Venice 81. Interview with director Claude Lelouch, for the film FINALEMENT

How do your ideas come about?

I film how I live, basically. In life of course there are things I want to do, and things I have to do. I work alone on a script, I write alone, then I'm on the set and I'm together with the actors and I happen to rewrite scenes, pieces based on what is the input that the actors give me. For example in this case there was one of the speeches that was too long and I rewrote it in a moment, because there are the things we think and then there are the things we say. There are the things we feel like doing, and then we do instead. On the set is the moment of truth, the moment when cheating is no longer possible, the present is always right.

Have you met Dino Ventura and do you like Italy?

Yes, it is true is Dino Ventura is of Italian descent and I love Italy very much and if one day they were to kick me out of France, a country I love anyway, I would hesitate between Italie and Quebec.

Does the soundtrack and music play an important part in your films?

Definitely yes, I always say that music is the star of all my films. I engage the music first before everything else, I choose it as a priority and it pertains to what is our irrational part, which then compensates for our rationality that tells us we are destined to die, instead music makes us immortal, somehow it counterpoints that value system and I like to mix the irrational and rational in life as in film.

Then music is always sweet, it never hurts, as words do, and so saying things with music has a point.

What does cinema represent to you?

Surely a movie theater is the most beautiful country in the world, if the movie is a good movie in two hours it makes in a complete journey through the whole range of feelings of human being, somehow it is a shortcut the cinema. It is what for example made me love women, made me love food, made me love painting, music, theater. It is not the seventh art, it is the first art because it actually includes all of them, including theater, literature. I live with a love affair with cinema that has lasted for more than 60 years.