At the beginning of February 1979, while filming Loulou has not reached the milestone of the first week, Maurice Pialat calls Jean-Louis Livi, Gérard Depardieu’s agent, on the phone. He yells : “You sold me a semi-trailer and it’s a 2 CV! » Livi has heard others. Moreover, it is known: Pialat is angry, impossible, excessive, violent. Always ready to start wars with its actors and technicians. In fact with the rest of the world. But in the case of Depardieu, he will have to do with it.
It will even do a lot. Four films, inscribed in the history of French cinema: Loulou (1980), Police (1985), Under Satan’s Sun (1987), The Boy (1995). Better, Depardieu and Pialat will grow old together until the death of the director, in 2003. The first is the obsession of the second, a fixed idea, a passion, since their first meeting, in 1973, at Deauville, a brasserie on the Champs-Elysées. The two men have so much in common… Of provincial origin, they are self-taught. Pialat dropped out of school in 3eDepardieu stopped her dead at 12, at the school certificate.
Both keep from their aborted schooling a problem with words. Pialat constantly searches for them, misunderstands the nuance, sometimes slips up, even humiliates. Depardieu explains to him that between the ages of 13 and 15 he gradually lost the use of language, expressing himself only by onomatopoeia, before reclaiming it, sentence after sentence, by reading aloud. Their common territory is a wounded childhood – Pialat’s first film is called Naked Childhood (1968). During this meeting on the Champs-Elysées, Pialat is 48 years old and Depardieu 25. Suffice to say that a father-son relationship is emerging. “With Gérard, it was absolute life in the face of death”, confides one day the filmmaker. Absolute life, the essence of his cinema, which the actor will embody.
With a little work…
This relationship has a dark side, made of violence, harshness, humiliation. Between themselves, but also towards others, especially during the creative process. The infernal machine can run at full speed when they are together. But also when they are not. After their meeting in 1973, Pialat sees only Depardieu to hold, in The Open Mouth (1974), the role of a son returning to his Auvergne village where he will witness, with his father, his mother’s slow agony. The film is partly autobiographical. The son, added Pialat, is “a character who thinks only of fucking while his mother dies”. It is not only a role that the filmmaker offers him, but a solemn entry into his family.
You have 86.84% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.