Last week I published a post which attempted to understand the nature of Michel Piccoli's talent, and, to a certain extent, that post was successful. However, I still felt that I hadn't really done justice to Piccoli and have decided, in an effort to make good my shortfall, to publish an interviews with Piccoli from Cahiers Du Cinema. Here, Piccoli articulates his thoughts on art and craft, with a rigour and depth I can only aspire to. Piccoli talks about many of the great names of European cinema, including Jean-Luc Godard, Luis Bunuel and Robert Bresson.
The Actor and the Secret: Interview with Michel Piccoli
Translated by Sally Shafto
AN IMAGINARY MADNESS
few years ago in an interview I tried to say that I would like to act like Munch paints. Perhaps that seems intellectual and very pretentious. When you look at his paintings from a distance, you see clearly what he depicted, a tree, someone who screams. But when you come closer, you find, close up, an apparent disorder, an untidy mess. In stepping back, the disorder disappears, but the frenzy remains. This work of painters impresses me very much. How do they manage to invent their painting from close up? For me, it’s like a mirage. I do not experience this need with painters who are straightaway violent or aggressive like Picasso. But with secretive painters, like Munch [...].
When I act, I am rather far away from the film’s crew, in the camera but distant from everyone; same thing in the theatre. Nevertheless, the acting must be very precise; the focus is sharp; the sounds of the text are audible, as clear as they can be. At the same time, I like very much to improvise in acting, like a painter adding a stroke here or there -then something faint or completely dark becomes visible, where we don’t see the inner workings.
I like to work in disorder and with the disorder of my partner, and also with the disorder that can exist in the director’s imaginary or that of the writer, to have this kaleidoscope in me and to try make something of it immediately comprehensible. Or rather often, I enjoy being very comprehensible, and I introduce a lost moment, a blank, and an empty space in order to take off again in the construction that has been asked of me [...]. To interrupt a sentence, to change key. I like to be very sure of what I am going to do and thanks to that, to allow myself shortcuts.
To this idea of disorder that I practice should be added: imagination. It’s a matter of remaining on hold in the disorder that can exist when you think or say something. It would be the opposite of an automatic mechanism, of an expertise or of a professionalism. In fact, I like constantly to do exercises. There are musicians who practice all the time but we actors are not able to do that. We don’t have an instrument, except if you say we are our own instrument, and yet [...] I always try to continue searching and working for the moment where you have to deliver. The Italian comic actor Toto was a role model for me. He was more than an actor; he was in his imagination, entirely. It is said that he never learned his text: when he had something long to say, he took off in a delirium, a logorrhea whose end his partners would await. It wasn’t ham-acting or disregard for his fellow actors. He was inventing, writing as he acted what he had to play. I would like very much to be able to do that.
ATTENTIVE LISTENING, DISCRETION/MODESTY/PROPRIETY
It often happens that I listen to the way my partner speaks and respond accordingly. Sometimes I act alone; sometimes I am extremely attentive to my partner, in order to juggle with what s/he contributes. An attentive listening can suffice to act. I have even explored this possibility to the nth degree, in a sort of improvisation based uniquely on listening to my partner and the director, because deliberately as an exercise I hadn’t read the script beforehand. I don’t remember the title of the film [...]. I was fortunate to be more on the watch for the director, in the theatre or in the cinema, than of myself or of the character I play, and even of my partner. Listening, entering into the secret, has always been my way keeping my bearings - in order to be the best marionette that they had imagined. I have never been self-sufficient, unlike many actors. I like extremely discreet actors, who thus open up the imagination. To be really immodest, you would have to let loose in way that you would never dare in real life; I can’t stand actors who let go unenthusiastically or modestly.
Take Louis Jouvet for example. He had a kind of discreet madness. You sensed in him an elsewhere, a “presence elsewhere,” and an acting style almost of a marionette. He never tried anything by emotion, by laughing or crying, he was instead a “monolithic secretive” actor. In the theatre, he was undoubtedly very attentive to his fellow actors; he would give the impression of always painstakingly maintaining a distance for listening - this is in fact an excellent definition of what in French we call “pudeur,” which in English translates variously as modesty/decency/propriety. This is why I like so often English actors or the great Americans originally from England.
