Senior Theatrical Editor
www.moviefreak.com
a SIFF 2007 interview
French Farce Unleashed
Filmmaker Tirard Tackles Fictional Tale of a Factual Legend in Moličre
In the new French comedy Moličre director Laurent Tirard (working with co-writer Grégoire Vigneron) crafts a what-if scenario revolving around legendary playwright Jean-Baptiste Poquelin aka Moličre. The obvious hook for such a tale is the historically proven disappearance of the writer after he had been imprisoned for debt, but this was not the inspiration that first got the filmmaker interested in the project.
“Actually, the idea of the disappearance came afterwards,” claimed Tirard with a roguish grin at the start of our interview at W Hotel just hours before his closing night screening of the film at the Seattle International Film Festival. “What started everything, and it’s all a big mess now in my head I must admit to you, was reading Moličre three years ago whom I hadn’t read since school. Part of it was because you always think you have to go back to the classics – which of course you never do – and added into that was that I wanted to make a period film, a period film that would be a comedy but in a way a contemporary comedy in disguise.”
Romain Duris in Sony Pictures' Classics Moličre
Which is what brought the director back to his country’s literary icon, the idea of going back to the classics and fashioning a fresh comedy about Moličre and not one based upon his plays, something he didn’t think had been done before. “I had felt there was something quite contemporary about [him],” continues Tirard. “Going back and reading Moličre was like a revelation. I realized suddenly how brilliant [he] was. I read all the plays and loved them. I knew I couldn’t adapt one, it wasn’t going to be enough, so I had to find a concept that allowed me to take all things I liked about Moličre and put them in one film.”
That concept, needless to say, was found the moment the filmmaker though about the 1998 Oscar-winner Shakespeare in Love. “[It] came to mind,” he admits with a chuckle. “I knew I had to do something similar to that. There was this play by [Luigi] Pirandello, ‘Six Characters in Search of an Author,’ where the author was being approached by the characters who asked him to write about them. I thought it was an interesting way to talk about fiction.”
“So, I came up with this idea of the story where Moličre would be approached by one of his future characters, M. Jourdain, who would hire him and drag him to his world and introduce him to the other characters who would in turn become characters within his plays. And, it is only then, that I was reading the plays and I was reading these bios that I discovered this period when he had disappeared and I knew immediately [the film] was going to take place within that time period. It was very fortunate.”
Fortunate indeed, and that’s when Tirard and co-writer Vigneron went to work on their script. But they didn’t proceed to do this without a bit of trepidation, they were after all tackling one of France’s most revered historical figures. “Too be honest, I didn’t feel that,” admits the director. “[Grégoire] did. When I called him and told him we were going to make a film about Moličre he said, ‘Are you nuts?’ He thought people were going to put us on stakes and burn us. I didn’t feel that way.”
“There was a director, I can’t remember the name, who said you need to be not be unconscious and to be unaware when you make films. If you’re aware of the kind of problems you are going to encounter then you are never going to make films so you need to be carefree. So, I didn’t want to think about that while I was making the film. All that mattered was that suddenly I discovered this love for Moličre and I wanted to make a film to try and share that sudden passion.”
Fabrice Luchini, Romain Duris and Laura Morante in Sony Pictures Classics' Moličre
In a way, this can’t help but sound a little naive on Tirard’s part. “It was,” he says with a laugh. “I was doing [the film] because I enjoyed Moličre and I wanted people to enjoy Moličre, so I thought there was no reason for people to not like it. And I was wrong, of course, because there were some people who didn’t like it because Moličre is a cultural icon in France and apparently [we] take our culture very seriously. Some of them, at least, and they said we couldn’t do that, we couldn’t reinvent Moličre’s life.”
“But, of course, that was a minority.”
Tirard smiles broadly as he finishes up this thought. The film, after all, has been a huge success in France, the response to both his picture and its story fairly rapturous almost across the board. “What is very funny,” says the director excitedly, “is that there was a film made about Moličre in 1978, very good film, that was almost a documentary. It was a real biography of Moličre from childhood to death, four-hours long and very austere. A really, really good film.”
“But what’s funny is that when I made my film, a lot of the critics who didn’t like my film would site this other [picture]. And, I find that funny, because I rented the DVD not that long ago which I hadn’t seen since I was a child and, what we forget today, is that when [Ariane Mnouchkine] made her film critics hated it completely. And now, probably the same ones who are saying it is a masterpiece are the same ones who at the time dismissed that one.”
All kidding aside, talking with him it is clear this version of Moličre’s story is very important to the filmmaker in more ways then one. “I realized afterwards just as the script was finished that really I was talking about myself,” says Tirard with a bit of embarrassment. “I was using Moličre to talk about myself, probably because there were things I found in Moličre that are similar to me. It was probably why I decided to make a film about his life and about his work. There were so many things I felt very close to.”
“But, to me, I still wanted to make a very contemporary film in terms of content and psychology. The content was very modern. It had to be. The form had to be like a period film and then it had to be very, very modern and contemporary in terms of the content. I’m not quite sure why that was important, but I felt it [definitely] needed to be.”
Ludivine Sagnier in Sony Pictures Classics' Moličre
“Martin Scorsese talks about different kinds of director and some of them he calls ‘smugglers.’ The reason why they are smugglers is that they make films that appear to be for broad audiences, they’re genre films, but inside of [them] they smuggle very personal things. So, everybody is happy. The broad audience is seeing – I don’t know – a crime story or a love story, but the director is also happy because he’s been hiding very personal things inside the movie. In a way that is what I do very often, and that in a way is what I was trying to do [in Moličre].”
But will the audience get that this film isn’t just a genre comedy, that it is in fact trying to dig deeper than that? “Very often I find if you try to tell the audience something in a straight-up manner,” Tirard answers, “or, if you’re trying to say something important and you say it in a serious way, very often it will be discarded. It was Voltaire who said you should say important things in a light manner, and it is an approach that works for me. You entertain people, but really through entertaining them you are saying things that are both important and serious.”
Additional Links:
- Moličre Movie Review by Sara Michelle Fetters
- Moličre Theatrical Trailer
