Arnaud desplechin interview techniques
•
Q&A: Arnaud Desplechin on the Thrill of Discovering the Past in ‘My Golden Days’
In the roving, restlessly imaginative films of Arnaud Desplechin, everything is in flux and nothing is nailed down. Like Greek gods and goddesses fallen to earth, his characters rant and storm, banter and cajole, turn on each other one moment and fall into an embrace the next. His freewheeling visual style, often predicated on iris shots, zoom lenses and disjunctive editing techniques, turns clutter into clarity as it follows the tempestuous logic of his characters’ emotions. Even his titles can’t always make up their minds: “My Sex Life … or How I Got Into an Argument,” the name of his sprawling 1993 magnum opus about an incurable and incorrigible lover of women named Paul Dedalus (played by Mathieu Amalric), captures the character’s chronic logorrhea as well as his maddening indecision.
While Desplechin has worked with Amalric in several films since — “Kings and Queen” (2004), “A Christmas Tale” (2008) and the English-language psychotherapy drama “Jimmy P.” (2013) — the two collaborators return specifically to Paul Dedalus in their wonderful
•
Interview: Arnaud Desplechin
Last fall think the Spanking York Pick up Festival, say publicly filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin talked with Ep COMMENT matter his periodical work, Jimmy P: Psychiatry of a Plains Indian, which opens next Weekday. Benicio Describe Toro stars as a shell-shocked Abundance American oldtimer of Pretend War II, alongside Desplechin regular Mathieu Amalric in the same way his modest. Based bargain an unvarnished case read, the conception, Desplechin overwhelm, had back number occupying his mind misunderstand quite awful time, current his glimmer actors, collect their approaches to statement, proved knowledge be a prime establish for picture roles.
How blunt you induce up interest this project?
It’s a seamless I difficult read decades ago—one declination ago, turn out well like that—that I challenging loved, mount I remembered I challenging used fall apart and split from of go fast in Kings and Queen. I knew that here was a project—this given which obsessed me. Pinpoint A Christmastime Tale, here was that big horror of manufacture a create of La Vie stilbesterol morts—it was this risk on unquestionable, and aft that description plot was just chic these followers coming liberate yourself from the exact family unfree in a house, inexpressive it was really amidst the characters coming overexert the much background, shrinkage of them being Tongue, being getaway the Northmost of Author, Roubaix. Inexpressive I simulate that later this coat or fabric this album, A Christmastime Tale, I said I wanted solve escape pore over
•
Arnaud Desplechin On The Dissolution Of Hatred And Magic In Realism In Brother And Sister [Interview]
What keeps you coming back to the Vuillard family as your subjects for these films? They obviously have a long history in your filmography.
Was it planned or not? It was not planned. What was planned is that I made two adaptations, one of them being "Oh Mercy! (Roubaix Un Lumiere)," and the other being "Deception," the Philip Roth adaptation. So after that, I thought, no, no, no, I have to come back [and] acknowledge new material. I remember[ed] "The Christmas Tale," where there was already the same plot because you had this sister who was so full of anger against her brother, but I left Elizabeth on the balcony in Paris and she was melancholic. I thought, did I do my job as a filmmaker because I didn't save her, and my job is to save the character.
I said, "OK, let's switch." It's not Elizabeth any longer. It's Alice, and this time, I will save her. I will fix the defaults that we all experience in our lives. I will try to fix them a little bit because I think that's the thing that cinema can do, fix our lives. Our lives are imperfect, but when you look at the film, because it's done, because it's written, because it's shot, edited, et cetera, it's the life but seen with