The French public discovered Patrice Leconte as a screenwriter and director in the 80s with comedies that have become cult and popular, The Bronzed, alongside the Splendid troupe. Over the years, he decided to dabble in everything, especially dramatic comedy with Tandem (1987), to the drama with Mr Hire (1989). There was also The hairdresser’s Husband (1990), The girl on the Bridge (1999), all nominated for the César in the best director category. César which he will obtain in 1997, as well as that of the best film with Ridiculous.
On Wednesday February 23, his new feature film is released: Maigret, with Gerard Depardieu.
franceinfo: Maigret is a film adaptation of a novel by Georges Simenon, Maigret and the dead girl, published in 1954. It is a first in the cinema. Big challenge for you?
Patrice Leconte: There’s something that I find very motivating in the job I do and a little in lots of things in life for that matter, it’s doing things that you’re not sure you know how to do. I’m not overwhelmed with doubts, but I try to throw my certainties out of the way just to be a little on the alert, not to be too sure, to doubt, but not to hesitate like an acorn for hours, that’s not is not that at all. I move forward by not asking too many questions and saying to myself: as long as it’s good.
There, we touch nevertheless on Georges Simenon, which is very important for you since you have already adapted a novel by Georges Simenon with Mr Hire. He was an important part of your construction, of your desire to also make films, to adapt.
He guided me a lot on two levels. In terms of pure imagination, he’s a storyteller, that is to say, you open a Simenon and from the second page he has taken you by the hand and takes you into his world and you want to know who is behind the door, in their own way and with their style. It has greatly fertilized my own imagination.
And then, what I really like about him is his talent for sticking to the essentials. There is no need to add more. I run after that, well, it’s a kind of virtual lens. And coincidentally, my films are always quite short, this one, I pushed up to 1h28, it’s almost a record.
And yet, you take the time. You have decided to embody this youngest, to call on Gérard Depardieu. He has a lot of humility in this role. How did you work with him?
I pretend to think that when you love people, they give you the best. Simply, we have to have fun doing it together.
“We can’t work with actors if there isn’t mutual trust, trust has to flow.”
Patrice Leconteat franceinfo
I’m a little naive sometimes, but when I make a film, every morning I rub my hands at the idea of going to the set and I say to myself: I would like the whole team and the actors to same time rub their hands for the same reasons.
When we say: “Patrice Leconte”, we actually think of your direction of actors. What is your particularity? Beyond loving people!
It is precisely not to be a director of actors. Directing actors is already, at the base, the choice of actors, but we don’t direct actors because directing actors would mean that we take them for fools and that it’s us who give them life, it is not true! The actors are intelligent, sensitive people, who have an intuition for acting. Especially a man like Depardieu, who has a kind of instinct, a sense of acting, of the stage, which is astounding. No, we don’t direct, we accompany, we are with, we whisper a little something in your ear.
And then, there’s something that helps me enormously, it’s that I’m a cameraman on my films, I film the actors. We are very few. We must be four or five in France to hold the camera. And the actors, they love it. They love knowing that the guy behind the camera is the guy making the movie. It introduces a kind of complicity, even intimacy, quite disturbing. It’s a bit as if the film was our secret. That said, and especially on this film, I don’t like doing a lot of takes and when I said to Gérard Depardieu, whom I didn’t know before, we brushed against each other twice, but now we found himself. When I said to him: you know, I don’t like to do a lot of takes. Him, he was over the moon, he said to me:That way, I’ll be able to be in with the first or second take. Sometimes we’ll do three, don’t worry“Often, we only did one, mostly.
You can almost hear the clock, was it a wish to mark this well?
It’s Maigret’s character, so Simenon, but it’s Maigret’s character who induces this kind of thing because he has this kind of bulldozer side. And he moves forward no matter what. He is wrong. He admits he was wrong. There is a kind of very calm stubbornness in Maigret, which is akin to the inevitable.
“Maigret is a guy who doesn’t judge. He gropes around. He is much more attentive and therefore in silence than in demonstration.”
Patrice Leconteat franceinfo
The investigation is not what interests him the most. What interests him almost the most is what interests Simenon and myself the most, is to push the door of a universe that we don’t know well, to meet people, to be attentive, to listen, to observe. There is a real humanity in Maigret.
And then what I also liked in this film, was to take Maigret at a time when there is a kind of great weariness, an old feeling of fed up on the shoulders because he has given too much. This film is as much the portrait of Maigret as the portrait of Depardieu. That is to say someone who can come back from many things and who still has somewhere in him an energy, a crazy enthusiasm.
Finally, what is your view of the passage of time?
I don’t suffer from the passage of time. Depardieu said to me: “You, anyway, you will live to be 100 years old and you will be in good health.” So I’m still going to make a few films.