Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (34 page)

O
F THE FILM’S
million-dollar budget, Bardot got half. Much of the rest went to Palance and to Lang, leaving Godard with relatively little to make the film—which he did in five weeks, but not without great difficulty. According to Raoul Coutard, “A lot of excessive things come with a star like Bardot—not just her salary, but also her hair stylist, her wardrobe person, and the like. These things completely alter the entire organization of the film.”
¹⁰
The shoot was also slowed by Bardot’s resistance to shooting early in the morning.

The atmosphere on the set did not help. Godard was now operating under intense media scrutiny. Bardot was the principal target of Italy’s paparazzi, who created an unnerving commotion. Godard had asked his friends Tolmatchoff and Laubscher to come along for moral and practical support as his “fixers.” Tolmatchoff knew Bardot from the 1961 shoot of
La Vie privée (A Very Private Affair
), where he had assisted Louis Malle. Now serving as Bardot’s driver in Rome, Tolmatchoff often had to “pull her from the claws of the paparazzi.”
¹¹
Godard had also asked Laubscher to shoot production stills, as he had done for
Le Petit Soldat and A Woman Is a Woman
. However, Bardot had brought her own personal photographer, Ghislain (Jicky) Dussart, who was also her confidant and unofficial bodyguard (and who had been Anna Karina’s boyfriend before
Le Petit Soldat
). Dussart did not like the competition from Laubscher, and Bardot pressed Godard to send his friend away, which Godard unhappily did, telling him, “What can I do?”
¹²

Charles Bitsch, Godard’s assistant director, sensed that the actress was playing a temperamental game with the paparazzi, which interfered with the film: “There was a crazy pack of photographers hunting her, and she did not want anyone to photograph her; but she was contradictory: on the one hand, we had to call the police to protect her, on the other, she was angry when nobody asked to photograph her.”
¹³
Godard’s friend, the director Jacques Rozier, captured on film the efforts to fend them off. He had been commissioned by the cultural services of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs to direct a short film about the making of
Contempt
, and he called it, simply,
Paparazzi
. It showed the photographers’ relentless pursuit of Bardot and the resulting distractions (including Godard’s own trek up a rocky hill to face down a pack of intruding shutterbugs). Rozier simultaneously made a second film from the set of
Contempt
, called
Bardot et Godard, ou le parti des choses
(Bardot and Godard, or The Point of View of Things), centered on a scene that Godard had attempted to film on a cliffside beach but which was
washed out by the sudden arrival of high tides. Rozier, who admired the director and the actress, put their collaboration in a positive light, recording moments of complicity and happy relaxation on the set. He did not capture Godard’s private response to Bardot, the uneasiness of their relationship, or its effect on the film.

B
EFORE THE SHOOT
, Godard occasionally met with Bardot and, afterwards, raved about her to Charles Bitsch, who later recalled that the director “got carried away like a child.” Godard had told him, “What a life, what a marvelous woman!” The enthusiasm, however, did not survive the reality of the shoot: two days into it, Godard sought solace with Bitsch, complaining that he found the actress “unbearable” and “horrible.” Bardot wore only miniskirts and refused Godard’s request to wear longer ones. He asked her to moderate her high and tousled hairdo—which he called her “sauerkraut”—and she at first refused. Godard later told an interviewer, “When I asked her to lower her hairdo by two centimeters,” he had to offer to walk twenty meters on his hands in order to persuade her. “It was a game.” Recounting the story on TV in 1965, Godard reproduced the stunt, and added sarcastically, “A pleasant way to work, right?”
¹⁴

The character of Camille was determined less by Bardot’s temperament, however, than by Anna Karina’s. Many of the lines spoken by Bardot in
Contempt
were things Karina herself had said to Godard.
¹⁵
In one scene, Bardot wore the short dark wig that Karina had worn in
Vivre sa vie
, and, as she later recalled, Godard even wanted her to walk like Karina: “Godard told me that I had to be filmed with my back to the camera, and to walk away from it, straight ahead. I rehearsed, and he wasn’t happy. I asked him why. Because, he said, my manner was not the same as Anna Karina’s!”
¹⁶