The best example is Buster Keaton. In what he does, in what he shows, always this impassive face which is not concerned by what is happening, a kind of solitude in the middle of disorder. It’s better, when one is an actor, to be modest than to be an extrovert and a “ciccione” as the Italians say, “a lyric poet unto oneself.” Even if of course there are some great lyric actors, like Vittorio Gassman, for example, especially when he was on stage.
Keaton, Chaplin: great self-control. They were capable of performing athletic pirouettes, circus stunts, but nothing showed. There is someone else who is a reference for me in this kind of work: Robert Mitchum. He recorded songs [...]. I think that he was a great practical joker, perhaps also a great alcoholic, but that didn’t stop him from being extremely discreet. He had a physical presence incredibly moving, and totally discreet. He was there, that’s all. Like Keaton.
FARCE
This métier necessitates farce. If you are bewitched by your own personality, bewitched by yourself, by the public or by the camera - the actor is inevitably immodest - but possesses a great awareness of the comic. I rather like the Italian expression “io faccio l’attore.” The Italians don’t say “I am an actor”; they say ”io faccio l’attore.” I would like to follow this idea to its logical end, to act like a marionette.
I used to dream of meeting Robert Bresson by chance, that he would not recognize me and would employ me like one of his “models.” It’s an actor’s wish and a double farce. First of all, a joke on me: to remove all my professionalism, as Godard often would say: to be no longer a professional of the profession - and a joke too on Bresson. Then I will have been doubly, triply, quaduply actor. Bresson approaches me and says: “I am Robert Bresson, I must make a film, would you accept that I write something for you,” I don’t know how he used to do it, and then like that! I would have played at once the actor who is no longer an actor. I would have very much liked to have fun watching this man who wanted “models,” non-actors, who, it seems, made an enormous amount of takes until he obtained the emotional annihilation of the actor, and I am sure that I would have managed, during our time together, to fool him. It’s an exercise I would have greatly loved to have done.
There is a crazy producer whose name escapes me at the moment who was supposed to do a film with Bresson towards the end of his life, with Alain Cuny and me. Bresson would have agreed. I knew Cuny pretty well; he was another extravagant, gigantic character as few actors have been. I would have so much liked to be between Bresson and Cuny, a perfect situation!
That’s where I would like to go. Still I got there, by chance. Otar Iosseliani, for his last film, Jardins en automne, proposed that I play an old woman. Iosseliani works generally with non-actors; he finds that actors, as he says, “produce clichés.” I think that he isn’t wrong, but that it is precisely a substantial part of an actor’s job to not fall into cliché. I acted thus with non professionals, and it was another exercise, first to dress me up as an old woman and to insert me in this work of marionette of Iosseliani. We tried wigs, dresses, etc.; I told him: above all no lipstick, no bust. It’s an actor’s work [...].
I went to the see the film in the editing; I saw a little bit, and noticed something very disturbing. It concerns the personal life, but it is important here. With age I resemble more and more my mother, and thus disguised as a woman, it’s outrageous: I see my own mother performing in the film of Iosseliani. Then, it all gets complicated, don’t you think? At the same time, it is part of the game. Why wouldn’t I, after all, resemble my mother? And is it thus that I do not mistake my mother for a marionette and continue to breathe life into her?
To meet Bresson in the street was one of my fantasies, but I had another even earlier. One of the first films that I saw when I was a kid was The Invisible Man [...]. There, I go too far, yes, I am going to propose to Iosseliani: “Wouldn’t you like to do a film on the invisible man, with me in the leading role?” But in word, I like very much to believe that I am the most invisible when I am acting. It is perhaps for this reason that people say that I do strange things - do I do them to hide myself, or am I myself really strange? To ask an actor to speak about himself and about his métier is a kind of analysis, wouldn’t you agree?
