Interview with Welles in 1982 - to be in Jacques Grand-Jouan's next film

[Christopher]

A friend in Paris sent me an article that appeared in this year's February 21-March 1 issue of Le Monde 2. The gist of it is as follows: in 1982, French filmmaker Jacques Grand-Jouan approached Welles about being in his film, Pantheon. Welles, in Paris at the time to receive the Legion d'honneur, turned him down. Vexed by his refusal, Grand-Jouan (then 33 years old) asked Welles to explain his reasons in an interview which Grand-Jouan would film and include in his next movie. Welles, rather taken aback by the audacity of this young cineaste, accepted on the condition (which he thought would be impossible to satisfy) that he be paid for his services with two gold ingots. Amazingly, Grand-Jouan remembered that his father, before his death, had left him some gold ingots which his mother had buried in the garden of their family home in Nantes. He spent a whole night digging up the garden to find the gold bars which he then left at Welles's hotel the following morning. Welles now had no choice but to grant the interview.

It was held on March 5, 1982 at the restaurant, La Grande Cascade, in the Bois de Boulogne. In a portion of the interview (which I will translate in its entirety in a later post), Welles actually prophesied that there would be a major act of terrorism in New York at some point in the future...

According to this article in Le Monde 2, the interview with Welles will be included in Grand-Jouan's new film, Lucifer et moi (Lucifer and I) which should be completed this summer in Greece. More to follow.....

[Harvey Chartrand]

Orson was a visionary in 1942 when he predicted the automobile would destroy America's cities ... and nobody wanted to hear the message.
Orson was a visionary in 1982 when he predicted terrorist attacks on U.S. cities ... and nobody wanted to hear the message.
Is director Jean-Jacques Grand-Jouan a devil worshipper (his credits include 'Lucifer and I' and 'Thank You, Satan')?
According to IMDB, Grand-Jouan hasn't worked on a film since the late 1980s.

[Christopher]

In the Le Monde 2 article, Jacques Grand-Jouan is described as a friend of Jacques Tati, Pierre Prevert and Eugene Ionesco. He was seen at that time (the 1980's) as "one of the most promising of the new generation of French filmmakers." However, due to "personal problems," Grand-Jouan, after making about 40 minutes of the film that included the interview with Welles, abandoned the idea. The following year, he made another film called Debout les crabes, la mer monte! (roughly translated as "Get up crabs, the sea is rising!") which was well received. Then he spent the next twenty years in a self-imposed exile on a small Greek island. Only last year, the desire to make a film seized him again and with the cooperation of Bertrand Tavernier and Gerard Zingg, he is now making Lucifer et moi which, as I mentioned in my last post, will include the 1982 interview with Welles.

Meanwhile, some stills from the interview are shown in the Le Monde 2 article along with a short excerpt which I shall attempt to translate. (Although Welles was quite fluent in French, I imagine the interview was conducted in English, since the excerpt begins in English.) In the stills, by the way, Welles looks robust and distinguished, as he did in an inteview he gave around this time on the BBC. He is wearing his habitual black suit and a natty polka dot foulard tied in a big, floppy bow around his neck which makes him look as though he has just been sharing a glass of wine with Manet, Cezanne, Renoir, Zola et al. He is seated at a restaurant table covered with a white cloth and empty except for some water glasses. Behind him we see a cluster of trees in the Bois de Boulogne.

Grand-Jouan: Why did you refuse to play the role of Mr. Welles in my film?

Welles: Because I don't agree with it: is it a comedy or a serious commentary? Why invent a mysterious gentleman who finds himself caught between two cultures and who is supposed to know everything there is to know about them? The problem is not between these two great countries -- no, both have the capacity to bring about total destruction and, in the process, cancel each other out. The problem is not these two powers -- who have in effect disarmed themselves -- but the atomic possibility of destruction which exists everywhere on the planet. I don't think the enemy is either Russia or the United States. No, the enemy is the the capacity for atomic destruction itself, which can appear in the back door of small countries that have acquired it; possibly Pakistan, Israel or even South Africa. It could be a terrorist knocking the wind out of New York, and that, well, that would bring about a chain reaction...that's my opinion, it's only my opinion....

Grand-Jouan: There is a scene in my film where a rope-dancer is teetering, dead drunk, on the Berlin Wall, and yet he doesn't fall off on one side or the other because he doesn't know if the truth will be found on this or that side of the wall.

Welles: Why does a man who makes films ask himself, "Where is Truth?" when everything that appears on a movie screen is nothing but a series of lies? And if it wasn't all lies, it wouldn't be art.

Grand-Jouan: Maybe it wasn't such a good idea to ask you to come here....

Welles: I see a young filmmaker who has films boiling inside of his guts. We are all the same, you know; we are all monsters, monsters with two sexes.


I am struck by Welles's remark about art being a series of lies -- the same message he delivered so brilliantly in F FOR FAKE.

[R Kadin]

Christopher - thanks for bringing this to us, as it's improbable we might have had the chance to enjoy it, otherwise. Certainly the Le Monde website is of absolutely no help whatsoever in like regard.

Speaking of Welles's recurring "art as lies" references, that conviction is so central to his thoughts that shades of it can be seen in almost everything he did or touched, from the get-go. For my part, I can't help but think that he found in it immense inspiration and liberation, a wellspring of his creativity. Like a born hedonist given a free pass to every revel, Welles delighted in the licence to lie his role as an artist bestowed upon him. Making things appear as they are not in order to bring an audience to question things as they are, such seems to have been one sense of his higher calling.

I hope the young Jean-Jacques with whom Welles so generously shared this insight appreciated the spirit in which it was likely offered. It's not everyone with whom Welles would use the "we" word inclusively. How many of the interviewer's filmmaking rivals and colleagues would have loved to have been called by Welles, in effect, "a beast like me"? I suppose the use he makes of this brief incident in his film-to-be will indicate just how fittingly the older/wiser M. Grand-Jouan has absorbed it.

[Glenn Anders]

Thank you, Christopher, for your report, insights, and translation.

The reference to destruction in New York gives substantiation to the idea that Welles provided his own interpretations of Nostradamus to the commentary he narrated for "The Man Who Saw Tomorrow."

Glenn

[Skylark]

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