For the Time Being (10 page)

‘Bring a suitcase full of all your old clothes. Ties, shoes, things you are comfortable in … that are worn, shabby. You have such things?'

I had. I carted an Oxfam shop's-worth of old clothing to Paris for his selection, which he picked through with extreme care, from ties to cardigans with holes in the sleeves and missing buttons. All we bought extra was one blue shirt, and that itself was secondhand.

Nothing, nothing at all, was film costume. The shoes were scuffed, the ties I had used in movies from 1953. Assembled, and with me inside, slightly heavy, hair unkempt, bald patch glowing like a dinner plate, ‘Daddy' began to emerge.

Tavernier grunted his pleasure and turned his attention to the rest of the cast – Odette Laure, who played my wife, and Jane Birkin, my daughter. Here again the clothes were essential. Jane had a pair of men's khaki pants, darned in the seat, and an old V-neck pullover too large for her. Odette, because she was rather more social in the stultifying life of the little coastal town in which we lived, was slightly better dressed. She was a ‘correct' little provincial wife.

If I emphasize the costumes here, it is for a reason. No detail was too small to engage Tavernier. The sugar on the table, the
oysters on the tray, the handkerchief in one's pocket, the wrinkled socks. This was the complete
auteur
at work: he supervised everything, from the plants in their pots to the lenses in the camera and the kind of sound he wanted (not always virginal: wind could intrude, traffic, birds). But, above all, what he wanted was the truth. Nothing else would satisfy him, and nothing else was offered. I remember, the first day we all met together in Paris, his last, vastly important warning: ‘You will have to be very patient with me. You are three people in one very small villa in Bandol, and I am shooting a movie in Cinemascope!' Anywhere else this slender little story would have been shoved on to a 22-inch screen with a commercial break halfway through. But not Tavernier's film.

It has been written of him, countless times before, that he is an intellectual film-maker … which is probably true, but it doesn't intrude to the point of bewildering one with theory and science. He knows more about the cinema than practically any director I have ever worked with, Visconti coming a close second. He has seen, it would appear, every film ever made, knows every player, the directors, the lighting cameramen, even the great make-up artists … he revels in the cinema. In London I have seen him come into dinner clutching two enormous plastic bags bursting with rare videos which he has tracked down with all the intensity and excitement of Howard Carter at the tomb of Tutankhamun.

Tavernier has also been described as a Russian novelist, a Dutch painter, a blues singer and an Irish playwright. Well, perhaps he is: it's a little bit above my head to grant him all these attributes. I mean, I know what is meant, because I too have seen the qualities there in him myself, but it's a little arty-farty for someone who is intrinsically first and foremost a film-maker. Passionate about the cinema, he is also well aware of how to explore, with his camera, the very soul of the characters he places in his Cinemascope film.

You don't just act for him. You literally become: and if that sounds daft, that is precisely what happens. Or what is expected of you to make happen. You do not offer him, as it were, a packet of corn flakes, glossy and bright exterior, unknown contents. You do not play the cover: he insists that you play the contents. Far too
many players in the cinema choose only to offer the cover of the package and never explore the contents. It's all show and no effect.

As with an onion, one is required to remove skin after skin after skin until, finally, away-down-there-at-the-bottom, the tender green shoot of life is exposed. It is not a painful experience under his probing eye. It is exhilarating. One ends ragged-out but satiated. A new person has been created.

No ‘take' is ever the same. Variations take place. Something one may have done instinctively in one take he pounces on with excitement and adds to another, one molecule of work combining with another to form a new dimension in the character. It is a tremendously exciting experience, hard (we would stagger from bed at 6 a.m., no coffee, no comfort, rehearse until 8 a.m., and only then be allowed refreshment; and we worked, with one hour off for lunch, until 8 at night on occasions), but no one could possibly complain.

It is the truth which hits audiences in the gut when they watch a Tavernier film, the twisting of a tiny screw of remembrance, the feeling he imparts through his characters to the spectator that they have shared exactly the emotion, the joy, the despair, the wry fun, or the heartbreak he is offering. Because he knows all these things himself, and is aware of them in others. His concentration on set is intense, there is none of the idiotic reverence so often imposed upon a set by some directors, just a determined, silent desire to get on film exactly what is demanded of him. The best: recognition, awareness, above all, truth.

