The following is a text commissioned by film critic and scholar Francois Thomas for an ongoing online series, “Les Papiers Alain Resnais,” devoted to items in the Alain Resnais archives and individual commentaries about them (https://www.imec-archives.com/matieres-premieres/papiers/alain-resnais). Rather than post my original English text, which Thomas translated into French, and which appeared on the site in French and English last week, I’ve slightly revised the web site’s English translation of his French text to make it both more idiomatic and closer to what I had in mind. And I begin with his “hasty” English translation (with explanatory glosses in brackets) of Resnais’ letter, which he did for me, reproduced here in bold. (Francois told me that Resnais hated to write letters and wrote very few of them; this one was mostly typewritten.)
Letter from Alain Resnais to Richard Seaver on the Délivrez-nous du bien project , October 20, 1970:
Dear Dick,
Your letter of October 10 from Southampton [New York] arrived last night. Probably intersected with the one I sent on the 8th, containing answers to several questions you asked me. But — is it a feeling — you don’t seem to be aware of the one I sent you on September 9 (and I remember that you didn’t seem to have received one of the notes I sent from London at the end of July either). Anyway, I’m writing to you without waiting for the French postal workers’ strike announced for next Tuesday.
Perry had told me that he was happy with your letter and the contract and that everything was fine on that side. [Young British producer Anthony was behind the project from the beginning.] The distance between rue des Plantes [Resnais’s street] and Dean Street makes it difficult to check. In any case, his silence is inexcusable and you can therefore feel free to have Konecky notify him of the loss of his rights [Ron Konecky was Seaver’s attorney]. (Unless he telegraphs money to you. That’s always a good thing. Paramount here was still talking about $10,000 as the total budget for a script!)
I always refuse to let a project be read and I had to take a lot on myself to give the material to Carlos [Clarens]. But he sounded so enthusiastic in promising me a reply from Gerald Ayres-Columbia within three days, with his plane leaving the next day, I feared I was missing a chance in case you were not in New York during Ayres’ brief stay with whom Carlos wanted you to have dinner [Gerald Ayres produced Demy’s The Model Shop and tried to launch a project by Agnès Varda]. What remains totally unclear to me is how you and Carlos were able to talk on the phone in such a vague way. I thought you were very friendly. You don’t seem to have received his letter either, which I will xerox for you tomorrow.
Yesterday, when Costa arrived from New York, he told me both how happy he had been to meet you and how much Paramount-N.Y. regretted not being able to help us. He left this morning with [Jorge] Semprun for London, still undeterred, to offer the case to [Robert] Littman-Metro-Goldwyn, with whom he works. [Costa-Gavras had already collaborated with Semprun on Z and The Confession. Robert Littman supervized MGM films shot outside the US, such as David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter].
As soon as I read your letter, I phoned Semprun to inform him of Perry’s silence towards you for the last two months, i.e. the signed contract, and of your wish that only the “second draft” be used. Not sure you’re right about that. I always give people both the second draft and the shooting script, and I ask them to start with the second draft, read at least the first forty pages and then move on to the shooting script. But it’s probably my stickler side and in the end the questions are always: “What is it about? Who is in it? A voice over, isn’t that dangerous? Is there enough action to attract a mass audience? Why such a mammoth budget? Why shoot in the Vaucluse since there is nothing of the period?” [The Vaucluse: this refers mainly to La Coste, where Sade owned a castle.]
Apart from that I feel a bit bewildered because since 1949 I had never met so many rejections. In short, after Mag Bodard and the three British producers, Warner, Columbia and Paramount said no [Mag Bodard is the producer of Je t’aime je t’aime and several films by Jacques Demy as well as films by Bresson, Godard and Varda]. If Metro is negative too, it will be very serious because United Artists produced Muriel and Fox Je t’aime je t’aime.
Costa told me that, in case of a production miracle, it wouldn’t be too difficult for you, if you were given three weeks’ notice, to come in and work a fortnight after the script was finished. Right?
I have no experience of using a “professional agent” (the French equivalent hardly exists) to mount a production. If it doesn’t cost anything (you can guess what my financial situation is) and if you think there is a chance in this way…
Yes, a million dollars obviously scares the producers. But I don’t see any way to reduce this budget, which is rather likely to be insufficient.
I received a letter (and a script) from Californian filmmakers who, unable to find financing in the U.S., asked me to find them a French producer!
[The end of the letter is handwritten :]
I’m stopping because I’m very late. I’m glad you’re happy. Love to you both
A
***
One of the main problems we have to face if we treat Alain Resnais as a formalist is that it risks making us forget that all serious formal innovation is motivated by the search for a new content — a content which is waiting to be expressed by a new form. We could then argue that the same Resnais who, for Last Year in Marienbad, had refused to film a rape written by Alain Robbe-Grillet in the style of the Marquis de Sade would be (or at least would become) sufficiently curious about Sade in as a character to dedicate a year to an ambitious and expensive film project, Deliver Us from Good .
