Claude Miller doesn't care where his screenplay inspirations come from, but his films are always quintessentially French in theme and tone. The director talks to Michael Dwyer about his new film, Betty Fisher and Other Stories.
For reasons best known to themselves, British film-makers have tended to regard Ruth Rendell's prolific output as almost solely the preserve of TV drama, where her novels have served as the source for such series as the Inspector Wexford mysteries and Tim Fywell's gripping, richly atmospheric A Fatal Inversion (1991).
Meanwhile, some of Europe's leading directors have seized on the cinematic potential of her work, as evinced by such striking achievements as Claude Chabrol's La Cérémonie (1995), which was based on A Judgment in Stone, Pedro Almodóvar's film of Live Flesh (1997), and now Claude Miller's Betty Fisher and Other Stories, which artfully transposes Rendell's 1984 novel, The Tree of Hands, from its London locations to a wintry Paris for an intricately plotted and thoroughly satisfying psychological thriller.
"I know that Ruth Rendell only liked the Chabrol one and my film," Miller commented with a justifiable degree of pride when we met last weekend in Dublin, where he was the subject of a special tribute programme at the IFC. "She wrote me a nice letter to thank me and congratulate me. It was the only time apart from the Chabrol that she felt a film achieved what she wanted to do in her story. No, she didn't like the Almodóvar film, but I don't know why."
It follows that Rendell didn't rate Giles Foster's London-set 1988 film, The Tree of Hands, which starred Helen Shaver and Lauren Bacall, and is inferior to Miller's film in every respect. "I didn't want to see that version," says the director, "because I was afraid it might be discouraging."
A war baby, Miller was born in Paris in 1942 and continues to live there. When he was 20, he enrolled at the city's renowned film school, IBHEC, and went on work as an assistant to four of the great 20th-century French film-makers: François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Bresson and Jacques Demy. "They were all very different in terms of their styles," Miller says, "but they all made films for the same company where I worked as an assistant director. It was a wonderful experience to work with each of them.
"I was still young and Bresson was about 60 when I worked with him on Au Hazard Balthazar (1966). I was frightened by him to begin with, but he was a nice and soft person and I had great respect for him." It was a different story to work as an assistant to Godard on Weekend, La Chinoise and Two or Three Things I Know About Her. "Godard was not soft," he laughs. "But we loved him, even though he was tough and mean with the crews. We were very impressed by the way he worked."
These were the heady days leading up to the turbulent events of May '68 in Paris. "I was out on the streets like everyone else," Miller recalls, "but I had to very careful because my wife was pregnant. I tried to stop her coming out on the street because I felt it was dangerous for her, but she insisted."
His wife, Annie Miller, has been producing his films for the past six years and had to cancel out on their trip to Dublin because she is preoccupied with setting up his next film, La Petite Lili, which transposes Chekov's The Seagull to present-day France and will be shot in August. Their only child, Nathan Miller, who was born in the summer of 1968, has made five short films and is about to direct his first feature film.
Of all the directors to whom Miller was an assistant, his longest and happiest relationship was with the late François Truffaut, on 10 films from Stolen Kisses in 1968 to The Story of Adele H. in 1975. "He was a very deep man with a great humanity," Miller says. As in Truffaut's work, a theme in Miller's films is the way children become the innocent victims of adult behaviour.
"Heroes never interested Truffaut and they don't interest me. I prefer to focus on the ordinary, unexceptional human being - on real people and their weaknesses and fragility. I have always been fascinated and perturbed by the way children manage with adults, because adults are such strange people with all their lies, compromises and perversions. Children are pure and they have to deal with these strange people, these adults."
It is one of a number of themes treated with honesty and subtlety by Miller in his first film as a director, Le Meilleure Façon de Marcher (The Best Way to Walk, 1976), dealing with the sexual tension between two young men working as monitors in a summer camp for boys in 1960. "I had the idea for a story of a quarrel between these two close friends about tolerance," he says. "It was very violent originally, but as I wrote it, it became more of a verbal battle between the two young men. I had been to a summer camp as a little boy and I was very unhappy with the experience. I hated the macho atmosphere of the camp and the way everyone had to be in step with each other, as if we were in a little army."
