Original subtitles

First version, shot in 8mm, black & white, 1972.

This film was born when I was a student at ENS.

With a few classmates,

we had decided to create some sort of film society,

whose goal was to teach the people who belonged to it

the mechanisms of dramatization in cinema.

So we decided to shoot a little movie with my super 8 camera.

The school was supposed to pay for the film roll.

They never did so we shot it with...

not enough film.

I'll start with a few explanations on a shot from the middle of the film.

We see a young woman entering an apartment,

who walks around a room,

who's about to light a cigarette and open her mail.

I did a sequence shot.

Why? These kinds of shots are usually difficult but

one needs to know that

the audience is waiting for something.

We see here the typical situation

when a character is in danger.

This character doesn't know it but the audience does.

For it to work, one needs to make sure that the audience has understood

all the elements of the narration

and that they ask themselves where

the killers are and when they will attack the girl.

But for the audience to ask themselves all these questions,

we had to lay the groundwork.

Since we were shooting in 8mm, dialogues were out of the question.

So were mechanisms of identification,

especially since all the participants were classmates.

They were no Anthony Perkins or Cary Grant.

And we had to make do.

Still, we had to introduce the characters. I chose two women.

In order to maintain the audience's attention,

I had started with an introduction sequence in which we understand

that the two killers have committed before the film begins

an act of rape and murder of a young woman.

For the rest of the movie, we're in the typical situation

of a character who's in danger

and another who might arrive in time to save the former.

And there, I used the alternate editing method popularized by D.W. Griffith.

And we wonder if Zorro will arrive or not.

For the second sequence of violence, there's no need to show it all in details.

We've already seen it, and now we can imagine and project whatever we want.

Therefore, the second agression is filmed with a lot less violence and,

in a way, in a more abstract fashion than the other.

I have to say I was helped at that point by the fact that

there's no dialogue, no words and it's exclusively visual.

DIFFICULTIES 1 - The actors

I had not written a scenario either.

I had a simple story in my mind

that allowed me to use

the technique of dramatization

that Hitchcock had used for his film

North by Northwest.

But quickly I encountered

a few difficulties with the actors

who were at first very enthusiastic since they wanted to do a fiction.

But we started with the sequence of the first murder.

This attack is filmed with a succession of very short shots.

There's a lot of them but each time you have to film them.

It took a lot of time

and although it doesn't look like it, it's very tiring.

When I think about the murder scene in Psycho

I believe it necessited nine days to shoot it.

It must have been particularly gruelling

because it's not always fun to film people

moving back and forth with a knife in their hand.

Anyway, at the end of the first day,

the actors didn't want to do the film anymore so I had to do a bit of editing

to motivate them again and in fact this little editing having been done,

they saw the effectiveness

of what had been filmed thus far.

But it was a lesson for me too

since I didn't really have the proper equipment to edit,

I edited with a flashlight.

And I didn't really have a splicer either.

I would use that later on, but at the first screening I did for my benefit

Bam! All the pieces of film roll went everywhere.

So I've become more meticulous ever since.

Another difficulty,

which may not look like much, was the scene

when the girl is filmed in a closeup while

being held up and struggling to get free.

The difficulty was to keep

her face in the frame.

I have to say, you have to be extremely strong to manage it

She needs to really struggle;

she needs to be lifted up and held up

while remaining in the frame.

Honestly, it was difficult.

2 - Technical difficulties

Let's not forget that the film was shot on black & white 8mm

and that there was no soundtrack.

Sound was not available

for amateur movies until 1975, with the new super 8 cameras.

As for video, it was a lot more complicated than today.

And we didn't have any lighting equipment either.

So we had to work it out with the ambient light.

Another difficulty had to do with the car shots.

It looks easy enough to shoot

but on the beltway it was particularly difficult.

One of the major difficulties was the following:

When you film someone in a car

and you also film from a car

the camera has a tendency to move when it's handheld.

To avoid this,

the only technique was to slightly speed up

because when one is speeding up,

the one with the camera is projected back thanks to inertia

and held back, giving the opportunity to remain fixed.

But you also need to stay flexible

so as to avoid jolts if the camera moves slightly.

These shots were difficult to film.

Especially on the beltway. We had to go all around it a couple of times.

