À ma Manière, My own way

When Laurent passed away, we had already completed an initial shoot and begun editing this fifth portrait. Thomas Glaser, editor of all the portraits, and I, probably had the diffuse feeling that we had to see things through, not the film that we had started since it wouldn’t be right to finish one of Laurent’s films, but rather  a path we had followed for about ten years and five films that the three of us had made together (in addition to the four portraits, there was De ma fenêtre, Laurent’s final, beautiful and brief film made for the 30th anniversary of Côté Court). I write “diffuse” because it wasn’t formulated as such: it was more a matter of of getting our hands dirty, moving forward somewhat blindly, guided both by an unfinished film and by a heterogeneous body of material, made up of fragments of footage captured by a camera left running before or after takes and by phones of people who happened to be present at the time.

Of course, there was the idea of making a portrait of Laurent, one that would try to follow at least three of the principles he repeated to us on each film: 1) By the end of the film, the spectator must like the person that the portrait depicts; 2) a portrait is not composed of theories developed by the filmmaker and said to the camera but of what we see them “being” : yawning, grabbing a drink, itching themselves…each in their own way; 3) cinema is a matter of rhythm. An idea quickly enabled us to work with a precise direction : since we were starting with the end, with the fifth portrait, we would go back in time and upstream until the beginning, to the film about Paul Vecchiali. There was no doubt a cathartic quality about going back in time, back to the living: anyhow, this structure withheld until the end. All the rest was the usual crafting: during each editing session, because we edited gradually, according to our shared availability, we refined things,  and new ideas or materials would appear and reshape the film. 

For one thing, our relationship was very epistolary. Laurent wrote a great many text messages and I quickly joined in that game, which lasted for years. So for a film that sought to evoke our relationship it seemed almost obvious to draw on those exchanges. The thing is, that evidence only emerged quite late, thanks to an idea by mutual friends of Laurent’s and mine, Valérie Massadian and Serge Bozon: they came to see a work-in-progress version of the film and left feeling very frustrated by the absence of our relationship, both personal and professional, in the film. To them, that seemed to be the film’s very subject, its whole substance and the reason for my stubborn determination to make a film out of these scraps that seemed to amount to almost nothing. Like many people, they too had received countless texts from Laurent throughout their lives, they mentioned this as a possible avenue to explore, as a way of helping the film take shape, so I went digging through my phone, my notes…Besides, I am a publisher and a devotee of Godard: text is as essential a companion to me as images…”Writing is not speaking” said Duras, or something along those lines.

First of all, I don’t consider myself a filmmaker. Indeed, I have directed a film but only one, and it’s an editing film, and it is important to emphasise Thomas Glaser’s importance in this story. There is something strange in the fact that I shot some of the images in the film, but not for this film : they were shot for Laurent’s films…In its own way, À ma manière, is a bit like saying hello! I am the producer and a publisher, which means that my place is that of a companion - in the artisanal sense of the term. And I think this is first and foremost a film about just that, companionship - of companionship, with companionship, on companionship, I’m not quite sure. The film was certainly impulsed by Laurent’s death, it would not exist otherwise, but Brisseau, Stévenin and Vecchiali left before it, while Lili died afterwards - she saw the finished film. I am not comfortable with the term “tribute”, partly because the film does not pay tribute to them, they are present through Achard’s gaze, within his shots, as the result of his work. I hope it is a film about work itself, about the creation of shots, about an image and about cinema as a playing field for friendship. And, if I was to be clever, I would say that the film tries to prove Cocteau wrong: it is not about showing death at work, but about doing Orpheus’s task by bringing the departed back to life. Well, Orpheus’s love lost Euridyce…a detail that often goes unnoticed. A ma manière is also the title of one of Dalida’s songs, a song about gazing. I highly recommend it. In the end, the film does not close with one of Jankelevitche’s quotations but with one from Groucho Marx. If we can no longer laugh, we might as well die!