LA MORT EN CE JARDIN/DEATH IN THE GARDEN
Luis Buñuel, 1956
[First appearance of Father Lizzardi (Piccoli) in white suite and a priest’s collar, among the adventurers reunited in a dive. The performance is conveyed in the way of filling out the suit (stiff and straight), and in multiple and diverse hand tricks, starting with a close up on a watch and including the kiss on the hand that Piccoli receives from Charles Vanel.]
Often I have noticed that in the characters, I play the director of the film. The directors delegate their secret to me. With Buñuel, it is extremely interesting. Before (Death in the Garden I saw him in Paris - he came to see me in a play by André de Richaud, a writer whom he admired, and I introduced them. I invited him to see this play because at the time I was beginning to understand what I wanted to do in the cinema: I wanted Buñuel to see me, so that we could work together.
One day I was given an appointment in a production company; this was before the advent of casting directors; at that time you saw directly the filmmaker or his assistant. It was for the role of a priest, “forty-five years old, and pudgy,” for Buñuel’s next film [...]. And given my appearance at that time, it was going to be difficult, but I wanted to have some fun. But it was he who had the last laugh. I sent a telegram directly to Buñuel: “Ready for the role of the priest. Let me know your answer, please.” And the next morning, he sends a telegram to the production company: “Piccoli the priest.” I was amazed [...]. I arrive in Mexico; he meets me at the airport and straightaway he says: “I am very happy to see you: you are absolutely not the character.” It was pretty fantastic! That a man like Buñuel gives me like that the possibility to enter into his world of madness and modesty, under the guise of a kind of farce. I quickly understood that this man both, wildly extravagant and exceedingly rigorous, was going to be my model, both physically and temperamentally. I began the film like that, and it suited him perfectly. Perhaps I stole a little from him and that’s what I kept for the following films, from Diary of a Chambermaid up until The Phantom of Liberty. Other than that, he never said to the actors: you need to be sensitive, there, you are going to move me or, there, pay attention, it’s the moment of “deep meaning” as the Americans say [...]. With Buñuel it was, you enter there, you sit down there, and then afterwards you leave, that’s all.
It is also important that the first role that he gave me was precisely that of a priest. Buñuel came from a family belonging to the upper middle class in Spain, very religious. He abandoned this faith to go towards Surrealism, but without any eccentricity. You could think that the Surrealists and the Dadaists were outlandish, but it wasn’t at all the case - they were on the contrary extremely hard-working, inquiring, mocking, and revolutionary. Buñuel always observed this moral code, and even with regard to religion. Simon of the Desert is one of the most beautiful things that exist in the cinema. To manage to struggle and at the same time to try to find what could be the best manner of being rigorous with regard to religious belief is extraordinary.
Those who had the opportunity to work with Buñuel know that they belong to a family: we are cousins. Julien Bertheau, Fernando Rey, Pierre Clémenti, Francisco Rabal, Claude Piéplu [...]. Ferreri created a similar bond. We, his actors, were all friends and interchangeable - between Ugo Tognazzi, Marcello Mastroianni and me, he used to hesitate, if one wasn’t available, he took another [...]. We were all pranksters, mocking of the talent and intelligence of Ferreri, and at the same time impressed by the surgical acuity of his topics as by his manner of being attentive. Another formidable lesson: Ferreri, at the moment of saying “Action!” used to not look. He would shut his eyes and listen.
LE MÉPRIS/CONTEMPT
Jean-Luc Godard, 1963
[Fritz Lang at the end of the scene inside the Casa Malaparte with Palance, Bardot, and Piccoli says: “Suffering is necessary.” Picccoli goes from window to window walking around in circles and containing his anger: each time he is ready to explode, he is calmed by regarding the Mediterranean through the bay windows.]
