Every day, a personality invites itself into the world of Élodie Suigo. Wednesday January 31, 2024: the director, Pascal Thomas. His new film “Le voyage en pajamas” was released on January 17 and he is publishing a book of anecdotes: “Souvenirs en pagaille” published by Séguier.
Published
Reading time: 17 min
Pascal Thomas is a director, screenwriter and producer. It all started as a teenager when he created his first film club with his French teacher. Then, it was a cinema magazine followed by journalism, comics and finally by directing and writing screenplays. We think of the films: The Zozos in 1972, The Hot Rabbit in 1974 or even The dilettante in 1999 with Catherine Frot. In 2008, the French Academy honored him with the Grand Prix du cinéma.
On January 17, his new film was released, The journey in pajamasand today he publishes Memories in chaos published by Séguier, a series of anecdotes collected in spite of himself by Alain Kruger and Jean Ollé-Laprune.
franceinfo: At the beginning, you did not want to do this book. What made you fall for it?
Pascal Thomas: The insistence, perhaps, of the publisher Bernard de Fallois, who was a very dear friend and who had wanted to produce this book. I was a little reluctant and eventually Kruger and Ollé-Laprune took it over, but I still didn’t want to. They made a first choice, it bore me. And then they still insisted, I reread the first 60 pages and I said: go ahead, choose what you want.
“They made this book with anecdotes. I read some, about a fortnight ago, and I found it very pleasant. I find it quite lively. There are no thoughts, there are no “There are only anecdotes.”
Pascal Thomasat franceinfo
These memories start with one of your quotes: “Shooting a film is an adventure like everyday life, but no more“. What does cinema mean to you?
First of all, it was an enriching, constant spectacle. Since childhood, I have seen around 20,000 films with my cinephile. When my father died, I was six years old, I became myopic, stuttered and had tuberculosis so I ended up in a sanatorium for a year and I read a lot of Alexandre Dumas, Stevenson, etc. And then, when we returned to Paris, we had a cousin, cousin Louise, who loved cinema and we went to the cinema all the time. We only saw westerns. And then I had to work and I became a journalist.
And that’s when you started telling stories. Not yours, but those of others. I have the impression that this is where you also discover this desire to write your own stories.
Journalism still lasted seven, eight years. I was writing a novel without success. For what ? I had a lot of difficulty with the descriptions. And one day, I made a series of portraits for the newspaper Him that Hitchcock, Truffaut, Claude Berri and Melville had already done. And one day, at Claude Berri’s, there was a coffee table with lots of scripts placed on it and while reading, I noticed that in one script, there were notes: “Daytime interior, radio studio and the director is sitting in front of the woman who is going to interview him” and presto! The dialogue. I found it good because there were no descriptions in a scenario. So, he suggested that I write one. I took an episode from this book which turned into a film. I wrote a little script at night. I gave it to Claude who gave it to his production director and four months later, I got him on the phone: “Pascal, Pascal, we have the biggest advance we’ve ever had to make a film“and that’s how I started. We made this film and it was Truffaut who told me: “Listen to Pascal, it would be better to tell your high school stories“. And so I told these high school stories on Truffaut’s advice, and it became The Zozos.
What comes out in your films is all the education and everything that your parents passed on to you. Your father told you: “Never denounce anyone“. Your mother is also part of your films. Moreover, you realized, at the time of the release of The Dilettante, how much the main character looked like your mother… With this freedom. Did she pass it on to you?
I think yes. She had considerable freedom. She made up words. Once, I met her on rue de Sèvres, I asked her what she was doing there, she replied: “I’m bad“. My father, for his part, like many adults born in Saint Chartres, took us, as children, to Oradour-sur-Glane, which was very close, to repeat the horror of the denunciations. And on leaving, I I still have this sentence in mind which really resonates in a very particular way: “Do you hear Pascal? You never denounce“.
Do you consider yourself a bit of a poet?
Like a prose writer, like a filmmaker… A poet, I don’t see.
So how do you define yourself?
I don’t define myself! Funny, a Zozo, I started with that.
The film, The journey in pajamas just got out. This literature professor, Victor, likes to enjoy life to the fullest. He goes to places that remind him of the course of his life. He has this freedom. Isn’t that the definition of what you are above all, a free man?
Ah, I think so. Against the grain, certainly free. I have always been open and too open in fact. I got into trouble for these reasons, the same for my behavior. In my love life, it was complicated for others. Poet, I don’t know, free I’m sure!
Watch this interview on video: