The Great Acting Blog "Michel Piccoli On His Work, Directors And How He Chooses Projects"

The Great Acting Blog “Michel Piccoli On His Work, Directors And How He Chooses Projects”

15.12.2018 , James , The Great Acting Blog

Michel Piccoli with Manoel de Oliveira

Originally published in The Guardian in May 2002

It is probably unwise to suggest to one of France’s leading film stars that actors are little more than marionettes. But Michel Piccoli, who has 170 films under his belt, is unperturbed. “In every profession there is a danger of being a marionette,” he says in his resonant, golden voice. “Journalism, for example?”

The slight rising inflection is a gentle reproach. “After the director and the writer,” he says, “the actor can perform his own mise en scène, insert his own interpretation. There is a kind of complicated alchemy, a game of seduction, in which one accepts the imagination of the director without allowing him to kill the imagination of us actors.”

There speaks a man who has thought about his profession. Before the movies, Piccoli, 76, got a grounding in the theatre with Jean-Louis Barrault and then on the leading Left Bank stage of the 1950s, Jean-Marie Serreau’s Thétre Babylone. “I did everything,” Piccoli recalls. “I was an actor, I cleaned the carpets, I took in the money. I never thought about the cinema then.” In those early years his progress was seasoned by an 11-year-long relationship with singer Juliette Gréco. He remained little known outside France, however, until he played opposite Brigitte Bardot as the vacillating, corrupted screenwriter in Godard’s Contempt in 1963.

The list of the directors Piccoli has worked with is like a roll call of the best in European talent: France’s Claude Chabrol, Jacques Demy, Louis Malle, Alain Resnais, Jean Renoir, Claude Sautet; Italy’s Marco Bellocchio and Marco Ferreri; Greece’s Costa-Gavras; Spain’s Luis Berlanga; and the truly international Luis Bunuel, with whom he made no fewer than six films.

But he also worked with Roger Vadim. Did he not say once that La Curée was his least worst film? “Let us be kind,” he says. “Let’s say it was the best of his films. But I wanted to work with Jane Fonda, a very interesting lady.” It was the mid-1960s and Fonda was entering her lefty-erotic Barbarella phase. It would be unkind to remind him of Hitchcock’s worst-worst film, Topaz.

“Apart from this,” I suggest, “you could say you chose not to follow money in your career?” He needs clarification here. Did I say “l’argent” (money) or “l’agent” (agent)? The fact is that for many years Piccoli has followed neither. He would not accept advice to make prudent commercial career choices. “It is for this reason,” he says, “that for many years I have worked without an agent.”

It cannot be a coincidence that his current project, I’m Going Home, by veteran Portuguese director, Manoel de Oliveira, is about a stage actor who rejects the advice of his agent and walks off a half-baked American film for which he has no respect. If he thinks the director has talent – “but above all passion” – he will support a project. And he will continue to work with a director whose work he believes in, no matter what the box office says. He grew used to picking himself up after playing to a dozen people a night when he was at the Babylone, so, unlike Hollywood stars, he doesn’t panic when a film bombs.

“I don’t like motorways,” he says. “I prefer side roads. I learned quickly that the only thing that is important is to work with directors of talent. I made films with Marco Ferreri when no one wanted to talk about him. Before La Grande Bouffe he had not made a commercial success. Then there was this crazy producer who agreed to make La Grande Bouffe.” The scandalous story of a group of gourmands who stuff themselves to death, La Grande Bouffe was Ferreri’s – and Piccoli’s – biggest commercial success.

Piccoli’s forte is bourgeois angst, bourgeois madness, bourgeois hypocrisy. He has played a disenchanted revolutionary (in Resnais’s The War Is Over) and, powerfully, an obsessed painter in Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse, but his speciality is bourgeois characters – from the young seducers in his early roles, to the airy Monsieur Dame in The Young Girls of Rochefort, or the fumbling provincial murderer in Chabrol’s Les Noces Rouges. With Bunuel, he defined bourgeois perversity, bourgeois amorality, bourgeois lunacy in Belle de Jour, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, and The Phantom of Liberty. “But I can play workers,” he points out. “I played a coal miner in my very first screen role.” That was Louis Daquin’s Le Point de Jour, in 1949.

Politically, Piccoli is a man of the left. He is an admirer of José Bové, the antiglobalisation activist, and last year he made a new feature, La Plage Noir, based on a novel by François Maspero, founder of the Latin Quarter left-wing book shop that played an important role in the anti-Algerian war campaign of the 1960s.

He has also made award-winning short films, and in 1997 directed Alors Voilà, a study of intense family tensions, which was well received by the critics but not the public. “But what is a failed film?” he asks. He cites Charles Laughton’s one attempt at direction, The Night of the Hunter. “He was destroyed by the critics, and never made a film again. Today Night of the Hunter is recognised as masterpiece.”

He has been a steadfast admirer of Bunuel since his first role with him, La Mort en Ce Jardin, made back in 1956 in Mexico. “He is a master for many people, a master who I was also lucky enough to have as a friend. He was a man who frightened a lot of people – producers and public – with his way of treating subjects, which was very unorthodox.” And very anti-religion? “He was a very complicated man: he had a religious education, but he was not necessarily anti-religion. But he told me once that he dreamed regularly of shooting the Pope.”

Piccoli reveals a surprisingly scrupulous element in this surrealist genius, a notorious practical joker. “When a producer confided a film to him he never wasted anything. He never overspent and always brought his film in on time. Bunuel was a man of rigour and morality.” But not bourgeois morality? “He had the morality,” Piccoli says, “not to be bourgeois.”

The 1980s consolidated Piccoli’s status and he briefly turned producer. “I said I would put this success to the service of film-making, so that at least some projects that were waiting for a miracle to get made would get made.”

“There were no longer enough producers,” he continues, “who were also poets or artistic jugglers, as all the great Hollywood producers were.” One of the projects dearest to him was Luciano Tovoli’s The General of the Dead Army, in which an Italian soldier returns to retrieve the remains of his fallen comrades 20 years after the war. Piccoli appeared, but the film’s star was Marcello Mastroianni. It was a commercial failure. Did he lose money on these projects? “Yes,” he says. “Every time.”

There were half a dozen loss-making movies. Did he care? “No. I worked well as a producer, but in a totally utopian manner. I stopped because I don’t know what it is to be a man who makes money. There are those who want power, who want money, who want their statue when they are alive. I have no such ambition.”

He is in danger of being betrayed, however: after half a century of high-tone contributions to the French film industry, medals at least must be unavoidable.

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The Great Acting Blog “Michel Piccoli On His Work, Directors And How He Chooses Projects”