The film starred one of the fastest-rising young French actors of the 1970s, Patrick Deweare, who committed suicide in 1982 when he was 35. "The movie exists only because of Patrick, because he chose to do it for free," Miller says. "It was my first movie, so nobody wanted to produce it and nobody would give me the money for it. I think they were afraid of the script, but Patrick loved the script and agreed to do it for no money, because I had no money. It is sad that he died so young."
Betty Fisher and Other Stories addresses Miller's preoccupation with the relationship between children and their parents. It opens on an edgy reunion between Betty Fisher (Sandrine Kiberlain), a young writer who has enjoyed success with her first novel, and her domineering and unstable mother (Nicole Garcia), who goes to reckless extremes in attempting to compensate for the way she mistreated Betty as a child. The film also demonstrates Betty's own deeply loving care for her own son, and contrasts it with a single mother who is feckless and cruel towards her son, the boy whose kidnapping triggers the drama.
"Above all, I wanted to avoid any politically correct approaches to dealing with motherhood," Miller says. "I wanted to capture something much truer and more human. This was one of the main reasons I wanted to make a film of this book. I like the way Ruth Rendell creates these very interesting, very complex female characters. In suspense novels there is usually a good guy-bad guy dymanic, but not in hers. She is empathetic to all of her characters, even the most disturbing.
"In La Règle du Jeu, Jean Renoir says, 'What is the most difficult thing in life is that everyone has his reasons', and the same goes for Ruth Rendell."
The film features a wonderfully natural performance from four-year-old newcomer Alexis Chatrian as Jose, the kidnapped boy, but Miller advises that working with children is never as easy as it might seem on screen. "It makes me very anxious," he says, "because you have to forget all the professional things you learn about film-making and concentrate on being entirely truthful with the children. It is a great responsibility, and you have to keep them happy every day, or else they won't want to come back on the set the next day. They can get tired and bored very easily, so you have to make them happy and feel loved every day.
"The boy who plays Jose was a gift. Two weeks before we had started shooting I had not found the boy for the part, and then came this gift from Heaven, this wonderful four-year-old boy."
With his classically, deceptively simple and consistently thoughtful style of film-making, Claude Miller firmly refuses to make any compromises to the pervasive Hollywood influence on international production. He is even less likely to do so, having seen the result when one of his own best films, the tense Garde à Vue (1981), was remade in the US a few years ago as the dire, plodding Under Suspicion, starring Gene Hackman and Morgan Freeman.
"I haveseen it," he says ruefully. "The problem with it is that everything in my film is under the surface, but in the American version there is no mystery or ambiguity at all. It's a pity, because it's a movie that Gene Hackman has wanted to do for 18 years, ever since he saw my film by accident. He says he went with his daughter to see a film and the theatre was full, so they went into my film in the same cinema just because they had seats available for that. He knew nothing about my film before seeing it, but he liked it a lot and wanted to do an American version of it. He is very good in the film, but it doesn't work.
"I have a theory about why Americans do so many remakes of European films. They make so many films for children that they cannot come up with ideas for films for adults, so they base them on films made in other countries. Young audiences now are so used to seeing American movies that it's like going to McDonalds for them. Every movie must be made in the same style for them, in the American way. They have a problem in responding to anything that is different. It is sad. It's an educational problem.
"Hollywood is like an industrial army that makes the films they think people want to see. Children have to learn cinema at school the way they learn literature, and if they begin to discover other styles of cinema apart from Hollywood, they are more likely to be receptive to them when they grow up.
"There was a time, after the Nouvelle Vague (New Wave), when many French films were regarded as perhaps too elitist, but now there are films like Amélie and Brotherhood of the Wolf, which are entirely French and not ashamed of that - and yet they are commercial successes in France and in other countries. That is a good thing, because in France, part of the takings of a commercial movie is given to French film-makers to help them make their own films, which may not be commercial. It's very important that our industry continues to do that."
Nevertheless, even Amélie was vociferously attacked by some Paris critics. "Well, critics are another problem," Miller says. "There are always critics who find any form of commercial success to be suspect. To say that Amélie is a fascist movie because everybody's happy in it does not make any sense."
Miller has had his own disagreements with French critics. "About half the critics in France have loved my films, and the other half have hated them. Why? I have no idea. But I believe in the freedom of the press, so what can I say?"
Betty Fisher and Other Stories is at the IFC, Dublin. It opens at the Kino, Cork, on July 5th.