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This story began in the elevator of a Paris apartment house,

between the 3rd and 2nd floors, to be precise.

I'm claustrophobic, and for two hours,

there I was stuck in an elevator with a companion in misfortune.

So we got acquainted.

Inès was the widow

of the famous filmmaker Henri-Georges Clouzot.

A cult figure,

one of the greatest directors in film history.

She talked about her husband, dead 30 years ago now,

and the masterpieces that always thrilled me.

L'Assassin habite au 21, Le Corbeau,

Quai des Orfèvres, The Wages of Fear, Diabolique...

She also evoked her husband's lasting regret,

Inferno, in 1964.

A huge budget, an ill-fated production,

a film that he'd given pride of place,

and which no one would ever see.

She told me about those forgotten cans of film,

the dramatic story of that shoot.

These 185 cans of film are all that remain of Inferno.

13 hours of exposed film.

The origins of a film that sought to revolutionize the cinema.

185 cans of picture negative,

unseen for more than half a century.

No soundtrack left.

These cans, these images tell us

the story of Inferno.

Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno.

It can't be!

It all started with insomnia.

I had this idea,

which was to dramatize

the feeling of anxiety that I have every night

and which keeps me awake.

So I wrote a 50-page treatment.

Well, I quickly realized,

after having finished these 50 pages, sadly,

that it was fairly easy to convey to an audience

that a character could have ten obsessions,

but you can't share these obsessions in two hours,

because they took ten years to poison this person.

There's a pathological side to this film.

A semi-pathological side.

The main character...

for a period I can't define

because it would take too long on television...

is in a pathological state.

But there are plenty of moments when he's normal.

Are you personally interested by what's morbid and pathological?

Not particularly.

The starting point is you, isn't it?

I don't think I'm a pathological case.

I had been one, but I'm not anymore.

- You had been? - I had a depression, yes.

A real one!

I'm not alluding to a particular starlet's depression.

I tell you... nothing.

Don't think. Forget.

Earlier,

I was about to leave for Clermont with her.

Don't think. Forget.

We're still here.

Like before.

Like before... what?

Inferno is the story of a man, Marcel Prieur,

and his wife, Odette.

Just married, they take over a small hotel

in the Cantal department by the Garabit Viaduct.

The script starts here.

A happy opening. Images of happiness.

The film starts now,

and as it says in the script,

it starts...

badly.

I arrived at the Colombe d'Or

where Clouzot was living at the time.

He gave me the script, some 300 pages.

He said, "Read it and we'll discuss it." It was late afternoon.

An hour later he calls me and says, "Well?"

I say, "I've barely started."

He phoned me twice that evening.

I said, "No, tomorrow morning. I haven't had time to take notes."

We met the next morning.

I asked him a question about a specific thing.

He re-read the scene to answer my question.

It was a powerful moment as it lasted a very long time.

It was ten lines.

But he took a long time, puffing on his pipe,

reading and re-reading,

as if trying to see exactly what he wanted to do and how.

It's an image that will forever stay in my mind.

Clouzot had lived at the Colombe d'Or for ten years.

This inn, far from the din of Paris in St. Paul de Vence,

had become a Mecca of French art.

Here you could meet anybody who mattered.

Painters, actors, writers and musicians.

Since filming Picasso,

he had become a painting aficionado.

Depression and the tragic death of his first wife Vera,

were far behind now.

In 1963, he married Inès,

finished the script for Inferno,

on which he'd worked for years,

and shared the opening lines with other hotel regulars:

Serge Reggiani.

Yves Montand, Simone Signoret,

and her daughter, who would have a small part, Catherine Allegret.

I feel like I'd always known Clouzot.

As Mom and Montand were always there, me at times, and Clouzot,

it was part of life at the Colombe d'Or.

He must have thought no one had ever depicted jealousy

as it should have been.

He cut deep into the pain of jealousy.

Someone with so many fantasies... It's an illness.

It reaches the point of neurosis.

It's virtually the neurosis he depicted... beyond the drama of jealousy.

The feeling I had when reading the script

was something

physical,

much more physical than intellectual.

I remember the story perfectly,

but what remains weren't scenes

where you say, "This is terrific. What vision!" etc.

