An idealistic film-maker
David Hare remembers his friend Louis Malle, who died last year Ifirst met Louis Malle at a rehearsal of a play of mine in Paris in 1971. I turned round in the beautiful boulevard theatre some time around midnight, in my memory — and found a slight, cheerful figure with a pipe chattering happily in the stalls with another man I recognised as Costa-Gavras. They were there, it turned out, because they were friends of the play's designer, the great Rene Allio. Yet it was t6 be over 20 years before Louis invited me to have lunch with him at a hotel in London to dis- cuss his despair at ever finding a way of filming a novel he had bought called Dam- age.
Although Damage's principal contribu- tors still benefit financially from its world- wide success, I have noticed that, curiously, few of them have a good word to say for it. As soon as it was made, Jeremy Irons branded it 'a disaster'. The young Juliette Binoche was plainly bewildered by it throughout. And the character of the betrayed wife — which rightly won Miran- da Richardson an Oscar nomination — is always treated by the press as though she were not truly living in the film, but only inhabiting it, like a brilliant squatter.
Had the film been specially well received either in England or in France, then I am sure Louis himself would have been willing to forget the occasional problems he had with the actual filming. Although he loved this country and hugely appreciated the understanding that British audiences showed towards his work, Louis did, I'm afraid, join that long line of visiting directors who have not specially enjoyed making a movie here. He found officialdom obstructive and the landscape unphotogenic. As soon as the same kind of literary journalist who'd so disliked Josephine Hart's strikingly original book began, in turn, to trash the movie we had made from it, Louis lost interest. As we planned another movie in the last cou- ple of years of our friendship, neither of us referred to it. Some of his English obituar- ies gave various critical odd-job men the chance to give the film a last kicking.
However, I must admit I remain immune to the dissatisfaction some people feel with Damage. My judgment is influenced by the experience I had working on it. Every morning for many weeks, Louis and I would meet together under a small vine in the South of France, and over a cup of cof- fee (but no croissant; he told me my crois- sant would kill me; so would white wine) he would ask me to go back to the beginning of our script, and once more tell him the basic story in my own words. Every day we started again at the beginning. I cannot recall a day when we managed to get to the end. Many directors pretend to be interest- ed in narrative. Most have personal theo- ries about it. But Louis was the only man I have ever met for whom its refinement was a consuming obsession. When, later, I was in trouble on a play of my own, he took the story apart like a car engine, in front of my eyes, giving me long stretches of his time for no other reason but that he relished working on any problem he believed he might be able to solve.
Like everybody who got to know him, I came to be intrigued by Louis, and defi- nitely to miss him when he wasn't there. He was the sort of person you just want to have around. His enforced isolation in Cousteau's bathyscaphe as a young man meant he had read everything. As his wife Candice Bergen remarked, there wasn't anyone in the world with whom you went to dinner with more hope of good conver- sation. Whether cooking scrambled eggs with truffles dug from his house in the Lot, or planning the structure of a new scene, Louis was one of the most absorbed people I have ever met. Film-making was simply the natural extension of his intelligence. Yet in person he could be the same mix- ture of hot and cold that so confuses peo- ple who cannot get a handle on his films.
You may think that as the screenwriter it is not my place to say so, but, for me at least, Damage is the most interesting for- eigner's view of England since Blow-Up. But whereas Antonioni flattered us — he presents us as trendy and opaque, not char- acteristics I've actually much noticed us having in real life — Malle disturbed us. He presented us as weird and repressed. Moreover, he did it in a style which was characteristically ambiguous. A film which was obviously passionate and physical at some times elsewhere seemed to observe its characters with a detached, almost doc- umentary eye.
It is this very quality of seeming at once to be both close and far which attracts those of us who think Louis to be Renoir's clear descendant. If I could take the films of a single post-war director to a desert island, then I am not sure whose I would choose ahead of his. Yet for others it is these very shifts of tone which most annoy them. They know where they are with other directors: Truffaut? Wry. Godard? Engage. For Louis, there is no single adjective, in whatever language. His mind and his heart are plainly going full pelt, but where, peo- ple ask, is he? The answer, of course, as it is in Chekhov, is everywhere. Louis' last film, Vanya on 42nd Street — an obvious masterpiece — is based on a play by the author he most resembles.
Malle died in the centenary year of the cinema. I still watch 150 films a year, which means, crudely, that I watch 130 films in which cars crash, buildings explode, huge crimson holes are ripped into the pectorals of muscle-bound idiots, and synthetic extras reel back like cryogenic puppets with their wires hanging out. Cinema's grand piano is being reduced to a tonic solfa, whose only notes are metal, leather, blood and flame. Hollywood, which once let a European art cinema co-exist beside it, now determinedly seeks to destroy that cin- ema by seducing its best talents and bribing them with grotesque sums of money to pump out facile nihilism dressed up as chic. Louis, by contrast, represented a view of film-making which was personal, humane and idealistic. It was about human beings. It had its eyes open and its brain in gear. To this friend at least, Louis' early death has an impact beyond the personal. It seems downright ominous.
This is a speech given by David Hare at a memorial evening for Louis Malle at the National Film Theatre last week.
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