Interview“I wouldn’t have arrived there if…” Each week, “Le Monde” questions a personality about a decisive moment in their life. The filmmaker looks back on the ups and downs that have marked his impressive career.
Screenwriter, director, producer, Claude Lelouch has devoted his entire life to cinema. Love is better than life, released in theaters on Wednesday January 19, is his fiftieth film. At 84, he begins to consider stopping filming.
I wouldn’t have come here if…
… If my mother hadn’t hidden me in movie theaters during the Occupation, when we were wanted by the Gestapo. The cinema saved my life both literally and figuratively. We moved constantly during the war. We had to leave as soon as we were spotted. In all the towns we went to, Nice, Grenoble, Voiron, Paris, Aix-les-Bains, my mother would drop me off in a room at the start of the afternoon to have a few quiet hours, in order to obtain false papers, find solutions to earn a little money or addresses where to hide. She went to see the usher and slipped her a tip so that she would take a look at me. I was 5 or 6 years old, I sat in the front row and watched the same movie over and over, completely fascinated, until she came to get me. I was in heaven.
I fell in love with cinema in this troubled time, the dramas of which I did not perceive. I had neither a doll nor an electric train, the first toy I was offered was the cinema. I was an insufferable little boy who couldn’t keep still, and the only way to calm me down was to put myself in front of a screen. The cinema was also the only time I didn’t see my mother cry. Every night, however, in the beds we shared with acquaintances or friends of friends, I heard him sobbing.
She cried a lot because she couldn’t join your father who had remained in Algeria. What had happened?
My father had an upholstery cushion factory in Paris. He was part of a family of very resourceful entrepreneurs, who had come from Algeria in the early 1930s. My mother came from Ifs, in Calvados, from a large and modest family. She was a “little hand” at Balmain when she met my father in Paris. I am a paid vacation child. My parents went on vacation and I was born.
My mother converted to Judaism out of love for my father, but she continued to go to church. My father always told me to do as I wanted, so I wandered between the two religions. He was demobilized after the debacle of 1940. He understood, before many others, that Jews risked being persecuted in France. He told his brothers: “Anyone who wants to save their capital will be dead. You have to choose: if you want to stay alive, you have to leave. He left everything and took us to Algeria, my mother and me, in 1941. There he found his friends, his family, it was joyful. I remember white Algiers and the blue of the sky, I felt like I was on vacation.
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