3 - Editing

I had put the fim in a small reel but unfortunately I wasn't careful.

And I put it next to a lamp.

It started to burn a part of the film,

which dilated, so then it was difficult to make a print.

This incident caused the image to jump.

There was a movement of back and forth with the image,

which was a bit annoying to say the least.

Even more so when I had a super 8 print of the movie made,

on which we had added a small magnetic soundtrack.

And that's when I added sound and in particular Bernard Herrmann's music.

That music was difficult to add for the simple reason that

there wasn't a record of the soundtrack available at the time.

So I had to film

and record the movie when it got on TV.

So I took the TV's sound,

made a copy, and injected it into the film.

I also clumsily added footsteps.

One other thing. Since we didn't have enough film,

I was sometimes forced to leave in

overexposed shots.

I didn't have a choice.

There's even a missing shot.

When the girl arrives and finds her husband in bed.

She lifts up the blanket and we see a second girl.

I didn't have any film left to shoot this

so I had to use another shot, one of the same girl actually,

which had been shot earlier, and I inserted it here

instead, and no one noticed.

I left the first girl relatively undressed

to create some kind of sexual tension because I had read from

Freud, and what I'm about to say was used by Hitchcock in his movies

that sexual tension could turn into fear.

And that's why I put in some more or less erotic stuff,

especially in the two remakes

so as to instantly create tension for the audience.

When we showed the film at the ENS,

one of the teachers was very shocked by the violence.

The film was shown along with La croisée des chemins

in a amateur festival at the Olympique.

A Super 8 festival.

Well, at this festival,

in two different projections, Pialat and Rohmer showed up.

I didn't know Pialat or what he looked like

But I remember now that he had congratulated me for the film

and had asked me if I planned to have a career in cinema.

These films were not destined to be shown

and never could I have imagined that I would be one day a filmmaker.

But he had liked the film. And La croisée des chemins too.

And as for Rohmer, I learned recently that the film had really scared him

and that this fear has been accentuated by the amateur feel

of the camera angles.

"Amateur" is an understatement.

But for him, it added to the sensation of reality.

You're about to see Des jeunes femmes disparaissent

The film cost around 700 francs.

And necessited 15 hours of shooting. All the participants are amateurs.

It's an exercise in style.

Soon after I decided, because

I had a super 8 camera with sound to film a remake

of Des jeunes femmes disparaissent but this time with sound.

I even said it was an exercise in style because I thought at the time

that everyone within the profession now knew

these basic mechanisms of dramatization.

Especially since Hitchcock / Truffaut had come out,

wherein Hitchcock explains in part how he makes his movies.

Therefore, I tried to prove

if only to myself, that I had the ability to master through the scenario and

the mise-en-scène these mechanisms of dramatization in cinema.

2 - resemblances / differences

The film in its scenario and mise-en-scène is very similar

to the black & white film.

But this time, I had written a text for the actors.

It was an advantage but also a problem

because the film roll was very expensive,

I could only shoot one take each time.

And if I made a mistake,

for instance, if I made an error with a shot or if I pushed

a button I shouldn't have,

I had to leave the shot in.

Same thing if the actors made a mistake.

For budgetary reasons I made the film

with Super 8 and a magnetic soundtrack

but also with silent Super 8.

It's only after making a copy that

I would add a magnetic soundtrack which allowed me

to sometimes add music.

The music is a bit different. I used Ligeti's music a lot.

And to dramatize I tried to add

the sound of an alarm clock.

I found that it worked relatively well.

The ticking may evoke the heartbeat,

it evokes the passing of time and ultimately death

But it was really more of an emotional process.

It was felt rather than thought of.

The film is a lot less violent and brutal than the black & white version

but I still found it worthwhile making it

and from what I heard, people thought there was suspense in it.

I wrote a text

but it was mainly to amuse myself by parodying

the mostly Italian films that tried to copy Psycho.

What's the real reason why you're sending me back?

- Because he's never touched you. - What?

You did say he has never... defiled you, didn't you?

You mean that he's never made love to me?

That's true. So what?

So what? You're lucky!

- Really lucky. - Is that so?

He's a superior being, who respects you.

You have nothing to fear from him.

He has flaws but the makings of someone exceptional.