In this house, in this immense room where we filmed, you cannot help but stop in front of the rocks and in front of the sea, as if to take a breath, whatever one’s state of mind. In fact, there is a great intimacy between this space and the state that I act and the acting itself; to create rupture, or at certain moments of the performance, moments of unconsciousness, or of extension of a feeling. A look into infinity through a window: that space offered me that
My character is trapped, surrounded by his wife whom he is in process of losing, by the moneyman to whom he doesn’t want to sell himself, and by Fritz Lang [...] who was there all time like an untouchable guru and a bit of a joker. Simply, there, the spectator of the suffering of my character, and that of Godard.
The music is tremendous, as is the manner in which it is placed; it too is a respiration. It gives the impression that it emanates from the suffering of the characters. It is the first time that I am so aware of this, even if it may seem pretentious to say so, of the conjugation between my score and that of Delerue; it was the same mood, the same secret.
There is my character who comes and goes into the room and in a sort of anger and the character of Jack Palance, who goes directly off screen towards the window and delivers a punch, the exact opposite of what I do. It seems to me that it was during this take that Godard pretended to regret, when Palance wasn’t listening, that he hadn’t broken the window pane and fallen [...]. Palance was completely lost on this shoot. Brigitte, on the other hand, although completely intimidated was very docile. The wise man in all that was Fritz Lang.
Contempt is a completely autobiographical work by Godard, autobiographical of this moment in his life. He describes a moment of distress, of self-examination with regard to love, literature, cinema, money. I think that it was a profound moment of anxiety in Godard’s life. But he is such a discreet man that I have a little difficulty in speaking of him, as I also do of Buñuel or of Oliviera. These makers of fantastic images have an extraordinary discretion.
Godard summoned me, as is said, to announce that he was going to shoot Moravia’s Contempt. He wanted to give me the book, but I had already read it - so he simply offered me the principal role, and nothing more was said other than “We’ll see each other again in a month.” When I see him again and he has decided on the other actors, he went with me to pick out my suit. I didn’t know him, Godard, outside of his films; but I saw that my suits would be similar to his own, and the hat was his hat. So I am playing Godard? I stand in for him; he takes me as his puppet. Something which I like a lot with Godard is the way in which he speaks about cinema and money. It is after all an obsession we all have: how do Luc Besson, Philippe Garrel manage? Godard is a scientist of cinema. I think that he has an enormous awareness of what money is; I think that there are many artists who can be the financiers of their oeuvre, whether it is with a lot or a little money. It’s the case with Garrel, certainly. It is another aspect of an artist’s upkeep. That’s why I like so much these people. Godard has a discipline of money; those intent on spreading malicious rumors say that he is cunning with money. But it’s an imperative life skill. Either one earns a little, and it’s enough, like the poet René Char in his early years. Or you really need a lot.
MAX ET LES FERRAILLEURS/MAX AND THE JUNKMEN
Claude Sautet, 1971
[In a café, Max reveals to the prostitute Lily (Romy Schneider) that he is a policeman. Piccoli holds completely still, while Lily collapses, but his very pronounced stiffness is contradicted by the complex interaction of looks which are successively disconnected, vacant, out of synch, tearful, then severe when finally Max departs.]
It’s a beautiful scene. I wonder, moreover, if it is not for me Sautet’s most beautiful film. The character has a dual career for which he needs an exemplary “uniform”: policeman and judge, because he thinks of himself as a judge. He is wearing pants and a jacket, which is in fact a cassock. And when he begins to no longer have a uniform at the end of the scene, when he looks at her and is on the verge of crying, hesitating between embracing her or killing himself, he controls himself to the breaking point [...]. How I managed, I don’t know. It was thanks to Sautet and to Romy Schneider. How to go in the blink of eye from complete self-control to a brush with total meltdown? There you have everything I like.
In holding still, you have to do a lot to give the impression that you are doing nothing. You have to know how to strike a balance and quickly change gears. It’s acrobatics, like aerial stunt pilots - I say that because I have a passion for small planes and I have learned how to stall in midair: you cut the engine, the plane goes into a nose-dive and you learn how to recover. Perhaps I stall all the time while acting, I let go into the void and then I recover the energy of feeling or of emotion.
