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I was very pleased to attend a screening of The Girl on the Bridge last night at which the director Patrice Leconte was feted. He's long been one of my favorite directors, and it was a kick to get to meet him (he took a picture with me and signed my DVD of The Hairdresser's Husband, my favorite of his films).
Leconte was charming and funny, in an understated way, during the Q&A following the picture. He said that he and actor Daniel Auteil have a two-man mutual admiration society and when Leconte announced recently that he's going to make just three more pictures (he's concerned about slipping into mediocrity, as some directors do), Auteil got quite miffed with him. Auteil finally forgave him, Leconte said, but only if he promised to make all three pictures with the actor.
Leconte said doesn't have a favorite among his movies. He loves them all, even though he knows there were some that don't really stack up. It'd be like choosing between his daughters to select a favorite movie, he said, and he could never do that.
Leconte had Vanessa Paradis in mind for the female lead in The Girl on the Bridge from the very beginning, Leconte said. "I don't know if she's a muse -- you'd have to ask Johnny Depp" he quipped. "But she was for us."
Leconte revealed that it took nearly as much effort to convince Paradis to cut her hair for the film as it did to make the whole picture, but he's convinced that her fetching hairdo is what cemented her character and put the film over the top.
The Girl on the Bridge is the only movie Leconte's ever made in black and white, and the only one he will make, but he was adamant from the beginning, he said, that it had to be made in black and white. Color, he is convinced, would have overwhelmed the story.
For Leconte, the magic of cinema is not that it can show everything, but that it can be used to suggest so much. Much is lost, he said, when all the details are revealed -- it is suggestion and allusion that interests him.
A recent interview with a film student revealed to Leconte something he'd never realized about his movies -- that virtually all of his movies begin with an encounter between strangers, and their lives being altered as a result. He was startled, he said, at the realization; no one had ever pointed it out to him before. He said he realizes now that he'd struggle to make a movie about, say, a long-married couple, that he thinks there's a similarity between movie-making and chemistry.
"You take a few drops of Vanessa Paradis and put them in a test tube," Leconte said. "She's a sad young woman ready to end it all. Then you add a few drops of Daniel Auteil, a knife thrower at the end of his career. And poof! You watch how they interact with each other and impact each other."
Leconte said that he's always apprehensive about introducing one of his films, as he did The Girl on the Bridge, as he feels he is expected to come up with something brilliant and insightful. "I can't say, 'This film is in black and white,'" he quipped. "You'll see that soon enough." He much prefers a post-show Q&A, where he can provide concrete info in response to viewers' questions, and he certainly did that last night.
I was very pleased to see that Leconte had signed my DVD, "Vive le cinema!" Everyone in attendance for this delightful evening would no doubt have echoed that sentiment.
Today I stopped in during my lunch hour for a decaf Americano at Flo's former place of employ, and as I departed, it hit me that the knit-capped schlub standing in line waiting to order was Paul Giamatti.
On Friday evening, I turned north on Broadway from 54th Street on my way to meet Flo for dinner and who should I cross paths with but Sean "Puff Daddy-P. Diddy-Puffy" Combs as he exited what I think is his corporate headquarters.
Then, on Saturday, Flo and I were strolling south on First Avenue along about Fourth Street, and we passed Mario Cantone, walking north and looking preoccupied. As a child, Flo appeared on Steampipe Alley, a children's television show Cantone hosted on WWOR-TV in Secaucus, New Jersey, from 1987 to 1993, so you'd think he'd have been thrilled to see her. But did he greet her warmly? Were hugs exchanged? They were not.