The Kanbar Award for excellence in screenwriting acknowledges the crucial role that strong screenwriting plays in the creation of great films. Graham Leggat talks about Jean-Claude Carrière. LISTEN
Going Beyond the Human Condition
By Judy Stone
In 1986, Jean-Claude Carrière told me that he and Luis Buñuel, both Catholic-educated, never rebelled against the church as such. "What we didn't like was the intrusion of the missionary spirit into politics, somebody who is going to teach where the truth is. We refused this not only from a Catholic point of view, but from the communist."
Remember those words, because Carrière's latest script, Goya's Ghosts, may well be a blistering look at the Inquisition. "It's not about Goya," Carrière emphasized in a recent phone conversation. The artist is only one of three or four characters, the star being a manipulative monk (Javier Bardem) who frames Goya's teenage muse (Natalie Portman). And the director is Milos Forman, no stranger to the "truth" once espoused in his homeland of Czechoslovakia.
It's hard to name a famous director Carrière hasn't worked with: Peter Brook, The Mahabharata (1989); Jean-Luc Godard, Every Man for Himself (1980); Luis Buñuel, six films including Belle de Jour (1967), and a book, My Last Sigh; Volker Schlöndorff, The Tin Drum (1979); Andrzej Wajda, Danton (1983); Philip Kaufman, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988). And the list goes on. Kaufman says, "Unlike many other screenwriters, Jean-Claude is very collaborative, working very closely with the director." "I just love working with him," says Forman, cowriter on Goya's Ghosts, scheduled for fall release.
So who are Carrière's ghosts? "They are the big painters and writers of the turn of the 20th century from 1880 to 1920. My house was one of the centers of Paris life. Toulouse-Lautrec used to paint there. The writers came to gamble or visit some of the girls working on another floor. Marcel Proust wrote Le Circle Masse, naming the street." The brothel closed in 1931.
Inside the elegant white house in the Pigalle quarter, there are intriguing reflections of Carrière's diverse interests. The walls are covered with a collection of Mexican masks, a large Japanese hanging of a sumo wrestler ("my bodyguard"), a mask of Frankenstein's monster ("one of my godfathers!"), Gunther Grass's sketch from his novel The Tin Drum, portraits of French surrealist writer and critic André Breton and an inscribed Modigliani pencil sketch of the poet Apollinaire ("my most treasured piece"). A wonderful, surrealistic painting of Buñuel carrying a cross with a venomous-looking beetle in the foreground and a pale blue stingray in the background is the work of Carrière's late wife, Nicole Carrière. He has a 43-year-old daughter and a three-year-old daughter by Nahal, his Iranian wife, a PhD in Chinese studies. And cats, there are always cats roaming around. The Siamese who bore 42 offspring is now dead. She had an elegant Sanskrit name, suggesting "the flaming love we need in order to go beyond the human condition."
It's a mystery how Carrière-courteous, engaging and erudite-managed for ten years to juggle all his commitments and function as founder and president of La Fondation Européene pour les Métiers d'Images et de Son, a film school that offered students an unusual mix of teachers: filmmakers, surgeons, astronomers, physicists, even rare-book dealers. That's a long journey from his birth in 1931 in the south of France to "rather poor, simple family farmers" who had lived for centuries in the same place. "We didn't even know the people from the next village. No one was really rich or really poor. I worked with my father producing wine, cherries and chestnuts. Until World War II, I was completely a country boy."
At nine, Carrière won a scholarship to a Catholic school in the region, later in Paris. By age 12, he had written a play based on a classical tragedy and also illustrated a novel. "Paris was like diving into another planet," he recalled in an earlier interview (published in Judy Stone's Eye on the World: Conversations with International Filmmakers). "Liberated Paris was like a bowl of boiling water." To earn money while studying for his doctorate in history and geography, he worked as a newspaper cartoonist and wrote cheap horror books under a pen name. His favorite "hero" was Frankenstein: "the monster, not the doctor."
While writing novelizations of productions by Jacques Tati, Carrière was introduced to Tati's film editor, who taught him about cinema in the editing room. "It was probably the best way to get into the film world," Carrière noted.
As for his two "masters," Buñuel and Brook, Carrière enjoys citing their differences. "Buñuel was like an enormous block of Spanish granite. He was a universe by itself." On the other hand, Brook is "like a brook, clear water jumping joyfully from granite to a dark forest. He's like an explorer who goes to many different unknown countries."
But to talk about the past, Carrière says, "It's something like the Mahabharata, one story leads to another. It takes such a long time."
Judy Stone will be signing copies of her new book Not Quite a Memoir:
Of Films, Books, the World at the Festival.
Jean-Claude Carrière
Selected Filmography
Goya's Ghosts 2006
Birth 2004
Chinese Box 1997
The Ogre 1996
The Horseman on the Roof 1995
At Play in the Fields of the Lord 1991
Cyrano de Bergerac 1990
May Fools 1990
Valmont 1989
The Mahabharata 1989
The Unbearable Lightness of Being 1988
Max, Mon Amour 1986
Swann in Love 1984
Danton 1982
The Return of Martin Guerre 1982
Circle of Deceit 1981
Every Man for Himself 1979
The Tin Drum 1979
That Obscure Object of Desire 1977
The Phantom of Liberty 1974
The Woman with Red Boots 1974
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie 1972
A Few Hours of Sunlight 1971
Taking Off 1971
The Milky Way 1969
Belle de Jour 1967
Viva Maria 1965
Diary of a Chambermaid 1964
Previous Recipient
Paul Haggis 2005
Festival Screening: Belle de
Jour