He's not the kind of man who would violate your body in a bestial manner.

You are very lucky.

A lot of people tried to make the same film over and over,

to scare people shitless like Hitchcock did.

But they never succeeded.

They thought that featuring a psycho

with a bad relationship with his crazy mother

was enough to scare the hell out of people.

Which means they didn't get it at all because those mechanisms of narration

for suspense can be found everywhere,

including in melodramas like An Affair to Remember,

in the film's last sequence.

So I made a parody of these films and a parody of Hitchcock.

It was clearly inspired by Anthony Perkins and his mother in Psycho.

No Mom, I didn't take your sleeping pills.

No, I won't.

No, I'm not disrespecting you.

No.

No, she hasn't come home yet.

I miss her a little, you know.

Listen Mom,

couldn't I go get her?

Calm down, Mom.

I may be in the wrong too.

She's my wife, you know.

I thought that the sound would help the audience to identify with the actors.

But I really exaggerated

some situations and some dialogues to amuse myself,

rendering those almost implausible.

I got married six months ago on your advice.

15 days in, he started to cheat on me.

Because of you, I forgave him and went back.

So, he starts beating me up.

You must not have been that innocent either.

At night, he locks me up in my room.

He kisses me.

He even blindfolds me.

Then, he locks the door,

he closes the shutters

And he leaves to spend the night at his mother's.

You see? He's not cheating on you.

I never really thought that the film would one day be shown in a theater.

I did tracking shots in this movie

And it was the same old story.

I didn't have the equipment to film tracking shots so we used

a shopping cart we'd taken from a supermarket.

We would put in it the person holding the camera to film the tracking shots.

For the car sequences,

we encountered the same difficulties from the previous film.

With this difference being that my friend Claude Morel's car

was quite small

so me being tall made it hard to get in the proper position for the shots.

The film looks a lot like the previous one.

But there are a few differences.

In the first one, I had filmed a sequence shot when the girl comes back

after her friend's murder,

but this time, the location was not suited for it.

So I filmed Lisa in a bedroom,

but I showed one of the killers at the beginning

whereas I had shown the killer at the end in the black & white version.

This time around, the girl agreed to get undressed.

She was a friend of Lisa's.

I used the same Freudian principle.

However there's one thing I regret leaving in.

I thought the movie was done and left it as it was.

There's a voice-over in the last shot when the camera is panning on the roof

to show Paris.

I should have kept it silent,

but I made a mistake and kept the voice-over.

The second killer was played by

a friend, Jean-Claude Finck,

who was a tutor at ENS.

He'd been very stricken with the first film and with La Croisée des chemins.

And if I'm talking about him, it's because

I owe him my career as a filmmaker,

or at least the direction took by my career in cinema.

He was indeed the one who dragged me to Rohmer's when he found out Rohmer

was at the screening with Béatrice Romand.

And that's how I met Rohmer, but without him I would never have gone.

I never thought the movie might be of interest to anyone,

let alone Rohmer.

He had really like the movie

and that's how we met and became friends.

Third version, filmed in 3D

1 - Why a second remake?

I was a guest lecturer at Le Fresnoy

and at the end of term, they asked me to make a movie.

I was a bit embarrassed because I didn't feel like it.

Then, I thought about it,

and months earlier I had bought for myself a 3D TV set

despite the bad memories I had

of the few 3D screenings I had seen when I was around 10 years old.

In 1982, the film was shown in 3D on TV.

The whole country rushed to their TV but it was a technical disaster.

The disappointment was such that there hasn't been any 3D on TV ever since.

And I realized that 3D,

with the technological advancements, could give impressive results

so I told myself I'd try it out.

So, I wanted to make this small movie

to experiment with the 3D on two things in particular.

On the one hand, the erotic elements, with chroma keying,

and on the other, the elements of suspense

centered around the moment when

the girl comes back to the apartment, with us knowing there's been a murder

but not knowing where the two killers are.

And we wonder when she's making her way around the apartment

where they are hidden, and so I tried to create suspense from the empty space.

Des jeunes femmes disparaissent, was the perfect material

in terms of duration and scenario to experiment with 3D.

The preparation of the movie necessited two things.

First, to understand how certain elements of 3D worked.