With Sautet, the idea was a little different. There is a bit of psychology in this statufication. To simplify, you could say: the good thing about being unhappy is that it forces you to self-restraint. That’s no longer said. You mustn’t saddle one’s fellow with your problems, but it is in spending time with another and in saying nothing that s/he can calm you of your pains. Here is what perhaps I practice as an actor; it is probable that I like to calm myself before the distress, or the grotesqueness or the madness of the characters I play.
I am wearing a very white foundation and there is undoubtedly a little make up on the eyelashes. An actor’s coquetry: I find that it is very good to put some mascara on the eyelashes, even for a man, it opens the eye, and the gaze becomes more forceful. But that has nothing to do with the balance between different feelings. This balance for me is completely in the mind. The tear is mental, yes, whereas people think I am going to really cry. But it’s also true that the mental can sometimes make you cry.
LA GRANDE BOUFFE/BLOW-OUT
Marco Ferreri, 1973
[Piccoli at the barre: weighed down by the orgy, he performs slow exercises, while whistling the film’s music, then lightly touches the costumes hung next to the barre, rubs his hands together, before rapidly hiding his face in the crook of his arm.]
It’s fantastic, the films where directors take their time; this scene has an imaginary dimension just by its length. All that is related thus in a single shot, physical and mental states, nostalgia, habits and needs, is extremely delicate and mysterious. The opposite of an anything-goes attitude, whereas at the time Ferreri was considered a political danger, a mental danger, a sexual danger [...]. Blow-Out showed gestures and conditions of reunion of characters who never existed; you never heard about four men who got together to kill themselves in eating! We had fun in being the grotesque puppets of grief, in order to die in climaxing; to die with an animality, not to die of mental despair. To play to die.
Ugo, Marcello and I were close friends and of course we had read the script, but as soon as the shoot began, nobody looked at it again! We were inventing incessantly, while remaining very attentive to Ferreri, but he too was paying attention to our pranks. The take-off on Marlon Brando, for example, was suggested by Ugo; it wasn’t in the script. Ferreri had a very deep imagination, a constant anti-psychological streak. He was a man of freedom of creation and he understood that we entered into his game with a lot of pleasure.
For this scene, he certainly didn’t direct me very much. I must have imagined how this solitary being could be the master of his pain; and the final gesture, the psychological point is very certainly my invention - the take was supposed to be longer; Ferreri cut precisely on this gesture.
At the time ofBlow-Out I was already well integrated into the troop. But the manner in which I met Ferreri is strange. I was shooting La chamade/Heartbeat with Alain Cavalier - he’s another whom I like enormously, and as we say, his evolution is extraordinary. Ferreri came by to have me read a few pages from Dillinger is Dead and to offer me straightaway the role, while at the time we didn’t know each other [...].
Dillinger is the story of man who coming home late, finds a pistol, and instead of committing suicide as is expected, kills his wife, eats, makes love with the maid, roams around the house like lonely child and suddenly jumps into the sea and goes to live on a boat. I am in all the film, continuously. The film was shot in 1969, after the revolution, and it’s a question of the desperation of man who has “made it” who no longer knows where to go. It caused a scandal, so much ferocity on the condition of the “parvenus,” as we said at the time. Too violent, too dangerous.
Ferreri didn’t direct me for a second during the shoot; he would simply give spatial indications. It was up to me to play this solitary person, this solitude, this eternal child or this childlike rebirth of “mature” man, between despair, suicide, simple insomnia, dream. There is another character who comes close fairly close to this, a similar state of solitude and of potential violence; it’s the male character in Agnès Varda’s Les Créatures/The Creatures. Or yet again, it is perhaps close to what Godard used to say to me for Contempt, that I should be “ a character from Rio Bravo acting in a Resnais film,” somehow perfectly split between the physical and the intellectual.
Finally, I have played many loners who were both cerebral and physical. If I had the energy for it, I would write my two lives, psychoanalyze myself via the psychoanalysis of the characters whom I’ve played. That could explain why I went in this direction, why different directors employed me in an ultimately similar way [...]. An introspection of myself and of the characters with whom I had a feast, to talk in a culinary way.
