Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (45 page)

The only serious critic we had was Sarris. There was Pauline [Kael], there was [Vincent] Canby in
Variety
who took films seriously, there were others, but not with that kind of vision that went beyond individual films. Sarris brought about a shift in the point of view of what work was.
¹⁷

The practical side of their cinematic reeducation was provided by Peter Bogdanovich, who was also a contributor to
Esquire
. As Robert Benton said, “Bogdanovich was in the process of doing his monograph on Hitchcock, so he’d call us, and say,‘3:00
PM
,
Rope
.’ We’d see the film, and then we went back and worked on the script”
¹⁸
in
Esquire
’s offices, while ostensibly working for the magazine.

Benton and Newman, inspired by the New Wave’s artistic view of American gangster films, thought that they were writing a French New Wave film; indeed they wrote it with the idea that François Truffaut would direct it. Helen Scott, a confidante of Truffaut’s who worked in the French Film Office in New York, read, admired, and translated the script treatment and sent it to Truffaut, who received it on January 2, 1964. In April, Truffaut went to New York and met with the writers, proposing many changes. By way of example for a revised ending, he screened for them the 1949 film noir
Gun Crazy:
Godard, who was in town to do research for a documentary on American women that he was planning to make for French television (which didn’t pan out), was at the screening too.

In the summer of 1964, Benton and Newman traveled to Texas to do research and then rapidly wrote their full-length script, which they sent to Truffaut. Though he liked the story, he wrote to the producers on September 7, turning it down regretfully (“of all the scripts I have turned down in the last five years, ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ is the best”), because of his plans to film Ray Bradbury’s novel
Fahrenheit 451
or another project featuring Jeanne Moreau. Truffaut did, however, add, “I took the liberty of letting my friend Jean-Luc Godard read Bonnie and Clyde and he, too, greatly liked the script.”
¹⁹
Indeed, Godard had sent Truffaut a telegram from Venice:
AM IN LOVE WITH BONNIE AND ALSO WITH CLYDE STOP WILL BE PLEASED TO SPEAK WITH AUTHORS IN NY STOP
.
²⁰

Benton later recalled that despite Truffaut’s rejection, the news that the script had gone to Godard made them happier than ever: although the pair felt a “great debt to Truffaut,” he and Newman knew that “Truffaut was not great in the same way that Godard was great. He was not revolutionary in the way that Godard was revolutionary.”
²¹

In New York in September, Godard met with Benton, Newman, and the pair’s producing partners, the brother-and-sister team of Elinor and Norton Wright, telling them, according to Benton, “I’m supposed to do a film called
Alphaville
. I don’t want to do it. I’ll go back and get out of it, then I’ll be back and do this in December”
²²
—in other words, three months later. According to the writers’ joint recollection in 1972, Godard told the assembled group that he wanted to do the film “in three weeks from now.”
²³
In 2000, Godard recalled: “So I saw the producer, it was a Friday, and he asked me, ‘When do you want to start?’ I said, ‘Monday,’ and it didn’t come about.”
²⁴

Godard thought that the producers had the financing in place and were ready to start filming soon—whether in three months, in three weeks, or on Monday. But the producers were only, in effect, packagers, who planned to use the script to attract name actors, and the names plus the script to raise money for the film—but, rather than admitting their situation, they prevaricated. As
Benton later recalled: “Instead, the young man [Norton Wright] said, ‘The weather won’t be right in Texas at this time of the year.’ They were just backing and filling; and Godard said, ‘I’m talking cinema and you’re talking meteorology.’”
²⁵

Godard told the producers that if the weather was bad in Texas, he could shoot the film anywhere, even “in Tokyo.”
²⁶
When they argued that it would be impossible to gather everything needed to shoot in three weeks, Godard told them, “If it happens in life, it can happen in a movie”
²⁷
—meaning, in effect, that
Bonnie and Clyde
would be whatever Godard pulled together and called
Bonnie and Clyde
, whether or not it resembled what Benton and Newman had written.

Benton and Newman were game for anything Godard proposed; but the idea of a
Bonnie and Clyde
shot in Tokyo or New York was unacceptable to the Wrights. Godard left the meeting and that day (or the next) he called the writers from the airport and told them to get in touch with him when the producers’ option expired.
²⁸

The producers, for their part, were unable to put together a package. When Warren Beatty got wind of the project, he not only coveted the role of Clyde but also decided to produce the film himself. The screenwriters’ contract with him, however, stipulated that he meet with Godard before hiring another director. According to Benton, the meeting, which took place in London in 1966, was “a disaster,” and Beatty hired Arthur Penn.

After
Bonnie and Clyde
opened in 1967, Benton and Newman met Godard in Paris. He told them, “
Now
let’s make it.”

W
HEN
G
ODARD RETURNED
to Paris after the New York Film Festival, he made the film that he had been willing to put aside in favor of
Bonnie and Clyde
—
Alphaville
, starring the American expatriate actor Eddie Constantine.

eleven.

ALPHAVILLE

“The capital of pain”

G
ODARD AND
E
DDIE
C
ONSTANTINE HAD BEEN PLANNING
to work together in late 1963, while
Contempt
was still unfinished. Their project was now reinvigorated by the fledgling producer André Michelin. Early in 1964, Michelin had hired Constantine to play the lead role in an American-style detective film,
Nick Carter va tout casser
(
License to Kill
). Constantine mentioned to Michelin his interest in working with Godard, then brought director and producer together. At that meeting Godard explained that he wanted to cast the star in a futuristic vampire film adapted from Richard Matheson’s
I Am Legend
, in which, after horrific wars, a man discovers himself to be the last human in a world filled with vampires. Michelin was not enthusiastic. “So,” said Michelin, “we looked for a subject.”
¹

Godard then suggested putting Constantine—as the secret agent Lemmy Caution, the role for which he was famous—into a science-fiction film based on Brian Aldiss’s 1958 novel,
Non-Stop
, about life inside a vast, city-like spacecraft, but he quickly realized that the story would be very expensive to film. Instead, he decided to come up with a story of his own which would nonetheless combine elements of Matheson’s and Aldiss’s plots.