I was told that you couldn't film from less than three feet away

and there is a sequence when we see

a girl looking at herself in a mirror from some guy's point of view.

So, I had to work it out

since the camera was supposed to be right by the guy's head.

We also experimented with the chroma keying.

George Prat, the sound guy, expected

the 3D shooting to create a bunch of difficulties

but in fact it was really easy.

The film was shot in four and a half days

including only one day when we filmed from 1pm to 8pm

because of a mistake of location scouting.

I had planned to start the shooting on May 1st

thinking there wouldn't be too many cars but there were demonstrations in Paris

and the police were diverting the cars

and so there were a lot of them in some areas.

We also needed to be able to park the cars.

And to find a spot,

I had to keep an eye out for three or four hours.

The weather was always changing,

alternating between rain and sun.

So I ended up adding a weather report from the radio to justify it.

Don't go out without your umbrella today.

Indeed, our nice anticyclone has left us

and heavy rain as well as storms are to be expected,

notwithstanding a few short-lived sunny spells.

In the first two movies, there was mention of a child but

since this one was probably going to be shown in theaters

I had to ask the commission which depended of the DHHS

and they would never have agreed to it.

I didn't want it to be gratuitous anyway.

In the first couple of movies, we see a child but everything is stylized.

Still, I wanted a shock effect

when the girl replacing the child arrives.

To accentuate the violence, we made it look like she was having her throat cut.

We used her t-shirt on which we projected

blood with a a rubber bulb.

It took some time because it wasn't that easy to do.

Show me what it looks like...

I used 3D for the erotic sequence,

the 3D and the chroma keying.

But, as I was told later on,

it had a poetic effect which lessened the erotic strength of the movie.

Another difference had to do with

what I called the sequence shot in the two previous films.

Here, it's a lot longer because it's almost a scene in itself,

which necessited several shots

so we could properly see the apartment.

An apartment I had shown multiple times through the girls' movements.

There's still the character on the phone with her mother.

I tried to somewhat maintain the parody.

No, Mom. I never feel like she's really here.

I can see she doesn't love me.

She always recoils a little when I touch her.

And evidently when we make love, she gets bored so...

I get bored too.

I used the music composed by Jean Musy for l'Ange noir,

one of my previous films.

The audience will decide whether the 3D photography added something.

I feel like it did,

because I saw a few members in the audience

who saw the film projected here got scared

including Jean Musy who couldn't watch it to the end.

I think that's because he was very emotional,

since this film was a lot less violent and scary than my previous films.

However, people told me "what do you want us to do with this movie?"

It lasts around half an hour.

If you had done a 90-minute movie, we could definitely have released it.

I had a few regrets because this film was shot in 4 and a half days,

was relatively inexpensive,

so I could have done a 90-minute movie by rewriting the scenario.

When the second girl is about to be murdered, I added some shots with stars

but it was totally to achieve a sense of surrealism.

I added the mummies in the bathroom.

The references to Hitchcock were obvious,

but at first,

there was nothing really scary at the end of the bathroom sequence.

So, I added the body we see when opening the shower curtain

and the bandages for a shock effect.

I also added a scream

for that very same shock effect

very much inspired by Hitchcock.

When it comes to it, I never recreated Psycho or North by Northwest

but these mechanisms of dramatization

were used in all of my movies with no exceptions,

in different forms of course because none were really a thriller.

I bring to the table a good deal of themes which are dear to me.

In a way, I'm doing the same movie, albeit in completely different forms,

and after all, I was one of the first to mix,

which is not very French,

the comical, the drama, the fantastic, the erotic,

in a mix that is more Anglo-saxon than French.

Now, I see a lot of people doing this mix of poetry, fantastic and erotic

but when I started making movies, no one was doing it.

Almost everyone was against that kind of thing.

I have to say I was extremely proud

because when a retrospective around Vertigo was

organized in an Parisian theater,

I saw my name,

with l'Ange Noir,

next to those of Hitchcock and Bunuel, for El.

But I was pushed towards cinema for other reasons.

I wanted to get back to the cinema of my childhood and my adolescence.

And by the way, it makes me a bit sad these days

to realize that this cinema,

that I would have liked to copy or imitate, has completely vanished.