1966
(Bad weather) it is one of the main characters of the film. We absolutely feel the cold throughout the whole movie. It's very important. In a love story, the colder it is the warmer we want things to get. It's a very special love story because it is not told, I think, in a logical way. The story is very simple but we make constant incursions into the past and the future of the characters. Here is the couple's sense of time. They are people who have experience, have already lived, who have had joys and sorrows and who, at the age of 35 years old, already have a past behind them. Yet everything is still possible. So we keep this past in mind throughout the film in order to know what the present and the future will bring. This produces a film with many cuts since it has about 3500 shots, I believe.
- Claude Lelouch on the set of Un homme et une femme -
What I love to do when I make a film is shooting in real time. For example, the story of Un homme et un femme happens in three weeks. We shoot live, we are like reporters, much more so, than a crew of filmmakers who rehearses for a long time. We rehearse, but never with the camera. I work with the actors at night in the room or early morning before shooting. (...) We're shooting the Monte Carlo car-rally, live. We got a car for the Monte Carlo rally. The three of us are going to race. It will be Jean-Louis, Mr. Chemin from Ford, and myself in the car. We'll run the race for good, for five days and five nights. I'll be able to film the face of a pilot, the growing beard, the exhaustion, the 1.000 things that will occur.
A director can make two sorts of films. Either films that are very dear to him which he knows very well, whose subject matter fits him, or subject matters completely opposite to him. Here, I've made a film completely opposite to my personality. In fact, it's the projection of a dream. This is a story I would have loved to live. And which I will probably never live... because I am not loving enough.
37 years later
The idea came to me after a film I'd just finished called Les grands moments. It was a disaster, nobody wanted to show it and I couldn't find a distributor. (...) At the time, I had a habbit, I still have this habbit when I'm feeling down, I'm taking my car and drive, just drive until exhaustion. My car's a place where I'm all alone, where I can think. And that night, I drove towards Deauville. I stopped at 2:00 in the morning at the beach because I couldn't go further. I slept in my car. The sun woke me up. I saw this woman through the windshield of my car who was walking on the beach. At the time it was low tide so the sea was really far away, at least a mile or two away from me. And I was surprised to see a woman walking at 6:00 in the morning with a child and a dog frolicking around her. All of a sudden my curiosity was stronger than my sadeness. All of a sudden my curiosity brought me back to life to the essential things in life. I said to myself: if this woman is on the beach with his child at this hour she wants to make the most of their time together. If that's the case, she must not see him very often. Maybe this child is in a boarding school. And all of a sudden the story of Un homme et une femme came to me. (...) When I got out of my car that morning and saw the woman on the beach I was not thinking of making a film. The film was a fantasy. I would've love to meet a woman as beautiful as Anouk Aimee in those circumstances.
Personal credo:
Un homme et une femme a fost distins cu Palme d’Or, în1966, şi cu două premii Oscar (1967) pentru cea mai bună actriţă, respectiv pentru cel mai bun film străin. A fost un imens succes de public şi, practic, biletul de acces al regizorului în lumea bună a cinematografiei franceze (şi nu numai).
Un homme et une femme (cu Jean-Louis Trintignant şi Anouk Aimée în rolurile principale) a fost proiectat în secţiunea 3x3 în care au mai fost incluse Les uns et les autres (de asemenea, premiat la Cannes, în 1981, pentru merite tehnice) şi D'un film a l'autre (2011).
Sursă imagini & text: documentarele incluse pe DVD-ul original distribuit în România de ProVideo.
Sursă imagini & text: documentarele incluse pe DVD-ul original distribuit în România de ProVideo.