Jean-Pierre Léaud - purple MAGAZINE (2024)

EAN-PIERRE LÉAUD — [Evasively] No, not really…

SIMON LIBERATI — Now here we are, Bertolucci and Last Tango in Paris.
JEAN-PIERRE LÉAUD — I heard about this project because I was hang- ing around all day in the offices of Les Cahiers du Cinéma. I heard that Belmondo had turned it down, saying: “I will not act in a porno film.” So Bernardo cast Brando, who wasn’t bothered by the script. His only stipulation was that he didn’t want to work on Saturdays. So that’s when I shot, and each week for the entire six-week shoot I had first-day stage fright every Saturday.

SIMON LIBERATI — Then came your iconic film The Mother and the Whore, which the magazine Les Inrocks has just named the greatest French film of all time.
JEAN-PIERRE LÉAUD — Yes, they called me. I was glad, but I told them I would do my own interview. I never do interviews. Well, almost never.

SIMON LIBERATI — Why?
JEAN-PIERRE LÉAUD — To maintain the mystery. But you were clever, you sent your wife, Eva. [Eva Ionesco has stepped away from the bar during this.] I couldn’t refuse because she’s my director! You know it’s quite spe- cial. On set she has managed to create a sort of controlled hysteria. She has a gift — she shares what she sees; we watch the piece as it is being created. I’ve never seen that except with [Philippe] Garrel. At the end I didn’t know if I was working with a man or a woman!

SIMON LIBERATI — Thanks, that’s a compliment. If you don’t mind, we’ll talk about Eva’s film at the end of our interview. Going back to Jean Eustache, The Mother and the Whore, which is certainly your greatest role — it also paradoxically marks the beginning of a long dry period for you as an actor.
JEAN-PIERRE LÉAUD — I spent three months on a mountain preparing this film, learning all the words. The subject of The Mother and the Whore was the language. As you probably know, JeanEustache only shot one take. during the rehearsal period, if i got one word wrong, he wouldmake me redo the entire five-minutemonologue. After that mythicalfilm I didn’t shoot anyinteresting films for 20 years. Talk about adry period!

SIMON LIBERATI — You were often seen in Montparnasse at a café. And at the Chelsea Hotel in New York.
JEAN-PIERRE LÉAUD — No, that was before, with Garrel. Andy Warhol took a photo of me, but unfortu- nately I don’t have it. I remember there were black pimps all over. A girl was even raped in the hall.

Portrait by Eva Ionesco

SIMON LIBERATI — In Paris, you’re seen a lot at La Coupole.
JEAN-PIERRE LÉAUD — Yes, I look at the women. I stare at them, like this [he mimes a fixed stare, intense, hypnotic]. I continued to practice my art, but with women.

SIMON LIBERATI — You sometimes act a little eccentric, and you’ve had some problems with the police.
JEAN-PIERRE LÉAUD — I was coming home from the Jerusalem Festival, where they treated me like I was the Messiah, and the cops jumped me and took me away. They had a gun pointed at my head.

SIMON LIBERATI — A gun to your head, really?
JEAN-PIERRE LÉAUD — I had been insulting them. In the paddy wagon I kept yelling, “The cops are fags!” so one of them took out his gun and put it to my head, saying, “If you say one more time that the cops are fags there is going to be an officer- involved shooting.” and I responded, “The cops are really, really fags!” You understand the right had just come back into power, and the cops were pretty cocky, sure of themselves.

SIMON LIBERATI — You were practic- ing your art again, I guess. What did they charge you with?
JEAN-PIERRE LÉAUD — When I was read the police report, I didn’t rec- ognize anything they said. They said I had hit an old woman and exposed myself to her. So I was held for a few days in the Prison de la Santé. Prison, even for just a few days, is terrible.

SIMON LIBERATI — Then you returned to the screen in the ’90s. You were rediscovered. You worked with some young cinephile direc- tors, who were fascinated by the Nouvelle Vague: the Finnish direc- tor Aki Kaurismäki in I Hired a Contract Killer, and the French direc- tors Olivier Assayas and Bertrand Bonello.
JEAN-PIERRE LÉAUD — Yes, I have good memories of them. I did sev- eral films for Kaurismäki. As for Bonello, his films are very stylized and precisely written.

SIMON LIBERATI — Before that, in 1986, you made an excellent film with Godard — Détective, also star- ring Johnny Hallyday.
JEAN-PIERRE LÉAUD — No, don’t talk to me about that. I had problems with Johnny Hallyday. One evening I said to him, “A puddle could act better than you.” He did not take it well. He called everybody, the producers, etc. And Jean-Luc called me: “Why did you say that to him. He’s furious.”

SIMON LIBERATI — And you — some- times you seem absolutely possessed. Rehearsing with you on the film we shot with Eva, I noticed that you were reciting the text without paying attention to the other roles. You were repeating your lines over and over as if you wanted to forget the meaning of the words.
JEAN-PIERRE LÉAUD — Yes, it is necessary for your memory to stop working, so that the words become music. You know that in a short film — your film isn’t a short, but a short film, like the sketch films they used to do in the ’60s — the actor doesn’t have the time to modulate. For each shot I needed to be at maximum intensity right away; otherwise I’d be screwed. That’s why I was so tired in the evening after we wrapped for the day.

SIMON LIBERATI — Yes, I remember you having to be carried. Your assis- tant, a young man who could be your son, he would literally carry you to the Rue Dante, near our set. It was after that you quoted that line by Antonin Artaud on incandescence.
JEAN-PIERRE LÉAUD — Yes, in your film I had no choice. I had to push myself all the way to incandescence. Eva was able to get that out of me.

SIMON LIBERATI — The film tells the story of a conference on Satanism and Esotericism, which is something that interests you a lot.
JEAN-PIERRE LÉAUD — Yes.

SIMON LIBERATI — On the second day of the shoot, you arrived carrying this strange little cane with a snake wrapped around it.
JEAN-PIERRE LÉAUD — It’s a sorcerer’s cane, which I bought at the Marché aux Puces [a flea market]. It’s quite rare.

SIMON LIBERATI — At the end of the film, there is a moment when yourecite a passage from an essay byW.B. Yeats, Swedenborg, Mediums and the Desolate Places, to Lukas Ionesco, Eva’s son [he has the principal role in Larry Clark’s new skate- boarder film, The Smell of Us], and you recite it in such an impressive way, with a sort of held-in breath, a way of skipping forward — not skip- ping, but there is a feeling of jump- ing which made me think of Artaud or the last days of Nijinsky. JEAN-PIERRE LÉAUD — I said it well, didn’t I!

SIMON LIBERATI — Yes. Would you mind doing it again, here in this hotel where Oscar Wilde died?
JEAN-PIERRE LÉAUD — [Breathing very carefully] “In the west of Ireland the country people say that after death every man grows upward or downward to the likeness of 30 years … and these angels move always towards ‘the springtime of their life.’”

SIMON LIBERATI — Thank you.

END

Jean-Pierre Léaud - purple MAGAZINE (2024)

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