I will begin my commentary on Resnais’ letter to his New York screenwriter Richard Seaver (an unexpected document from a filmmaker who hated writing letters) by recalling the way in which Resnais once spoke about this project. In December 1973, at the Épinay-sur-Seine studios where he was filming in a gargantuan, neo-Lubitschian setting that represented the office complex rented by Stavisky in 1933, I took advantage of a break to interview Resnais about Stavisky… and some unrealized projects. Here is what I wrote about Deliver Us from Good in the March-April 1974 issue of Film Comment: “Resnais visited many places where Sade lived and took pictures there. The screenplay was written in English for various reasons — among which was to create a certain ‘distance’, knowing the constraints of French censorship at the time. Now that these constraints no longer exist, he believes that the potential shock value of the project has diminished. I’m glad we know a lot more today.
A few details to clarify this letter. “Carlos” designates Carlos Clarens (1930-1987), of Cuban origin, a protege of Henri Langlois and one of my friends in Paris at that time. We see him playing himself in Lions Love by Agnès Varda, shot in 1968 in Los Angeles, and he was able to return to the United States in 1970, a few months after our meeting at the Cannes festival, perhaps to interview George Cukor for the book that he dedicated to him, published in 1976. But since Carlos had many friends and centers of interest, it is difficult to say anything definite about this trip. “Costa” stands for Costa-Gavras, Ron Konecky is the lawyer who brokered Seaver’s contract, Gerald Ayres had produced Jacques Demy’s Model Shop for Columbia without appearing in the credits, and Robert Littman supervised MGM co-productions shot in Europe such as David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter. Dean Street, in London, was then the address of the British Film Institute, and rue des Plantes, in Paris, was the address of Resnais’ one-bedroom apartment.
Resnais met Seaver in the fall of 1959, during his first stay in New York. Although the English translation of the screenplay for Last Year at Marienbad at Grove Press was entrusted to the better known Richard Howard (who was to become Barthes’ main English translator), Seaver in the mid-1960s translated a version of the screenplay from Adventures of Harry Dickson and, for Grove Press, the screenplay of La Guerre est finie. Resnais and Seaver began discussing the project on Sade in April 1969. Dirk Bogarde, to whom Resnais provided the script in May 1970 during the location filming of Visconti’s Death in Venice, gave his instant agreement to play Sade. (He had already agreed to play Harry Dickson, but would ultimately only work with Resnais on Providence, one of his most memorable roles.) The rest of the cast was to be made up of British actors — the very young producer Anthony Perry was also British — but no further casting decisions have been made. Resnais asked Jim Steranko, a designer from Marvel Comics, to design the sets in consultation with a British production designer. However, as Resnais failed to strike a deal either with Mag Bodard (the producer of Je t’aime je t’aime, which had been a commercial failure), nor, through Perry, with Warner, Columbia, Paramount or MGM for a British-American co-production, the project was shelved in late 1970.
As a cinephile, Resnais was as nourished by the sumptuous pleasures of studio cinema as the young Turks of the Cahiers du Cinéma – perhaps even more than them, if we consider that Resnais is said to have introduced André Bazin to the German Expressionist cinema. Resnais needed studios like UFA or MGM to flesh out some of his projects, and the sumptuous melancholy of Miklós Rózsa, the composer of Ben-Hur , is a major ingredient of Providence — much more essential than Bernard Herrmann could be for the films where De Palma tried to copy or appropriate Hitchcock. The crucial dividing line between the respective use of their sources of cinematographic inspiration by Resnais and by the young American filmmakers of the 1970s (Resnais is closer both critically and creatively to the way n which Godard works with and enriches his sources) is Resnais’ predilection for mixing and merging his different visual models: he prefers applying rather than simply duplicating. In Stavisky…, reproducing the encirclement by the camera of the facade of a Lubitschian hotel not only implies the recreation in the studio of an architectural landscape such as one found in the Paramount films of the 1930s, but also a sharp, even violent encounter of this facade with an angular 1950s MGM heroine inside the MGM rooms of this hotel, bathed in very classy colors and fabrics.
But unlike Godard, Resnais was a Surrealist, so his desire to give the Divine Marquis the opulent treatment of MGM may well have been a mere urge to imagine and then discover what such a shocking collision between these two worlds could have produced. Certainly not a costume adventure film in the tradition of Richard Thorpe; but what he may have had in mind we shall never know.
Jonathan Rosenbaum