That's not it. It's a kind

of experience you have when you read through this script.

The anxiety and neurosis felt by Marcel, by Reggiani,

is so strong that you're caught up

by something physiologically nerve-wracking.

You can't breathe.

Clouzot and Romy Schneider.

Filmed together for the first time.

Can 5 and following

contain the first exposed images.

First moments of shared enthusiasm: the costume tryouts.

In 1955, Romy had become Sissi.

Now at age 26, she was this young star

who had already worked with Welles, De Sica, Siodmak and Visconti.

For the general public, she was still the innocent Sissi.

For Clouzot, she would be the sensual, alluring Odette,

object of her husband's gaze and obsessive jealousy.

It was a pretty amazing story, written, I think,

for Romy Schneider alone.

Romy at the time was one of the major French actresses,

despite her Austrian origins.

Romy's co-star, Serge Reggiani, would be Marcel Prieur.

He was 42 and had already worked with Clouzot

15 years earlier in Manon.

The two men knew each other well and met often at the Colombe d'Or.

There were many contenders for the part,

but Clouzot fought with the producers...

He wanted Serge Reggiani.

People said he had a head like a carved chestnut.

So he was perfect for the role of a man

who becomes totally paranoid and jealous.

He easily filled the bill.

Among the hotel regulars, Clouzot cast Jean-Claude Bercq

as Martineau, the mechanic from the next village.

Beefcake, showoff and womanizer.

Did he seduce Odette? Is he the only one?

Alongside Mario David,

the mischievous Dany Carrel

would play carefree Marylou, the best friend, the village hairdresser.

In the story Clouzot imagined, she is both angel and devil.

She introduces the feelings of seduction

and doubt.

In the cinema of the time, Clouzot was one of the greats.

One of those French directors who could

get the actors and the funding he wanted

to do as he wanted.

It was a big film,

in terms of budget and as an undertaking as a whole.

It was the talk of the town.

The fact, too, that he had American backing.

That added to the gossip.

Clouzot hadn't worked in four years.

His last film, La Vérité, with Brigitte Bardot,

had won a prize at Venice.

Four long years of waiting.

As the new film seemed out of the ordinary,

the cameras of the only TV channel of the time,

went to the Hotel Georges V, where Clouzot was headquartered.

He rounded up his usual team of long-time collaborators.

I met a Clouzot quite different

from the one I'd known when making Quai des Orfèvres.

To begin with,

he took a suite at the Hotel Georges V to prepare a film,

when in the old days, he'd easily settle for a drafting office at the studio,

or, as on Quai des Orfèvres,

my brother's apartment on Rue des Bourdonnais.

It was casual and easygoing.

But this time, it was a bit Hollywoodian.

9 am.

In a palace hotel, the Clouzot factory is gearing up.

With an engineer's precision,

Clouzot begins the preparation of his new film, Inferno,

which will co-star Romy Schneider and Serge Reggiani.

His hero's obsessive jealousy has been charted on color-coded cards

depending on the hero's moods, the action in time and space.

Madness conceived as an equation.

In any case, the storyboards,

previously used on The Wages of Fear,

are more important here.

This ingenious system allows one

to calculate the height of a character in the camera's field,

depending on the lens used.

Clouzot demanded

extremely detailed preparation

so that when he was on the set

he could devote himself almost exclusively to the actors.

The 2-D representation you see here

is exactly what you have in the frame

if you respect the focal of the lens

and the camera position.

Sometimes, he'd say, "I'd like you to photograph

"a bottle of mineral water on the nightstand with a 75 mm lens."

But I'd answer, "What for?

"You know all about it.

"You know what you get with a 75, if the camera is 80 cm away

"or if it's 1.20 m."

But he needed

to feel reassured.

And he was someone

who saw things in a big way, from that angle.

He was criticized for that by the New Wave...

for being meticulous, for planning everything out in the script.

That was the big criticism of those great directors.

You had to improvise. That was the keyword. Improvise.

Today it's auteur cinema.

Every generation has its own...

He had a nice line about it. "I improvise on paper."

