In the Cannes Special Screenings title A Magnificent Life [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Sylvain Chomet
fiche film], Belleville Rendez-vous [+lire aussi :
bande-annonce
fiche film] creator Sylvain Chomet talks about Marcel Pagnol, a writer and filmmaker, and the man who had at least nine lives.

In his previous films, Chomet didn’t care much for words. But there was no escaping them in A Magnificent Life, as Pagnol was all about them. “I did a live-action film, Attila Marcel [+lire aussi :
bande-annonce
fiche film], where they already talked a lot. Well, the main character didn’t, but everybody around him did,” he explained during a round-table in Cannes.

“There’s a lot of talking here, or walking around a table, and these things aren’t exactly ‘cartoonish’. We did exactly what Disney does. Before animating the film, we shot the actors first, already in costume, and we would say to them: ‘Don’t act naturally. Or do, but still make it extreme’.”

At first, he was thinking about a documentary about Pagnol. “That’s how it all started. I got a call, and the person asked: ‘Do you like Marcel Pagnol? You do? I’m his grandchild.’ I thought he would be some awful person, and then we became instant friends. Eight years later, we’re at Cannes with the film.

“I didn’t really know about Pagnol’s life. I wanted to peek through the curtain and see how he became ‘the Marcel Pagnol’. I wanted to answer that question. Also, I love films about struggling – about how people become who they are, all the mistakes they make, all the doubts they have.” Or the animals they had.

“He used to be surrounded by them, and so the talking bird is a real thing. The cat is a real thing. The sheep, which they had in the studio, is a real thing. That’s why he had to say it was a true story right at the beginning of the film. We didn’t have to invent things: most of it was already there.”

Pagnol’s mind was constantly on the move, he says. “He was fascinated by new technology. His brain was the brain of an engineer – much more than the brain of an artist. But then he had this connection to poetry because he was writing them for his mum. He wanted to impress her. Later on, he discovered theatre because, at the time, that was the big thing for a writer; then, he moved on to movies.”

According to Chomet, Pagnol – who died in the 1970s – “had the spirit of a child. […] He was always passionate about things, all these new toys. When he was making films, he would go everywhere: into the editing rooms, the laboratory; he would open the cameras to see how they work. When he opened his own studio, he already knew every single step. He was a ‘complete’ filmmaker. The only thing he didn’t get to do was to be a cinema owner. He tried that in Marseille during the war, but they didn’t allow him to do it. He wanted to be in charge of the whole chain of distribution, absolutely everything. He wanted to be in control.”

Pagnol influenced many filmmakers, including the French New Wave, says Chomet. But he wanted to show a human being, not a legend. “Of course he’s making mistakes in the film. He comes to Paris with his wife, from Marseille, and she hates everything about it. It’s raining, it’s cold, and they can’t even find a hotel. I like his doubts as well – he’s not sure if he’s going to be able to make a play in Marseille because no one will understand a word.

“He actually wrote Topaz and Marius at the same time. When you think about the biggest plays, you have Cyrano de Bergerac [by Edmond Rostand], and then you have Topaz and Marius. And yet he was such an anxious person: he was hiding in the attic during the premieres of his plays! He was so scared. I love the fact that his friends would prank him, telling him they’d flopped.”

Chomet wrote the script for the movie in French, but A Magnificent Life is also an English-language movie. “I directed both versions, but we shot that one first. It was interesting because a big part of it has to do with accents. How do you do the Marseille accent in English? We went with Welsh,” he laughs.

But now that he’s done with Pagnol, he’ll return to the universe of the triplets. “Yes, that should be my next movie. I’m starting storyboarding next month. It’s a script that I wrote at the time of Belleville Rendez-vous, 25 years ago. It’s going to be in the same spirit, with different characters. There are no dogs in this one – there’s a cat. I’m taking the piss out of cats now.”