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Jean Renoir: "La Grande Illusion" and World War I
From: Columbia University
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Columbia University Oral History Research Office |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
In a 1960 interview with Columbia University's Oral History Research Office, the French director Jean Renoir, son of the French Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, talks about the style of his films and the reason he made his most famous picture, La Grande Illusion (1937). |
Jean Renoir describes his filmmaking techniques and the making of La Grande Illusion. |
Question: I would say your pictures were much more in a documentary style than what they think of as "commercial." |
Jean Renoir: Documentary style is true for certain of my pictures. |
 It's not true for all of my pictures, because it happens that several years ago I discovered something. I discovered that the truth is not outside but inside. I discovered that it was like the commedia dell'arte, which has nothing to do with outside reality; it is acted by people dressed as Columbine, Punchinella, Harlequin. Well, these are not real--and it is more real than any picture with actors made up as real coal miners, let's say, or streetcar drivers. |
In other words, my last pictures are even an attempt to escape from outside reality. For instance, I started to do it almost completely--almost wildly--in my picture The Golden Coach, with Magnan. I don't know if you saw the picture. Well, it is exactly a fantasy, not real at all--but it is about something very real. It is about the theater, about the transposition of real life into artificial life, which is very important to me. |
This is why, when you said my pictures were mostly documentary, it was true in the beginning. In the beginning I tried to be helped by the reality of appearances in my pictures. I don't anymore. |
Q: We always think of the French film industry as much more liberal in the subjects and stories they can film, and we think of ourselves as quite benighted and backward. Have you found this true at all? |
Renoir: No. I don't think it's true. I believe that for instance the pictures by Kazan in this country are as true as any other pictures anywhere in the world. And I believe that if the French pictures are sometimes a little more serious, may I say, than the American pictures, it is only because in France the industry is not as strong as in America. Yes, I mean that a producer in France is not a powerful man. A producer in the United States is very powerful. In France, a producer is just a man who is trying to produce a picture, and to produce a picture, of course he needs money. He also needs actors, and he needs many collaborations, and to get those collaborations he has to deal with people. That means that a director in France frequently becomes a producer. French pictures and Italian pictures seem better because they are more the work of an author. That's the only reason. |
Q: We have our Motion Picture Producer Code here, which limits subjects that can be put on the screen. |
Renoir: Yes, that's true. That's true, but I don't believe that any censor is bad. I even believe that a strong censor can help very much. I believe that when you are entirely free, you don't know anymore what to say. I believe, for instance, that the wonderful quality of the early American pictures was probably due to the fact that the United States is a puritanical country, that for instance the point of view about sex of most of the writers writing screenplays was a puritanic point of view. That is wonderful--something you have to go over. It was very good to have to fight. |
I'd like to give you an example, because I don't believe that I'm very clear; but may I say, for instance, that in the time of Louis XIV, a man like Molière was more powerful in his criticism against society, against nobility, against medicine, against religion--like in "Tartuffe"--than people were in a time when everything was free--since he had to be very careful and to use symbols and to go around the aim instead of going directly to the aim, he had to have talent to express himself. And his criticisms, his satires, are more powerful than the satires in the time of complete liberty. |
What I say is a bit of a paradox. It doesn't mean that I'm in favor of the censor. I just mean that practically the censor is not so much against talent as we believe. |
Q: He seems to be against content and story, rather than against talent. |
Renoir: Yes. You know, to me, the belief in the story is your own belief; in any storytelling business, the story doesn't count. What counts is the way you tell the story. And you can be very strong with a fairy tale by Pierrot, and you can do very well with a very bold story by Françoise Sagan. That doesn't matter. What counts is the personality of the artist. And what I have against the film industry, or against the censor--more against the film industry--it is not that certain stories are forbidden. That I don't care about. I don't mind at all. It is just that the film industry is against personal expression. They believe in a formula, because this formula was already successful. When I say one formula, I should say a hundred formulas, but formulas. I don't want to follow a formula. They are afraid of novelty, they are afraid of personal expression, and to me that's the wrong thing. But I'm ready tomorrow to work in a country with a very strong censor, where I would be allowed to tell only certain types of stories, only a few stories--even where I would have to tell the same stories all the time, to repeat them--if I was free about the way in which I like to tell them. |
You know, André Gide said something; he said, "In art, only the form counts." I believe he was right. |
Q: I'd like to ask about some of your famous pictures. La Grande Illusion--when was that made, and can you tell me the story of it being made, how it was put together? |
Renoir: Well, I wanted to shoot this picture for one reason. I knew, and I still know, and I'm still convinced, that the turning point of history is the war of 1914-1918. The world changed. We can divide the history of the world in very wide periods, and we can say, for instance, that between the fall of the Roman Empire and the end of the Middle Ages, we had a kind of period which is about the same. It is a period of religion, it is a period of work in common, it is a period where the individual had to express himself without any signature--and that was very important and great. |
Well, the Renaissance is the next period, a very important period. It is the period of the signature, and we can understand the period if we think that it started with Gutenberg, the printing, and Luther, and that means the possibility of praying in your own language. That means the end of the whole Christianity, the end of one world, the beginning of many little worlds named nations. |
But I believe that now we are at the end of that. I believe that the idea of nations, for instance, is absurd. You believe that you are an American, and I could believe that I am a Frenchman. That's not true. We just belong to the Western world. The division of the Middle Ages, between Byzantium and Rome, is here again. The name of Byzantium today is Moscow, and the name of Rome is Washington, but it is exactly the same situation. |
Well, to me the war of 1914 is exactly the break--for many reasons, for social reasons. For instance, the women started to work during the war of 1914. Before that war, women didn't work in factories. They wore long skirts and long hair, and they were behaving, thinking, very differently. A woman, a girl, as you are, was unknown before 1914. After 1914, they were exactly as you are today. Why? Because they had to cut the hair, cut the skirts, and work in factories, that's all. Or to work in an office. |
You know, they became a new sex, very different from the female sex as we knew it before '14. That's something I wanted to express, and I thought that to express it by telling it very directly was wrong. I thought, Let's tell a war story, and during this war story--I should say, besides this war story--maybe the feeling will be given to the public that this war was the big chance, was the border, the frontier, between the Renaissance and the new Middle Ages in which we are living today. But many people don't know that we're living in a new Middle Ages. They still believe that we are living during the age? |
That's the problem. That's my problem, the film industry--they don't know that we're in a new era. That's the reason for Grande Illusion. |
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