal.
But she is like the character, she has the will of the character.
In life she's someone who...
She went through the same process as her character, meaning that...
A determination to see things through...
She has a determination to see things through
as well as remain detached.
It's a sort of pride...
She took a huge risk with this film.
It's a bit like the rehearsal, for La Bande des Quatre, these posing sessions.
Yes, it's what we could call raw filmmaking.
It's as though the fiction... Because it is essentially fiction...
...but at the same time it's something that looks very real
because what's happening here is anti-narrative or counter-narrative.
- It's almost like a documentary. - Well, yes and no because it's acted out.
The posing sessions, for instance are not improvised at all.
They are dramatized and...
Everything the characters say has been written, nothing is improvised
so we cannot say that...
these are not documentaries inter-cut with fiction
to reinforce it in a way...
it's not even improvised like in L'Amour Fou
where in almost every scene
the dialogue was improvised from a basic framework.
What happens here is that it's in real time.
Whereas in the narrative,
we have the time of the story which is not real time.
It's a fictitious and contracted narrative.
- In the posing scenes... - It's blocks of time.
Blocks of real time.
And this gives the film this weight...
this weight of "presence" or...
this feeling of reality which is very characteristic of Rivette's films.
Frenhofer's hesitations, for instance,
when he has Marianne, played by Emmanuelle Béart,
pose, for him, for the first time
when he moves a stool or when he...
until it becomes almost funny.
A sort of frenzy within the moment.
It's all real time.
As opposed to when Marianne comes to see him and says
"I'd like to pose after all" or "I don't want to pose"
because then it's a scene
in the filmmaking or theatrical sense of the word.
That's also why Jacques films very wide continuous shots
to make the audience feel the weight of real time,
the intensity of real time,
which exists to a lesser extent when a scene is cut.
This was a way to speed things up a little bit
because the film looked like it could be very long.
Porbus fainting fit added a little rhythm to the film
at a time when it was needed.
So what happened is that...
the day we gave the scene to Jacques, I remember,
we used to do it at dinnertime
Of course when a character has to faint
the first question is how are you going to stage it?
During dinner someone just collapses on the table.
And Jacques said, OK, we'll shoot the scene like this.
So in the scene we have Porbus collapsing at the table
as suddenly as the young person dining with us
- I can't remember who it was -
collapsed on the table.
It was a just coincidence because she hadn't read it.
She wasn't some kind of copycat!
The scene was only given to Jacques, nobody else was allowed to read it
so it was just a coincidence.
And it's the kind of thing that Jacques loves
because it justifies in a way
a film, a script or something that's written.
It's one of the shortest scenes we wrote, for the film.
The scene also made him realise that he had left his glasses in his workshop
and this way, we learned that he had seen something
There they are.
We can go back to the ladies now.
Wait...
When you shoot a film on location as opposed to in the studio
you have to find the right location
but the houses in Jacques' films
are always chosen, for the way in which
they will exert a strong influence on the screenplay.
It has to be love at first sight
between the location and Jacques.
The houses used in Jacques' films are found during location-hunting...
They are all existing houses
real houses, with a history that the director makes use of, in a certain sense.
They are houses with a real existence.
Then they are transformed, for the film.
They become everybody's childhood houses.
They become a symbol...
That's right but at the same time Jacques couldn't film in...
- He has to choose the house. - Absolutely.
Scouting, for location is a very important process
because the film will depend entirely on the location that has been chosen.
That's why Lydie Mahias is very important to Jacques
because she wasn't only his continuity girl
she also played an important part in the scouting process.
She would drive, for miles and miles
- To find the perfect location... - And she knew what...
She had a feeling, for...
The house in La Bande des Quatre, for instance was found very late in the process
after Jacques had visited many of them
that weren't right, for him. He found them either too terrifying
or too mediocre, and so on...
And it's the same process for each of his films.
That doesn't mean that the production designer has nothing to do
quite the contrary.
However a house, even an empty house has or hasn't a soul of it's own.
Spaces, walls, hallways
connecting corridors, openings, all these are...
These are places that are going to be inhabited by the story.
The workshop is like the library in Va Savoir?
It was entirely built.
Yes it was entirely rebuilt inside the big house.
Sometimes it is the set which develops the story
and sometimes it's the people.
Here it was the girl and her cat.
Originally that character was more or less non-existent,
originally she was nothing more than a silhouette and then...
- But she was so sweet that... - Exactly.
That's one of the great things, to start shooting a film
when you don't have a script all tied-up...
it makes it easier to add to the film
depending on the people you meet while shooting.
- No. - It's the fake ending of the film.
- The painting is a fake. - The real end is really about...
what will happen to both couples.
One of them is destroyed.
Marianne leaves Nicolas.
We assume that the painting revealed something to her
something about the fleeting nature of their relationship.
But it remains a bit of an enigma.
It's the painting that destroyed their relationship.
It shows that it wasn't very strong. It's more what happened.
Their relationship is falling apart as the painting is being painted.
She becomes someone else...
...by posing.
This is another interpretation of Balzac's novella.
The fact that she posed, for Frenhofer
encouraged by the young Poussin
introduced a feeling of hatred between his mistress and the young painter...
...Nicolas Poussin, the main character of The Unknown Masterpiece.
The young bashful hero in front of his master..
That's also what the film is about.
Frenhofer and his wife.
As a couple, they have a long history behind them
and we assume they have been through a lot and are left with scars.
They have been scarred and also...
he started the painting with his wife posing.
Yes. That's another story.
They are a couple who have been destroyed.
They have been crushed but at the same time, they keep going.
It's beautiful.
Are you talking about the painting?
Yes, I am.
I'm talking about the real painting.
And also...
about what you did.
I was hoping to surprise you.
You'll always surprise me.
Always.