He was fascinated by the film 8 1/2,

which had rocked the cinema at the time.

Especially the directors of Clouzot's generation,

who made, not so much traditional films, but a certain type of film.

Suddenly they were confronted with an amazing phenomenon:

the birth of a cinema that was something else entirely.

I think that Inferno for Clouzot was

the determination to make another kind of film making.

Odette!

Mr. Martineau was just showing me his photos.

- In the dark? - True, it is dark.

But with this thing you don't need light.

Know what time it is?

- I don't know. 8? 8.05? - 8.20.

Really? Time really flew by.

They're waiting for dinner.

Don't get mad. I'm going.

It's a drama of jealousy that's not totally thrilling.

I think the film would only have interest

if the tests in question had allowed him

to find something quite new and extraordinary,

a new way of using images, of filming a new pictorial universe.

At the time it was all very "in"...

The Ircam, Boulez, electro-acoustical music, Op Art.

That was the environment of the 60s.

It was a big topic of conversation.

At first, with a relatively reduced crew...

There was Clouzot, Winding, me. Maybe a grip... Very few people.

We began filming an exhibition

at the Museum of Decorative Arts, called "New Forms."

There was Yvaral, Vasarely, and others.

It was about kinetic art.

I should tell you, the film is about a man

who fantasizes and is very jealous.

He thinks his wife is cheating,

with anyone, men and women.

Each time he thinks his wife is cheating,

he has these fits of jealousy

and the outside world becomes deformed.

What we had to figure out was how to deform this universe.

Instability... We liked the word.

It was exactly what we wanted to capture...

The visual non-security

of people who look at something

and the denial of visual logic.

He asked

Jean-Pierre Yvaral and me to come and reconstitute

certain works in the studio.

Very quickly,

this representation of objects in the studio turned into

a request to find

effects made especially for the film.

Marcel Prieur loses his visual and spatial bearings.

But the obsessive jealousy also distorts his perception of sounds.

How did Clouzot plan to explore the sound world of his hero's madness?

It was at Jean-Louis Ducarme's, in a small cardboard box,

that a reel of sound was found.

30 minutes of tests, which talk and tell us a good deal.

"What's she see in him?"

In March '64, Clouzot went into the studio

for his first test recordings.

With him was Ducarme, a young sound engineer

in public radio's research division,

and Gilbert Amy,

one of the leading lights of electro-acoustical music.

He told me, "I'm planning a very ambitious film,

"in which I want the music...

"Not just music, but the sound...

"to be foregrounded but also be the mainspring of the film.

"That means we start off with sound, voices

"that lead to the projections, towards the visual shooting.

"I want you to think

"about a way to work as a composer

"on manipulations, of the voices in particular."

So, of course, he explains the aims of the film,

the theme of jealousy, etc.

and the fact that the mind hears voices in a certain way.

The mind of the main character to be played by Serge Reggiani,

hears voices that remind him,

that maintain the phenomenon of morbid, pathological jealousy.

Your wound's opened again.

It's your wound opening.

What did you expect? Your wound opened.

You never started to imagine such things.

Look.

Look.

Come on. Don't be afraid.

Be brave.

As you can see,

she's here, here, here...

These sound aggressions are deformed phrases.

He starts to multiply

his assumptions

and he multiplies them so much

that he repeats a lot of phrases

from things he's seen in his daily life,

or supposedly saw, but which he imagined.

And this progression

in the complications of his mental torture

becomes superimposed voices,

as when a musician writes a fugue.

There's the first voice, the second, then the descant.

And the more time passes in the story,

the more it takes on monstrous dimensions.

At first, it's only babbling,

inverting syllables as in back slang.

But then it grows and becomes totally uncontrollable.

If you end up like that,

take a vacation and go see a psychiatrist.

It's something like that.

Well, then...

That arouse you?

We play bitchy mama.

Hanky-panky, itty-bitty, bang-bang, dickory-dock.

You bitch!

Hell, he's married.

All the more reason to be two-timed.

Let him feel her up, stick in things lying around,

They leave no trace, no fingerprints.

Just a kid sometimes, as a souvenir.

Wait, bitch. I have my key.

You're gonna get locked up.