Tolmatchoff sensed that Bardot was suffering greatly from her separation from her boyfriend, Sami Frey, who was shooting a film in Spain at the time. One night, she required thirteen takes of a long tracking shot that ended at the ticket booth of a small movie theater and, according to Tolmatchoff, was “sleepwalking” through the performance. “She was terribly distracted, and Godard told me, ‘Take her for a ride in the car, here’s the phone number at the theater, take her away, call me and let me know whether you’re coming back or not.’” In the car, Tolmatchoff said, “She cried, I didn’t know that it was possible to cry so much,” and he telephoned Godard to call off the night’s shooting: “She can’t do anything, it’s screwed for tonight.”
¹⁷

Coutard, who had worked with Godard on all of his previous feature films, found him in an exceptionally foul mood during the shoot of
Contempt;
Suzanne Schiffman thought that Godard “threw a few more temper
tantrums than necessary.”
¹⁸
As the crew approached the end of their time in Rome, Godard was behind schedule, having been slowed down by the media circus around Bardot and the inconveniences intrinsic to the big production itself, and he was advised by his production manager, Philippe Dussart, that the company was in danger of having to shoot overtime, at enormous cost (primarily Bardot’s extra salary).
¹⁹
There remained a long scene to shoot—the confrontation of Paul and Camille at home—and Godard decided that he could make up for lost time by shooting it as fast as possible with as little preparation as possible. He asked Dussart to find him a modern apartment in Rome in which to film the scene.

The action was centered on the couple’s discussion about whether Camille should accept Prokosch’s invitation to come along to Capri, and quickly degenerated into open marital warfare. In his script Godard had anticipated the scene’s unpredictability in an aside to Joseph E. Levine:

This sequence will last about 25 to 30 minutes. It is difficult for me to recount precisely and chronologically what will happen in it… I have a pathological need for the presence of the characters… in order to imagine definitively all the details of this Sequence 5, which I can only describe to you for the moment in broad strokes; because, you know as well as I do, a sequence of twenty minutes straight hangs together only thanks to the details which make the characters exist; and details of this sort are not invented a priori on paper, or at least, almost never.
²⁰

As it turned out, the “details which make the characters exist” were those which Godard took from characters who already existed: from Anna Karina and himself. According to Piccoli, who played the screenwriter, “The male character in
Contempt
is [Godard]. He wanted me to wear his tie, his hat, his shoes.”
²¹
Elsewhere Piccoli said that he also wore Godard’s jacket and socks. “I am convinced that in
Contempt
he is trying to explain something to his wife,” Coutard said. “It’s a letter that cost Beauregard a million dollars.”
²²
The “letter” says something fairly simple: if Godard continues to accept projects that he despises—such as
Contempt
itself—but persuades himself to like it so that he can pay for the luxuries he thinks his beautiful young wife expects, Karina will ultimately despise him nonetheless. In general, the “letter” suggests, they would be fine if not for the cinema, where Godard’s work curdles Karina’s feelings for him and drives the couple apart.

The long and demanding apartment scene was filmed in a frenetic discharge of energy—almost the entire half-hour sequence was shot in five days,
²³
“as if,” Dussart said, “we were in a factory.” The sequence turned on a single two-and-a-half-minute shot of the couple arguing while sitting at
opposite sides of a coffee table, with a table lamp and its oversized conical shade between them. A lateral tracking shot moves back and forth between the two characters as Paul reasons intricately why he should refuse the job, Camille declares that she no longer loves Paul, and he desperately seeks to explain her rejection of him. Meanwhile, Paul flicks the remote light switch on and off, as pointlessly involved in its absurd mechanics as in those of his own vain rationalizations. (The movements of the camera were prepared, but not their timing: Godard improvised them during the shot, walking behind the camera and tapping a technician on the shoulder each time he wanted the camera to glide from one character to the other.) This shot makes the model apartment’s modernist architecture and furnishings visually eloquent: they are part of the problem, as their inhumanly geometric contours contribute to the couple’s incomprehensions and miscommunications.

