The documentary “Patrick Dewaere, my hero“, soon to be broadcast on France 2, is signed by director Alexandre Moix.
A film that tells the life of Patrick Dewaere since his childhood. A terrible, cruel childhood which made him this man who played in front of the cameras what he could not express and which he kept deep within him.
Lola Dewaere, her daughter, is the voice of this documentary and it is a big “I love you” that she pronounces throughout the film to her father whom she ends up calling: dad.
Both modest and disturbing “Patrick Dewaere, my hero“shows a fragile man, an actor whom we admire and fear.
Interview with Alexandre Moix during the FEMA in La Rochelle.
Patrick Dewaere your hero?
Alexandre Moix: Patrick Dewaere, the hero of many people, the hero of everyone, the hero of a whole generation. And then the hero of youth. Patrick Dewaere, who committed suicide at 35, remained immortal. Patrick talks a lot to young people, it symbolizes freedom, revolt, tenderness, freeing itself from all the rules.
Is it someone who also accompanied you in your life as a man?
I have always been fascinated by Patrick Dewaere. I discovered Patrick Dewaere in Coup de tête, the film by Jean-Jacques Annaud. I saw an actor who wasn’t acting. I saw an actor who was himself, who replayed his pains, his flaws, his neuroses in his roles. I immediately fell in love with this character. In 2003, I made a first documentary with already quite rare or unpublished archive footage. And there, I wanted to redo a film because I hadn’t said everything. We cannot decently understand the personality of Patrick Dewaere and his gesture if we do not have the keys to his childhood. I could not say at the time what had happened in his childhood. His mother was still alive. She made a kind of barricade, a fortress around family secrets. Patrick Dewaere is a child who was sexually abused throughout his childhood and forced to become an actor. He never knew the identity of his real father while his mother knew who it was and had a photo well hidden in a drawer. She never showed him. All his flaws, in fact, he played them, he played them again until death.
Lola Dewaere, his second daughter, is the narrator of this documentary in the form of a great love letter. It was the principle of this film, to say I love you?
The idea was to make another film about Patrick and do something completely different. I have known Lola for twenty years. She has absolute confidence in me and I suggested to her a year ago that she talk about her father, that she do it like a great love letter from a girl who didn’t know her father too well. She trusted me completely. She said write it down. With this text, she questions her father, she reveals him, she shakes him up, she questions herself. It also questions us about the meaning of life, the meaning of notoriety. It is a moving tribute. And Lola Dewaere said to me, after the screening of the film in Cannes, this incredible sentence: “I think that now, thanks to your film, I may finally be able to say daddy”.
What did you discover about Patrick Dewaere while making this new documentary?
I discovered completely new archives. Journalists at the time who had interviewed Patrick Dawere had kept the recordings of the paper interviews which had been published in the magazine Première. They told me, we have tapes, we will search. They sent me these sound carriers and I discovered incredible interviews or Patrick Dewaere indulges in confidence, he talks about his childhood, his mother whom he hates.
– Jean-Louis Urli.
The narration is also musical. What did you wish for?
It was very complicated the music of this film. Patrick Dewaere is both a tender, wild, unpredictable character, dragging deep pain. But also there was something sometimes joyful in him and totally desperate, the music had to interpret, concentrate all that. We find sounds bordering on dissonance, like notes that are a bit fragile, ready to break, like glass. I had the idea for the glass organ when I thought of Patrick Dewaere, you see. This music is also very rhythmic, it jostles, it shouts… because Patrick was like that.
We talked about sound, unpublished archives, are there images in this documentary that we haven’t seen much?
Ah yes, there are images that we have hardly ever seen, never seen at all, which are available at the INA but not in a documentary on Patrick Dewaere. That’s the purpose of a documentary, it’s to go on a treasure hunt and exploit, to show images that we’ve never seen. The 90% of the images we see in the documentary are “unpublished” and had never been used. In particular this famous archive where we see scrolling, one after the other, the children of the Maurin family of which Patrick was a part. Mado Maurin, the mother of this whole tribe who says: “yes, I love my job and my children” and who pushes them from the age of five to the theater, we feel this kind of rather inauthentic love.
Do you think you have said everything about Patrick Dewaere?
I think so. Lola said to me on leaving the Cannes Film Festival, said to me “it’s the definitive film on my father, we can’t make any more, I think”.