Double lock. Got you, old girl.

Nabbed.

Nothing.

You're safe.

Don't think.

Calm down. Everything is in place.

Calm down. Don't think. Think of nothing.

Calm...

Next time we'll take a cab.

Odette!

You're going too far.

What? He flirted with me, I took advantage.

- Did you pay the printer? - Sure. Right after lunch.

He phoned at 3 to ask for his check.

Like I said, I went by after lunch.

- At your mom's until 3? - Who said anything about Mom?

- Didn't you have lunch with her? - She had a student.

An hour of scales. No thanks.

I dropped by Marylou's. We had a snack in the shop.

What about her customers?

We were in luck. There weren't any.

Until 3 o'clock?

I don't spend my life checking my watch.

Let me look at you...

You're jealous!

Jealous...

I'm not criticizing. On the contrary.

It shows you care about your wife.

Isn't it nice?

It must have been expensive.

Take a guess.

Crocodile skin must cost in the 800 to 1,000 range.

Are you crazy? 800? Where would I find that much?

- How much did you pay? - When you get an idea!

- Less than 200. How about that? - That's something.

March 1964.

Clouzot and his crew set up at Boulogne Studios for a few days

for the first camera tests.

Tests that would in fact go on for several months.

When we started doing all these tests,

on a low budget, as there were few of us,

we weren't planning on making a film like that.

I can't remember just when it was, but one day we saw

five or six people arrive from the United States.

They were the heads of Columbia

who screened the first tests.

Coming out of that screening, they said, "Unlimited budget."

That's when the film

took on a gigantic dimension that hadn't been planned.

I walked into something totally insane,

which were Clouzot's tests.

It staggered me,

because I had worked on French films

of the most sedate and traditional kind to be part of

a weird combination with all the elements of traditional film making,

with the best cameramen and the most seasoned technicians

all involved in doing the weirdest things.

It seemed clear they didn't know what they were doing.

He went off into a world of tests

that was completely new to French cinema.

It was a mystery.

When there's mystery, there's irony.

When they don't understand,

people get ironic instead of trying to understand.

But it was a pretty astonishing phenomenon.

They expected something exceptional to come out of it.

With Clouzot, it could only be exceptional.

What's interesting in Inferno,

what makes it perhaps not a unique film,

but something rare in cinema,

is that the means, the money

weren't there to have 100,000 horsemen

or build huge sets.

Again, it was a small film in a way.

It was to give a creative artist, Clouzot in this case,

the possibility of freely experimenting,

as he wrestled with ideas, to see if they came or not.

There was something else.

At a certain moment in the film,

he sees his wife on the lake,

in a rowboat with someone.

He thinks there's something going on with this someone,

and the reality changes: the lake which is normally blue,

turns blood red.

It made for an astonishing image.

Nowadays, it's easy to create an effect like that.

Back then, as we didn't want laboratory effects,

we worked by color inversion.

By shooting the normal way the blue lake turned red.

But the rest had to remain normal.

Which means we had to make up the actors gray-green,

so that once reversed, they were pink.

We had to find clothing in complementary colors

so that once reversed, we had the right colors back.

It was a Herculean task.

We rarely had a chance to do tests like that.

We usually did only camera tests, and that was that.

But here we had the chance of doing tests,

shooting with film and seeing the results. It was terrific.

In Inferno, the daily scenes are shot in black and white,

and Marcel's visions and fantasies are shot in color,

the improbable colors of madness.

To produce these "shock images,"

Clouzot could rely on two top-rank technicians:

Claude Leon, head of fabrication at LTC Labs,

who would stop the lab to do his enigmatic printing tests,

and Michel Deruelle, in charge of makeup,

who experimented in new ways:

actors covered in sequins or olive oil, blue lipstick, multicolor makeup.

We worked in total freedom.

Clouzot let us do what we wanted.

He'd come to see us from time to time.

Rather likeable.

Rather nice, a bit sardonic at times maybe,

but not bad.

And then,

when the objects were made,

without there ever being a completion date,

or a special rush for something,

he would test them and we'd try them out.

We had the impression that he didn't quite understand

what we were doing or why.