G
ODARD’S TEMPESTUOUS
devotion to Karina made itself felt during the shoot. He often returned to Paris to see her on weekends (Coutard knew, when he saw Godard with a clean shirt, that the director was preparing a quick getaway), and Karina came to Rome to pay him a visit. As she later recalled:

It was mad love. Love, jealousy, revenge. We adored each other. We were rather passionate. We had crises of jealousy. Oh, there were some slaps. In Rome we went one evening to a nice nightclub, someone invited me to dance, I went, and when I came back, [Godard] gave me a slap in the face, in front of everybody, because I had danced with this other man. But I wasn’t angry—it was proof of his love. I kissed him afterward, because it proved that he loved me.
²⁴

Karina’s presence in Rome and her symbolic presence throughout the shoot was an obstacle to Bardot’s performance; according to Piccoli, Bardot “no longer knew her place.” She was unable to forge any kind of personal relationship with Godard, and she “detached herself… by locking herself in her hotel with her friends, her entourage, except during shooting hours, playing cards while waiting to be called to the set.”
²⁵
Asked about his relations with Bardot during the shoot, Godard answered, “None,” and added, “She wasn’t very interested in me and I wasn’t very interested in her.”
²⁶
Outwardly, Bardot remained supportive of Godard, and Jacques Rozier recorded Bardot and Godard mounting the long staircase of the Villa Malaparte hand in hand, laughing. The producers were delighted to find Bardot so apparently pleased by the course of the shoot. But the director and the actress suffered a silent and mutual disillusionment.

Godard’s relations with Palance were worse. When the actor accepted the
role of the producer, it was with the expectation that the character would be Italian. He had had a bad experience with several Italian producers and now “wanted to do a satire and take a little revenge on those bastards,” but the character of Prokosch disappointed him: “The role has been changed, now it’s an American producer. I feel a little bit duped.”
²⁷
From the outset, Palance was bitter and unenthusiastic. His frustration burst into open conflict over Godard’s hands-off way of directing actors. Suzanne Schiffman recalled a scene where Prokosch was supposed to call his secretary, Francesca: “Palance asked Godard, ‘How should I call her? Am I angry?’” Godard answered, ‘No, just do it,’ and Palance responded, ‘It’s impossible to act like that.’ He gave Godard twenty-five versions.”
²⁸

Godard’s seeming caprice was an essential part of his method. He had always directed, or nondirected, his actors in this way—Godard had “never explained anything to anybody,” Schiffman said—but by now he understood the method’s purpose and its price, telling a visiting journalist: “If I give them very few indications, they think that I’m asking nothing of them. Whereas it’s exactly the contrary.”
²⁹
He was lucid on the subject of the inner meaning of his way of directing, which was part of his “existential” relationship to the actor as a person whose free will does not vanish on-camera.

I do not direct them much. I seek to disconcert them. It’s not a matter of brutalizing them… I leave them rather in the dark, I speak to them very little, I limit myself to placing them in a certain situation in such a way that they react according to their own inclination, like the man or the woman they really are. It’s a free man that you have before you. He must bring with him his entire life. He doesn’t stop living, being himself, when he arrives on the set. The actor must control his life, but that control must escape him. As for me, my role is to render them vulnerable.
³⁰

As Godard recognized, some actors “suffer a bit” from this approach—for instance, “real theater actors, like Brialy or my wife, Anna.” Palance openly voiced his suffering: “We never know in advance what we’re going to do. There’s almost no dialogue. It’s the worst experience I’ve ever had! It’s madness!”
³¹
By the end of filming, Palance not only refused to speak to Godard (passing his remarks through the head set decorator) but also tried to keep him out of sight. Suzanne Schiffman reported that the choleric actor could not even bring himself to mention the director’s name and haughtily decreed when Godard stood next to the camera, “I prefer that this person not be there.”
³²
It was Prokosch brought to life.