Here’s a rare interview with director Robert Bresson for French television on the making of his last film, L’Argent (Money, 1983).

Bresson discusses his unique manner of working — no sets, all real locations, no professional actors, making up a deatiled storyboard and then essentially throwing it away, having no idea from one to day to the next where he’ll be shooting, or even why, and embracing the element of chance and spontaneity in all his films — with candor and a certain brusqueness that is probably a result of age, his general contempt for the publicity process, and a sense that time is running out.

As the interviewer notes in his opening comments, even when the film was screened at Cannes, Bresson consented to a press conference that lasted only a few minutes, before walking out; earlier in his career, in an interview on his masterful film Pickpocket, Bresson seems much more relaxed and less combative. But now, in the early 1980s, he sees the values of cinema rapidly shifting towards cookie cutter entertainment of an utterly predictacle nature, and he isn’t pleased by the prospect, as he makes perfectly clear.

This is fascinating viewing, and a rare look at someone who is a genuine artist of the cinema, who made his films entirely according to his own idiosyncratic rules, which is what makes them so timeless, and also, as Bresson points out, so perishable.

Tags: L'Argent, Robert Bresson

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 21st, 2012 at 12:14 pm and is filed under Film History, Film Theory, Foreign Films, Inside Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.