And he had the impression

that we were holding ourselves back.

So there was a tension,

but nothing compared to what the actors put up with.

Dozens of cans of color tests, visions and enigmatic obsessions,

none of which exist in the script.

For endless days, in the heat of the Boulogne sound stages,

Clouzot tried to fit his actors into strange kinetic images.

We realized that Clouzot had a very special vision

of the objects on view.

I remember there was one work made of triangles

which came towards you.

There were a dozen triangles like that, completely modern.

Very quickly in the conversation,

while Winding was lighting, Clouzot said,

"No, Andreas, the left thigh should stay in the shadow."

So he really saw something else, something very sexual

against something that apparently wasn't.

I had become... I remember laughing about it...

I'd become the specialist of optical coitus.

He had me zoom in and out,

faster and faster, faster and faster,

like in coitus, to reach the final orgasm.

We had no idea what this load of tests would be used for.

Every evening, we'd meet to look at the dailies,

and we'd be fascinated and dazzled by things,

or bent over laughing,

because it was bungled, which happened plenty of times.

But this accumulation of all-out research

seemed to us a sort of reservoir

which he could draw on when it was time to assemble something.

June 1964. The tests were over.

Thousands of meters of experiments and a star, Romy.

Clouzot saw in her the sensual woman haunting her jealous husband's dreams.

For Clouzot, she agreed to everything.

She chose to give him her trust, until the end,

as she had done for no other director before.

During these tests, I realized

that Clouzot was the most difficult director I had ever met.

Difficult not in a negative way, he is never satisfied.

He's a perfectionist, who wants every tone, light and gesture

to be exactly, down to every nuance, as he'd imagined it before.

I wondered,

how will I stand 18 weeks of shooting with Henri-Georges?

July 6, 1964.

Principal photography began at Garabit in the Cantal.

An ideal location: a remote hotel,

a lake, a viaduct, and, of course, trains.

In a few days, the tourist hotel had a new face,

and the ambiance was less homey.

Like the crew, gathered around Mario David,

Bernard Paul and Dany Carrel,

they played hard and worked hard.

The local press announced the arrival of the top film stars,

who all would live here at the Hotel Garabit.

Art directors and construction crews had been at work.

The Hotel Garabit became the Hotel du Lac.

There would be four weeks of exteriors,

before the 14 weeks of studio at Boulogne.

Every angle had been filmed for a few seconds, for prior approval.

Everything was worked out.

Bernard Paul, the first assistant, didn't mind filling bit parts.

Now they had to work very fast.

In exactly 20 days, the artificial lake, filled a few years earlier,

would be emptied by the power company to generate electricity,

after which no pickup shots would be possible.

The lake problem had long been anticipated. Clouzot was well aware.

There were other hotels, other railways along other lakes.

But this was Clouzot's dream site.

He would work fast, with all the means he needed.

But here comes another train, always on schedule,

which makes the viaduct's metal structure rumble.

Buses and tourists go by,

and always that unreal rumbling, which each time triggers

Marcel's anxiety attacks and jealousy.

The shooting took on proportions that were truly Hollywoodian.

Three camera crews,

and not just anyone.

Armand Thirard, who'd shot

Quai des Orfèvres, Retour à la vie, Manon...

The Wages of Fear.

Claude Renoir, who'd done Le Mystère Picasso.

Andreas Winding.

Top cameramen, Florent,

Dumaitre.

He even brought in Louis Née,

Thirard's old cameraman.

Née had been cameraman on Dreyer's Joan of Arc.

We called him "millimeter frame edge."

Every cameraman had a complete crew.

Cameraman, first assistant, second assistant.

Key grip, plus two or three grips,

Chief electrician.

It was an army, not to mention the extras and all that.

We couldn't all eat in a single shift.

We had to have two shifts for lunch. There were so many people.

You got mail?

A letter from my brother.

Where is he now?

In Germany.

Germany?

The stamps are for my dressmaker's son.

You going out?

- To Mom's. - Again?

I told you, she's sick. I promised to help her.

You told me?

The doctor was right. You need help.

My bus! Tell him I'm coming.

Eugène, my wife will be right down.

Still, what nerve!