When the film was finally being edited, he discovered that there was the need for one extra, final scene. He called me to tell me, and to ask me to try to write for him a piece about pain and death. I had recently been witness to both, as indeed so had he. I said, almost despairingly: ‘Bertrand … pain is not intellectual, you cannot rationalize it … It is like a bad neighbour, with you all the time.'

Bertrand interrupted me urgently on the line from Paris. ‘That is it! Write it! Write that!' And we finished the film.

I have said, when asked, that Visconti is the Emperor of Film,
Losey is the King, Tavernier is the Genius. And, for me, so he is, a genius in the minutiae of life which he gets on to a cinema screen as no one else has ever done quite so brilliantly before. Nothing very much happens in a Tavernier film. Just all of life.

Sunday Telegraph,
5 May 1991

From my earliest days, say about three years old, I was constantly told by my parents and our Nanny that Little Boys Should Be Seen And Not Heard or, more to the point perhaps, that one must NEVER DRAW ATTENTION TO ONESELF.

It seems to me that I have been steadily doing my best for the last sixty-something years to ignore that sensible and good advice. I have spent ages forcing people to regard me, to be aware of me; standing centre-stage and in a pin-spot (when available), and, as I would have been told, drawing attention to myself and behaving in a most ungentlemanly manner.

If I say that I fled into the arms of the theatre because there was nothing else that I was any good for, you might well raise an eyebrow. Oscar Wilde said ‘the stage is the refuge of the too charming,' and I have a hideous feeling that in this, as in so many other of his epigrams, he was absolutely correct. As a foul little boy I remember overhearing again and again the dreadful remark, ‘He
is
very charming; don't worry about him,' as my distraught parents sought to get me educated.

Hopeless despair on my account was supreme in our family for years. Until one brilliant spring day when I marched up the hallowed steps at Sandhurst as a spick-and-span officer. Charm had once again come to my rescue, for there was precious little of anything else. I was very good at square-bashing, splendid at yelling orders and preventing an entire squad of men from marching determinedly into Aldershot town centre by a nifty, and brilliantly timed, ‘Abooooout turn!'

My beaming smile, signifying disgusting conceit and a wholly smug ‘I can do that', reaped rewards. I was disobeying the rules, drawing attention to myself and being seen and heard all at the one
time. I would never have survived otherwise. Disgracefully, I am still ‘at it'.

For some time, when I reached my mid-century, I abandoned this slightly reprehensible business, quit the Cinema and the Theatre and faded happily away into the bucolic life of a modest agriculturist in France. And when this came to an abrupt and unhappy end, as it had to, I found myself back in an almost alien land and a vastly altered city, London.

I was aghast. All the clichés were true. A fish out of water, high and dry, a stranger among his (very few by this time) friends. What to do? There was no possibility of the Cinema now, too old, and hated it anyway; no hope ever of returning to the Theatre (once you have lost your nerve it has gone for ever).

For something to do while I lived abroad, I had started to write. The long winter evenings dragged. There was no one around to ‘charm' and nothing at all to do once the chores on the land had finished with the sunset. So, I wrote. And I had not the least idea that writing would entail the utter horror of public appearance; that I would have to go out and sell the product.

All that, I thought, had been done and forgotten when I quit the Cinema. There, I expected to promote the work; to suffer the Critic and the dwindling audiences who had to be whipped into the cinema with hysterical hype.

The worst prospect of my new career was the signing session. I had grown out of the publicity habit. I did my best to scuttle away. Impossible. You had to flog the book; your book; all your own work, not like a film which you shared with a great many others – strong backs to shoulder the blame with you.

Alone, sitting beside the dreadful till, faced with (if you were lucky) your readers as the money rang up loudly, was as near to absolute disgrace as anything I can remember. I did hear a woman in Harrods exclaim with disdain: ‘My dear!
Look
what he's doing now! Selling himself in public!' Which was exactly, and precisely, what I was doing. It was an altogether shameful business.

Then, as these things do, it occurred to me that people with the
good manners and interest to queue for miles through Software, Records and Lampshades should be offered a little more.

