« A film set firmly in the present, not a filmed pilgrimage… »
Interview with Nicolas Philibert conducted by Stephane Lemolleton - April 2007
Before you were hired to work on Moi, Pierre Rivière… what had your previous experience been?
My very first professional experience was as a trainee on Les Camisards, also directed by René Allio, in the summer of 1970. I was in my first year at university in Grenoble at the time. I was 19 and I dreamt of “being in movies” without really knowing in what capacity. In early July, I heard that a film was going to be shot in the Cévennes. With a friend, I hitchhiked down to Florac. Two days later, when we turned up at the production office, we were told that they were only taking trainees from among local people to avoid paying for hotel rooms. So we lied, said that we were locals and it worked! Over three months, I was, in turn, a messenger for the set crew, an assistant grip, an assistant prop man and an extra. Then I went back to Grenoble and returned to my studies but, two years later, I decided to move to Paris. René Allio - again - was preparing a new film, Rude journée pour la Reine, for which I was hired as an assistant set designer, in charge of props. I didn't know much about the job but I got by somehow. The following year, I worked with Alain Tanner, Claude Goretta, and then the experience of Moi, Pierre Rivière… came along.
Why was this film so important for you?
Firstly, I didn't have much experience as an assistant and, all of a sudden, I found myself entrusted with a huge responsibility: the screenplay indicated that it would be a complex shoot with a large number of characters, children, animals, numerous sets, costumes… and a very tight budget. And the decision to entrust the main roles, at least the roles of peasants - the murderer, his family, the neighbours, the witnesses - to local farmers and their families rather than to professional actors gave the whole undertaking a unique human dimension. We had to travel the countryside looking for our characters, overcome the scepticism with which they greeted the project, make it credible in their eyes and so enrol them in an adventure that they were not at all prepared for. With Gérard Mordillat - the other assistant director - I thus spent almost three months, going from farm to farm, from country fairs to union meetings to find the actors and to share our conviction with them. It was a fascinating experience but a difficult and uncomfortable one, especially when you realize that three weeks away from the planned shooting date, we still didn't know if the film would be made or not since money was so short. And then the shoot, after several delays, finally started and, in spite of the financial difficulties that weighed down on it until the end, this shared experience between film people, nearly all of them Parisians, and Normandy country folk was a very powerful one. The shooting conditions were tough, the weather unreliable, the days long and trying, but I think that everyone who participated in this adventure had the feeling that they were experiencing something exceptional. The film set itself apart from the usual representation of the rural world in the cinema that is often mocking or scornful. We were also a long way from any condescending approach. Allio was just as demanding with his country actors and had as much faith in their abilities as he was with the professional actors who rounded out the cast. As a result, in the group that we formed, we never had the feeling of a division between the film crew and the country people. We all had our own part to play to bring the same project to fruition. Later, looking back, I realized just how lucky I had been to take part in this exceptional experience, totally unique in French cinema. The film has stayed with me over the years. It has perhaps even irrigated my own work, like an underground « rivière » (river). Probably because fiction and documentary were so closely interlinked in it.
Over the years that followed, did you stay in touch with the actors of Allio's film?
One year after shooting Moi, Pierre Rivière... some of us went back to Normandy to present the film. But, after that, we lost touch and I didn't see them again, except for Claude Hébert, who played Pierre Rivière. He continued to work as an actor for a few years. He was living in Paris and I would often meet him at Allio's place. Then in the middle of the 1980s, Claude left Paris for good and I never saw him again either. Then, in the spring of 2000, before I started filming Etre et Avoir, I went back to Normandy where I saw Joseph and Roger. It was a friendly reunion and, in the back of my mind, I started thinking about a film with them all.
When did you decide to start work on this project and how did they react?
At the end of 2004, the Fémis (Cinema and Audiovisual Professional school) invited me to present a film of my choice to its students. I chose Rivière. None of them had seen it. Most of then hadn't even heard of Allio, less than ten years after his death. That made my blood run cold. After the screening, instead of having the usual debate, I read texts to them for an hour: notes made by Allio about his film, extracts from his “diaries”… They discovered a filmmaker, an unusual and fascinating body of work and they were stunned. I went home and I decided to make this film. For the last thirty years, I have kept a few photos and documents from « Rivière » : the shooting schedule, my copy of the screenplay… It all started from there. In early January, I hopped on a train to Caen, rented a car and started calling on everyone. It was very moving! The memories left by the experience were incredibly vibrant. Each participant had turned the page, undertaken all kinds of things, had lived happy times and less happy ones, but they all spoke about this experience with an intense feeling of gratitude. A few weeks later, when I first mentioned the idea of making a film with them, they had no better idea than I did what it would be like but they trusted me. They had followed my work, knew some of my films and had remained intensely loyal to Allio and his crew, recalling each member clearly.
When the project started to come together, what were the choices that guided your work?