Writing to her at my hotel.

I wonder...

I'm not mad, girl.

No, I'm not mad...

Not mad at all...

Get that into your head. I'm not a monster

or a madman.

I'm not a monster

or a madman.

So what exactly did happen at the Hotel Garabit?

A handful of people shut up in a hotel in a valley,

a hugely ambitious film,

and crews who knew less and less what was going on.

In reality as in the fiction,

the elements of a strange drama were falling into place.

Everyone who was close to him, script-girls,

directors of photography, cameramen,

all the people who had to scout locations

after the day's shooting,

had the right to live there.

I took the opportunity to rent

a house a few miles from the hotel.

I said, "Take my room. I'll gladly let you have it."

Because he had the bad habit of waking people at 2 am,

as he was an insomniac,

to discuss the next day's work schedule.

I wasn't keen on that sort of thing.

I remember one thing that always made me laugh.

He couldn't stand us not working on Sundays.

He didn't want us to stop.

He wanted to keep on supposedly scouting locations.

Clouzot would wait in the hotel lobby

for the first cameraman to come by

and he'd say, "Oh, let's go take a look," and off they'd go.

Claude Renoir had no desire to go.

So he'd go into the toilets

and climb out the little window.

Clouzot was a bit odd. His assistant went nuts.

Clouzot would call him at 2 am when he'd suddenly have an idea.

And as Clouzot was an insomniac,

he wouldn't let anyone sleep.

No one among those close to him

who were making the film for him, with him,

and at the same time as him.

Everyone was bone-tired.

Unable to sleep, he couldn't stand others sleeping.

So when he suddenly had an idea, you had to be on the ball and take notes.

For him, we had to be there around the clock.

We'd stick with him. When he got up, we had to be there.

At breakfast, we were there. We were stuck to him.

We were his things.

We were his fingers, we were his respiration.

I'm not crazy, girl.

Oh, no.

I'm not crazy.

Soft, normal or firm hold.

At the mike: Robert Vedal.

The UN convened yesterday in New York

in a special session

to debate a problem left pending for too long:

territorial waters.

Everything ended rap...

This is Marcel Aufray in NY.

Yesterday, the United Nations Organization

met in a special session...

So there you are, at last.

- Yes, darling. - I almost missed you.

I'd have been sorry.

- You should have seen my face. - Poor dear!

- Show me, quick! - Look!

It's gorgeous!

And now, a word from our sponsor.

Sensational discount on crocodile bags!

Her darling's gift.

- A handbag for a pair of... - Brown a large amount of onions in oil...

To make it spicier you can add my little darling...

Say there,

yesterday afternoon went by like a dream.

He may not have looked very tasty...

but a pastry that melts in your mouth...

Attention, citizens of Barbezieux!

An envelope containing a key chain

has been lost in the main street of your city.

This envelope has nothing written on it.

Naturally. What a nerve!

Writing to my hotel...

I wonder...

The address... a woman's handwriting...

He had his secretary write the address.

Isn't he clever!

The girlfriend set it all up.

The snack. The ironclad alibi.

What are you doing here?

As you can see... Waiting for Mom.

The Credit Union called.

Credit Union?

It's nowhere around here.

- Where's the car? - Joan of Arc Square.

At the bus station?

I can't believe this. You're following me.

Why would I follow you?

Hard to say why a shooting goes wrong.

The film was going ahead, but slowly.

Despite a tight production schedule,

Clouzot spent hours on certain scenes,

re-shooting a few sequences over and over.

He was increasingly fussy.

He seemed anxious and nervous.

His three crews were ready. Always ready...

But ready for what?

Theoretically, it was smart.

It could work.

But in practice, it was catastrophic.

Theoretically,

you had crew no. 1 preparing shot no. 1.

Clouzot of course was there to do the shot.

Afterwards, as in any film, you have to prepare.

So during the preparation, he was to see crew no. 2.

And with crew no. 2 he'd set up shot no. 2.

Except that in practice,

he'd go in the morning to see crew no. 1 and wouldn't budge.

He didn't feel like it. He wanted to see the preparation,

so the others did nothing but wait, having nothing to do.