I had, in desperation, accepted an offer to commemorate the anniversary of the death of the writer Saki by reading one or two of his stories one evening at a platform performance at the National Theatre. Ill with fear, I managed. It went very well.

I was asked if I would do another, but this time ‘answer questions and read a bit from your own books?' That worked, too. I had an enchanting lady to monitor the ‘game', but quickly discovered that we did not need her. The audience began to take me over, and I began to take them into my confidence. It was an amazing experience. Quite new to me.

Why then couldn't we combine the two things? The awful Signing Sessions
plus
the Platform Show? At a Signing I never spoke to any reader beyond a fleeting smile and a muttered ‘What name do you want me to use?' while the till clanged another sale. It was insulting to us all. So we decided to go to a proper theatre, do a couple of hours on stage with a few books for me to read from, and then be braced to answer
any
questions.

A brave thing to do? I tried it with a packed house, and it worked. It was hard, but exhilarating and fun. After the Show came the Signing. And because people had been laughing with me, thinking with me, listening to me, we were closer. It was far, far better than sitting in a heap at a table signing away next to the till. I shall never do that again.

I love my audience. They are no longer a mass of separate people in a large theatre looking at a single figure on an empty stage for a couple of hours. We are united, are together, join in the laughter and, sometimes (there are serious questions about cancer, strokes, death and old age; it is not all ‘hilarity and mirth'), in the silences which follow a desperate, sad question which someone has had the immense courage to ask in public.

To share the worry, despair or anxiety with everyone is a wonderful, moving feeling. Something I would never have experienced had I not, all those years ago, decided to draw attention to myself. Sometimes one can be helpful, as well as amusing. I have discovered
that for myself. I cannot imagine how I ever did without it in the past.

Daily Telegraph
Cheltenham Festival of
Literature Supplement,
28 September 1993

Before I had my second stroke and my speech was impaired, I used to read aloud most of my own books for audiocassette. This is how it worked.

The other day a girl with a black velvet hat crammed down to her eyebrows suddenly screamed at me in Lower Sloane Street: ‘Hey! I'm listening to you! Amazing! Brilliant! There you are and I'm listening to you! Wow!' She could have been Lord Carnarvon, so wide with disbelief were her eyes.

I smiled inanely and she ran alongside me, jogging and squealing, wires flying, looking like a demented spaniel. In desperation, I fled into an antique shop and priced a marble table I could neither afford nor wished to purchase, and she ran on. One hoped, into the river.

Audiobooks, or talking books, are here – and to stay, it seems; particularly now that not only the abridged texts on two tapes, running for about three hours, but also unabridged versions lasting twelve hours or so – what I call the ‘Full Whack' – are commercially available at a reasonable price and on standard-sized cassettes.

Every night my ex-nanny, Lally, listens to one of my books (abridged) about my childhood, in which she played a not unimportant part. She drops off to sleep, she says, ‘in a twinkling, remembering those lovely, happy, days'. I can think of no better reason for reading to her than that. Especially as I do not have to be physically present. She can just potter about and get herself into bed without fuss and, as she says, with my voice to send her off to sleep. That is hugely rewarding to me. The actual process of bringing her this delight is different. Hellish, in fact.

To read an eight-cassette job (unabridged) takes me two full days. At the end I am usually wrecked. One sits in a tiny cell, soundproofed, airless, a table, a desk, a chair, the book-rest, the
book, a sealed window on to the aquarium of the Control Room.

One starts with an eager joy. Then a pleasant voice on the intercom interrupts, very gently: ‘Dirk? Tummy rumble. Sorry'; or ‘page turning' or ‘heard you cross your legs/arms/ankles'; or again, ‘sleeve touched the desk', or ‘raised your arm'. Until you are so frightened that to sit stark naked in cement seems the only way to carry on. It means that with each tiny hiccup you have to go all the way back to the paragraph, line, whatever, and start again. This can take hours. I now insist, if I make a verbal mistake, or cross my arms, or if any other unacceptable sound issues from my person, that I cry: ‘Repeat!' and proceed. Appalling work for the poor editor, but at least I get my ‘run' clear.