ADIEU BONAPARTE
Youssef Chahine, 1985
[Short scene at the foot of the pyramids; while a writer of Bonaparte comes up with a well-known expression, Cafarelli, played by Piccoli, gets carried away: “ [...] when I will be destroyed by their majesty, I will describe my euphoria!”]
I was very much at ease to do a historical film, “in costume.” It was exciting that it was made by an Egyptian showing how Bonaparte’s army could moreover have brought benefits to this country, history seen from the other side. It is also a farce, as is often the case with Chahine. It was very intelligent on his part. I juggled between the epic moments of the character - triumphant, on horseback, in a magnificent military uniform - but at the same time a secretive man undoubtedly inwardly in love with a young boy. The equilibrium between the outward panache and the private discretion pleased me inordinately. How all that came to be, I will be unable to explain to you [...]. I see now my manner for varying the rhythm of a phrase, to quickly turn to anger just after having smiled, going from hot to cold.
I like to break my performance, above all in the theatre. In the cinema, it’s more difficult but in the theatre it pleases me a lot. To act in the clearest, the most “correct” way, and then suddenly everything changes dramatically [...]. Sometimes in acting, I think of an emotion, an emotion in the actor’s bag of tricks, tears in my eyes. Of course it all happens more quickly than that [...]. Then I turn towards the audience and I look at them to see if they have understood an emotion that could exist. Once I treated myself to a diversion [...]. I was performing in a small theatre-in-the-round. I don’t know what came over me; I had a long passage of dialogue. I deserted my partner to whom I should have responded, swung around towards the first spectator I saw, and I continued the text while looking at him, in acting with him. The spectator looked at me, shrinking back into his seat, a little bit afraid [...]. Still, I don’t think that it was a bad joke. Instead of addressing everyone, I chose one and performed with him.”
PARTY
Manoel de Oliveira, 1996
[First dialogue with Leonore Silveira, in the garden of the garden-party. Piccoli as an old, bombastic don juan is behind her, between big smiles and enthusiasms.]
“This film was overlooked more or less [...]. I would like to see it again. My acting is a little overdone, don’t you think? Perhaps in the overall film, it isn’t noticeable, but here in this scene I find that I find it overacted. It seems to me that it could have more sober and delicate.
Laughter is wonderful. It breaks the solemnity, the pretension - because this character is an incredible snob. Laughter is a joke, sometimes not very polite. I am laughing about what the other one is saying, not necessarily about me. Or if not; it’s a mockery of the character himself.
I am told that I often use laughter [...]. I am not aware of it. Laughter breaks the psychology, like a simple injection of a smile, also unexpected, sometimes. It is a way of being ironic with oneself: I make fun of myself as an actor. Laughter allows you to play on both sides of the fence simultaneously, to smash all at once the solemnity of the character and of the actor.
Above all, I would like laughter to be like a “stroke” in my paintings: not a moment of expressionist performance, a spectacular break, but something linked to an overall sentiment. Which doesn’t remove anything of this function, to undo the solemn. Since I am catalogued usually as an intellectual actor, something that I detest; it’s a constant battle! That’s how I am described: an intellectual who does bizarre things.
I am going to play King Lear soon. He was another great loner. I would like, if it’s possible, to show him conscious of playing with his madness, and not simply showing a character in profound distress. But a character who plays with his grief. “O, matter and impertinency mix’d! Reason in madness!” A tragic orgasm [...]. That’s why people say: He does such strange things! But you are frightening! I am a monstrous actor; that’s a real delight for me, of course. But I try so much to not play monstrosity but rather the secret of tragedy, the secret of desperation. Perhaps after all I am a sad clown.
I don’t know yet if this King Lear is going to laugh, but I hope so. With his daughter at the end, for example, when he says to her “I am old now and stupid,” I have the desire to say it laughing [...] as if a kind of mockery.”
Remarks recorded by Cyril Béghin, Paris, 9 November 2005
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