He didn't even know the shot.

It was like that almost every day.

I think no one really understood why this film mobilized such means

and why we finally never got anywhere.

There was always some reason we had to stop at a given moment,

and it went on forever without producing any real results.

I remember the crew arriving at 7, 7.30 in the morning.

Everyone was there,

and we were often there till 10 at night.

Waiting or changing a scene.

It's weird. He was so efficient in the past.

When you look at Quai des Orfèvres,

it's a film made with incredible precision.

There's not a thing out of place.

It's superb craftsmanship.

But this time, he'd remain there

for long minutes next to the camera.

He seemed a bit lost.

Marcel, what is it?

What happened to you?

An accident? Are you sick?

- Answer me. Is it serious? - It's nothing.

Where were you?

Don't just stand there. You're scaring me.

Can't I help you?

My poor Odette. I know everything.

I saw you and Martineau on the river.

So what if you did?

I'm fed up. I don't feel like talking.

I followed you! That's enough.

On the island, did you talk about the weather?

Is that why you took off like a lunatic?

Is that why I trembled all day and you made yourself sick?

Sure, we got off on the island. And I rested up.

- Lying in the grass? - No, standing on one leg!

Look at me, you dope.

Don't you see I love you?

That I'm your wife?

Look at my eyes, they're pretty, aren't they?

It's your fault, fella. It's because of you

that I cried all afternoon.

I told myself,

"What if he doesn't come back? If something happened?

"It'd be the end of me, too."

I had decided that.

Leave me alone!

You don't love me.

If I didn't, I wouldn't be here.

I wanted to die, too.

My poor sweetheart.

Is it true?

Did you think that?

Did it hurt you so much?

But it's all over.

It's over.

Never again.

Promise me, Marcel.

I love you so much.

Hold me closer.

Closer.

Romy Schneider was a huge star.

A "vedette" as they called them.

She wouldn't be pushed around.

On top of which,

the actors arrived a bit tense

because they knew Clouzot's reputation of being hard on the actors.

They said he was cynical, that he tortured you.

That was his trademark.

He wanted his ideas to come through his actors,

that the actors translate and interpret his ideas.

Not always easy, especially with actors like Reggiani,

a strong personality who had his own vision

of his role

and the role he was asked to play.

Reggiani was on his guard with Clouzot.

I remember him sniggering. It exasperated Clouzot.

He was always in opposition

and you could feel

that his idea was, "I won't be had,

"I won't be had by Clouzot.

"I know 'La Clouze' and I won't be had."

Relations between Reggiani and Clouzot

were a bit harsh.

I don't know what it was, but they had something to settle.

He had to run behind a camera car, for miles and miles, all day long.

He couldn't take anymore.

If you do it with an actor you don't do it ten times,

or else you do a test with him and that's it.

But here, he wore him out. He was dead tired.

He drives people so hard,

that if you break down, and if you do, he's happy,

and he says, "Let's shoot!"

I'm jealous.

Jealous of who? Of what?

I don't know. But it's killing me.

Sometimes, I feel like jumping out the window.

We can't go on like this all night.

If you won't be reasonable, I'll be for us two.

My going into town worries you?

Okay.

- I won't go. - Never?

- No. Never. - Never?

- Feel better now? - Yes.

Of course,

it's too late now. What's done is done.

What did I do?

Why ask me? On the island, were you eating candy?

Not again! I told you, I was tired. I rested.

You rested for half an hour?

- Five minutes. - Not true.

You went off at 1 1.30. I arrived at noon. You'd just got up.

- It took time to get there. - With a speedboat?

We stopped on the way back.

For the last time: We left at 1 1.30.

I skied to the dam. We stopped at the island on the way back.

For a roll in the grass.

I'd just laid down when the bells rang.

You're lying.

I've had enough of your lies!

Now tell me the truth. Answer me, now!

Yes, I slept with Martineau.

Not only on the island, everywhere!

At his house, in the car, in his bed, in your bed.

While you were at the market.

We couldn't get enough.

There. Happy now?

Henri-Georges

would yell, of course.

Serge never yelled.

He'd leave.

Romy would yell and Henri-Georges would yell.