From the very beginning, it was obvious that this would be a film narrated in the first person, with its roots in my own memories, and that I would intervene through a voice-over. At the same time, I wanted to make a film set firmly in the present, not a filmed pilgrimage. And finally, in relation to my previous films that nearly all focused on a single setting, I wanted a more fragmented and freer form this time in which it would be possible to slip from one register to another, at times from one period to another, with a as much fluidity as possible. I imagined that there would be a common core - Allio's film - giving rise to a multitude of characters, stories, settings, and sequences of varying nature: voice-over, interviews, documents, extracts, direct cinema sequences, landscapes… But everything was fairly vague and it wasn't until shooting and then editing that this tree-like structure asserted itself.
You often talk about your penchant for a portion of improvisation. How does that work in this film?
From that point of view, Back to Normandy follows my usual approach. The ideas camealong during filming and, apart from certain places like the prison, the courthouse or the Calvados archives were we could only film on specific dates, the shoot was mostly improvised, according to encounters and conversations. In general, I don't like to prepare things too much. If everything is mapped out ahead of time, you miss out on the essential. There has to be an element of the unknown. The fact of having to invent the film day after day, to seek it out until the very end, procures a dual feeling of freedom and fragility that stimulates me and drives me into a corner. During editing, it's the same. I had 60 hours of rushes, in other words virtually tens or hundreds of combinations. And yet, at the end of the day, there's only one film possible: the one you carry deep within you. However, I continually avoided the pitfall of making a film for film buffs or an audience already aware of the original story. It has to speak to everyone. If you haven't seen Allio's film or ever heard about the Rivière case, that doesn't matter. This story has an almost timeless dimension and could have taken place anywhere: a long time ago, somewhere in the country, a film was shot about a crime, with non-professional actors. Since then, life has gone on, but not exactly the same as before…
The film is constructed in such a way that we never know what the next shot will show…
That's a result of its fragmentary nature, the diversity of registers and the materials used. Since the film tells several stories in parallel, they echo each other, mingle and mutually enrich each other. The relationship between them is explicit at times and less obvious at others. From this point of view, my use of extracts from Moi, Pierre Rivière… is significant. They burst in when we least expect them since I never summon them up to illustrate an interview. Each time we switch from my footage to Allio's, the transition takes place on a sensory level: it occurs according to a fictional, almost dream-like logic, as if Pierre Rivière's appearances were there to irradiate the rest. As we progress through the film, we realize that it is like a layer cake made up of different superimposed strata, linked between each other. Deep down, I wanted to work on a sort of paradox: the evocation of Allio's shoot had to be central to my film but it could not be an end unto itself. It had to echo other questions. About the cinema, about our world, about our relationships with others, with our fathers…
This fragmentation allows you to pass from one theme to another as if the film were progressing through associations of ideas…
The film gradually leaves the straightjacket that a documentary is usually constrained in: its subject. It is marked out by encounters and sequences that lead us off in other directions… I'm thinking of Annie and Charles who talk about their daughter's illness; about Nicole, the former militant who had the bakery in Athis, and about her struggle since her accident to recover the power of speech; about Joseph, who still makes his own cider; about the workers at the Éclair labs; about the prison in Caen, where Pierre Rivière ended up hanging himself, etc. With such a multitude of elements, it's hard to hem in the film. Present and past, memory, madness, writing, speech, illness, lurking death, passing time, the law, transmission… The film concerns all those things and many others that are not cleaved together. As in real life, where the intense and the insignificant frequent each other at all times. But this is first and foremost a film that talks about the cinema, from the angle of desire, obstinacy and its capacity to build bridges and forge bonds. Most of the interviews evoke this collective dimension since the film returns to a shared experience of cinema. We realize that, for them too, the shooting of Allio's film was a decisive and even fundamental experience, just as it was for me. Both because it brought together people who wouldn't have met otherwise and also because it raised us up somehow.
Your voice-over narration describes the preparations for Allio's film at length but you say hardly anything about the shoot itself…
I felt that it was more interesting to talk about the problems that we had encountered and, beyond this example, of the obstinacy that all filmmakers have to show to reach their goals, whenever their projects display artistic ambition and stray from the beaten track. The gap between rich and poor films, that has continued to grow wider in recent years, already existed thirty years ago. I worked on four occasions with René Allio and I always saw him deploy incredible energy in order to make his films and pay off his debts. The general public usually only sees the glamorous side of the cinema, as if that's all there were to see! I wanted to lift a corner of the veil. The sequence shot at the Éclair labs also shows the other side of the story: the chemical industry, the violence of the market, the pension funds and these people who work for set hours, with breaks, like on a production line…
The final sequence remains very discreet. We don't learn anything about your father…
Michel Philibert, my father was a professor of philosophy and loved the cinema. Alongside his university lectures, he would give a weekly “public class in the cinematic art” in front of a crowded lecture hall in which he would screen and analyze films by Bergman, Dreyer, Antonioni, Bresson, etc. There's no need to tell you where my love of the cinema comes from! Michel Philibert, René Allio… Since we're dealing with the question of filiation here, I should add that the music used in the film is partly by a young French jazzman, Jean-Philippe Viret, and partly by André Veil, an industrialist from Lorraine and an amateur composer whom, as a child, I would listen to for hours in the evening as he composed at his piano. He was my maternal grandfather.