I began on Léon Morin, Priest. Melville was charming and impossible, an insomniac who spent nights driving around in his car! There was always that one person he liked and the one he hated on the set.

Melville must have had a hard time, for him to browbeat others as he did.

He joined the Resistance, went to London to support de Gaulle, and, contrary to his American counterparts—Raoul Walsh, John Huston— he never talked about the action he had seen or how he hadcrossed the Pyrenees. He told me he had gone to London to see Michael Powell's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. But he was with the Free French, in the Italian and French campaigns.

When did you meet Powell?

In Paris, when I was a press attaché on Peeping Tom. I didn't know allhis films so he set up two days of screenings in London: I saw BlackNarcissus, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp—A Canterbury Tale was magnificent. After that, we saw each other every day. But lateron, he went broke. His son told me he had only one meal a day—I didn't know. He had received me at his club in London. Truffaut said something imbecilic, that the English had only one director, Hitchcock, and it was the fault of their climate. I did the first interview with Michael Powell!

How did you part ways with Melville?

We had to break, it was inevitable. He told me I wasn't going to make it as an assistant, and I told him I had been disappointed by his adaptation of Simenon's L'Aîné des Ferchaux. He said, "It's my best movie." So we didn't speak for two or three years. Everybody broke with him at some point—Volker Schlöndorff, Yves Boisset . . .One night he called me late: "Allo, Coco! It's Jean-Pierre, I just read your book on 30 years of American cinema—it's terrific, but there's a mistake on page 698." And he was right! We didn't know about Melville's heroism. He never talked about those things.

People were more discreet then, weren't they?

It was also a form of pudeur, a certain reserve—people feeling they did what they had to do and not bragging about it. I'm very sensitive to that.

Because of your family?

Yes, probably, and I see how certain choices spring from that, and how that reserve can illuminate a work—it explains things.

Wasn't it a big change to become a press agent?

I always wanted to go to battle for films that were unknown or underrated. With friends like Bernard Martinand, we had had our ciné-clubs. And the movies we fought for received admiration from audiences. My parents wanted me to get a serious education. ButMelville and Sautet, my two godfathers, said, "Leave Bertrand alone." I adored Claude, we were friends for life. After my stint with Melville, Pierre Rissient and I worked as press attachés for 12 years. We worked on films by Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol . . .

How did it go with Godard?

Godard was funny in those days, but he wanted filmmakers to respect their contract with producers and not go over-budget. He could be strict—I saw it.

A bit Swiss?

Maybe, but so funny! We've seen each other a few times; he had a restrospective at Lumière; we lunched together. At the time of my film,Captain Conan, he sent me a fax and called me Captain Tavernier. Godardhad genuine curiosity—and he always wanted to be unpredictable. MostFrench critics today, you know what they are going to write. But backthen, people didn't write about the movie the same day. Sometimes when a critic was disappointed with a film by a filmmaker he admired, he would wait until the next day to write about it, which was better.

Can you talk about those years?

I'm doing another chapter on the '70s. We worked with Americans in France—I knew all the blacklisted directors; John Berry was a friend. Later, I worked with Warners on Joseph Losey's Don Giovanni and Mr. Klein, the two movies he made in France.

How was it working for him?

Kubrick was very difficult. I got lots of late-night telephone calls and at one point, somebody said, "No press book." So I sent a telegram back saying that with his creative work he was a genius but in daily work, he was an imbecile, and I was dropping the movie. Warners in Paris went into an uproar, but Joe Hyams, head of publicity, wrote me, saying, "At Warners, your cable is framed in my office, thank you very much for it, you can pick up any film on the Warner list as press agent, at your price." That's how I came to work on Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, and met Kazan on the French release of The Arrangement.

Did your early passion for American movies, and then your discovery of other cinemas, contribute to the free approach of your new documentary? For instance, you go traveling back, crisscrossing borders, introducing the French careers of Eddie Constantine and John Berry.

People think that because I wrote about American cinema, it's my specialty, but I don't like labels. I want to keep a free approach, mixing the famous and less-known, my coups de coeur. When I was a kid, I saw Wake of the Red Witch four times in one week and still watch it now: John Wayne is magnificent, somber, tough, and dies at the end. It's a love story that features a battle with an octopus, but you can see it's true cinema, influenced by the Brontës.

Aside from a brief visit to Agnès Varda's Cléo from 5 to 7, you don't have much on female filmmakers in the movie so far.

The next chapter will have episodes on my favorite movies, as well as neglected filmmakers, among them several women, starting with Jacqueline Audry, who was the first female director in the '40s and paved the way for Varda and others.

Of all the movies in the documentary, which one touches you the most?

Casque d'or. A masterpiece. And Becker is, for me, the cinéaste of "common decency," in the words of George Orwell, another of my heroes.

Joan Dupont was a film correspondent for the International Herald Tribune and a longtime contributor to The New York Times.

Film Comment: Joan Dupont interviews My Journey Through French Cinema director Bertrand Tavernier

September 3, 2016 | September/October 2016 Issue (pp. 47-49)