When they'd both yell, we spectators knew why.

When Henri-Georges yelled at Serge, we knew why.

But when Serge walked off, we didn't know why.

As Clouzot cut himself off and kept revising his film,

the crews tolerated the atmosphere less and less.

Christian de Chalonge, one of the assistants,

a key production figure,

couldn't follow the rhythm of constant changes.

He suddenly walked off the set.

The film was behind schedule, way behind.

The rhythm had to pick up.

The lake would be drained within days.

Clouzot wouldn't listen.

He kept re-doing dialogue and scenes already shot.

And despite the general confusion,

his directing of the actors became increasingly demanding.

On a film, you can't totally escape

the notion of productivity. It's impossible.

So we'd think, "Does he really want to finish this film?"

He was alone. He alone called the tune.

On the script it said, "written, directed and produced by..."

He was the architect of the entire undertaking.

What the film lacked the whole time was a producer.

I don't mean a producer

as a watchdog, but a producer as someone to speak to, to confront,

sometimes to clash with.

Otherwise you go off on wild tangents, you indulge yourself.

In the end, you no longer know what you're after.

It can't be true.

Come now.

Calm down.

You're in your bedroom.

Safe.

Nothing has happened.

Nothing.

I don't believe it.

It can't be true.

It can't be true.

It's not possible.

Everything's in order... Explanations...

Explanations... Calm...

Ask for details... What happened...

July 20. The crew awoke to the news that Reggiani had left.

Suffering from pains for several days,

he had walked off the set, never to return.

There was talk of Maltese Fever.

They had to start over again,

and Clouzot had to find another actor and fast.

It was the end of a day's shooting.

Late afternoon.

It was something

that had been simmering all along.

This time it was too much.

Serge said

he wasn't there to be insulted and yelled at

by a schizophrenic maniac,

that he was leaving and screw it.

- "But there will be a lawsuit." - "Screw it."

That's what it came down to.

He had a mysterious illness,

which wasn't surprising coming from Reggiani.

And people were saying

that he had been so wound up

that he was trying to steel himself, before anything could happen,

he was so wound up against Clouzot

that it brought about a nervous reaction.

I don't know which theory was right: Maltese Fever

or semi-depression.

He had consciously taken the risk of searching

but with 100 people around him.

Which was a courageous enterprise but a risky one.

Every director has had this experience

when you suddenly don't know what to do

and you have the crew around you.

If they like you and respect you

they'll wait, they're trusting. They say, "He'll find it."

But you're under pressure.

He deliberately put himself in danger.

To replace Reggiani,

Clouzot brought Jean-Louis Trintignant to Garabit.

A brief encounter.

What happened between them?

After a few days, Trintignant left

without shooting a single shot.

So for a few more days,

Clouzot wrote new scenes and shots every night

for the actors he had at hand.

New visions. New nightmares for Marcel.

The main thing was to shoot.

Shoot until the end.

A few more images.

Clouzot was shooting a scene on a boat,

a small boat on the lake.

There were two women, I think, Dany Carrel and Romy Schneider.

It was a scene where the two women were kissing.

He was behind with his pipe.

We were very close, three or four yards

and suddenly there were a lot of people rushing over.

Clouzot had suffered a heart attack.

They called an ambulance and he was taken to the hospital.

It all happened very quickly.

I have the feeling that this was the general opinion

at a dinner we had at St. Flour.

Several actors were there, including Romy Schneider.

She said that, to her mind,

it came at the right moment. He couldn't have gone on much longer.

Things were going too badly.

He taught me what other directors before and since taught me.

You have to see your madness through.

You have to take responsibility to the end.

At some point, everyone wonders... "Where's he going?"

"Into a wall."

That's the moment when you have to keep going.

I don't much believe in inspiration.

I believe

there's a job to do every day

and from time to time, ideas do or don't come.

It's like a seed you plant in the earth.

Every day, you water it and whatever grows will grow.

And there's no point pulling the stem to make it grow faster:

If you do, you uproot it and that's that!

Clouzot made one last film, La Prisonnière,

in 1968, re-using his work on kinetic art.

He died in 1977 and remains one of the giants of world cinema.