At the Venice Film Festival, in September 1964, Antonioni had talked to Godard about his research for
Red Desert
, which involved interviewing cybernetics researchers who were experimenting with artificial intelligence. Godard’s interest was piqued and he began to look into the subject while in New York. On his return, he told Michelin, “Over there I got in contact with electronics specialists and I was struck to see to what extent electronic brains, the calculation of probabilities, are becoming important

Eddie Constantine rescues Karina from a heartless dystopia. (
TCD-Prod DB © Chaumiane / DR
)

in the lives of businessmen, even in the lives of heads of state.”
²
Michelin put Godard in touch with a group of engineers from Bull, one of the leading French electronics companies. The theme was in extreme contrast to the romantic and violent adventures of a cinematic secret agent—and it was exactly this contrast that Godard turned into the subject of
Alphaville
.

Michelin asked Godard to write a screenplay, which would be used to obtain financing from German coproducers. Godard agreed, but then procrastinated. Godard’s assistant, Charles Bitsch, stepped bravely in, as he recalled:

I told Godard that the screenplay was due the day after tomorrow; he told me, ‘So just write it.’ ‘But what should I write?’ He said, ‘Buy an adventure of Lemmy Caution; you read, you write.’ So I wrote thirty-five pages, ‘An Adventure of Lemmy Caution’; there were fights and pretty girls. Godard didn’t read it. He gave it to Michelin. Michelin liked it and gave it to [his West German coproducers], who liked it.
³

Bitsch’s script was just a place-filler which kept the project afloat while Godard continued to meditate.
⁴
In December 1964, after the contracts were signed and the project announced, the
Nouvel Observateur
filled two pages with interviews of Godard, Constantine, and Karina, who, marital strife aside, was slated to play the female role. Under the two-page headline, “Alphaville, a science-fiction adventure by J.-L. Godard,” Godard described his film:

A secret agent will arrive in a city, Alphaville. He will at first be bewildered, then he’ll understand, from certain signs, that the inhabitants, the Literates,
⁵
are mutants.… Constantine, my Illiterate,
⁶
will notice that certain words have disappeared… Anna [a Literate] will not know the word “to love”… The Literates will not know the word “handkerchief” either, because they won’t know how to weep… I will show a thought that tries to combat this, and which to some extent succeeds. Anna will finally be able to weep.

Anna Karina said of her role, “‘You are a Literate and you don’t know how to weep.’ That’s how my husband explained his film to me. I didn’t get it. In the story there is also an ‘eternal programmatrix,’ but it isn’t me. I think it’s a machine.”

Constantine noted that Godard hadn’t “written anything yet, but that’s all to the good, because this is all too deep for me.” But the actor did understand one essential aspect of his work with Godard: “The Americans
just bought all my films in one blow, to show them on television. Because of the Godard film, of course… Without Godard, without the young, I’m ruined!”
⁷

B
ETWEEN THESE INTERVIEWS
and the start of the shoot, on January 4, 1965, Godard wrote his own story treatment. By that time, Godard was no longer Karina’s husband, the couple’s divorce having become final on December 21, 1964. Karina would remain in the film, however, and Godard did not give up hope:
Alphaville
would be another attempt, like
A Married Woman
, to show that Karina’s true emotions had been distorted and suppressed by irresistible external influences and forces. The main drama of the film would be the effort of Lemmy Caution to teach Karina’s character to say the words, “I love you.” Through an extraordinary filter of genre, it would be a film in which Godard was desperate for life to imitate art.

Though Godard had been eager to drop
Alphaville
in favor of
Bonnie and Clyde
, he now infused it with his most pressing personal and aesthetic concerns. As Eddie Constantine later recalled: “He wanted to shoot this film, he needed it. He thought that if he didn’t shoot it, he would never do anything again.”
⁸
After
A Married Woman
, which the title card declared to be “fragments,” Godard once again wanted to attempt to compose a film along the lines of a classical story, within a familiar genre, but without sacrificing (as he had done in
Band of Outsiders
) his spontaneous methods or his philosophical reflections. As it turned out, the armature of this story was strong and clear enough for Godard’s frenetic and willful methods to have surprisingly little impact on the narrative flow of the finished product.
Alphaville
was, in some ways, Godard’s last movie (without, of course, being his last film).

Godard considered his story to be, in its essence, a western, and it is indeed a variation on John Ford’s
The Searchers
, in which a man enters enemy territory to rescue a woman who had been held there since early childhood. (It also resembles Orson Welles’s
Mr. Arkadin
, another drama about a malevolent mastermind whose daughter the detective-surrogate loves.) But Godard set his film in something like an outer-space dystopia called Alphaville, in which life is governed by a giant computer and emotion is a crime punishable by death.
⁹
Godard understood the project to be “the development” of
Le Nouveau Monde
, with its view of a person projected into a society that had lost the meaning of its language and the truth of its feelings; the film would also be “the prolongation”
¹⁰
of
A Married Woman
, with its accusations of mind control and the repression of love in a centrally governed society.