« My father had forgiven Truffaut » 
 

Posted on 14.10.2023

Former Director of Fiction at Canal+ and now an independent producer, Fabrice de la Patellière is in Lyon to introduce works of the filmography of his father, Denys (1921-2013), whom Michel Audiard had affectionately nicknamed "le père Pat”. He gives us precious keys to comprehending an underestimated body of work.

 
Taxi for Tobruk

What is your favourite film directed by your father?

Fabrice de la Patellière: I think it's Taxi for Tobruk - I'm not being very original in saying that. It's his most popular film and I find it very well done. I obviously have an intimate relationship with my father's cinema. My father was a very humble and modest man. He never talked about his films. But he did talk about shooting. The Taxi shoot was quite epic and complicated, a filming experience that he could laugh about years later, but which was difficult at the time. Gaumont didn't believe in the film. Alain Poiré, the producer, wanted a classic war film but my father made a different film. Not an anti-militarist film, as has often been suggested. My father was not anti-militarist, he was the son of an officer, he had prepared for Saint-Cyr. But, on the other hand, an anti-war film, yes, naturally. So Gaumont did not expect much from it and released it without fanfare. Except that from the very first day, from the very first screening, there were huge queues and the film was a great success. I think my father liked the film because it had an air of revenge about it. He made it with a bit of an “anti” attitude because he didn't feel supported by the production.

It was also a personal film because he himself had fought in the war...

Fabrice de la Patellière: My father was born in 1921. He was the son of a soldier brought up in a little provincial nobility that was very conservative, very right-wing, very Catholic. He went to join the cadets at Saint-Cyr, which he failed, just before the war, in 1939, I believe. ‘Fortunately,’ he said later… Then came the war. Everything crumbled for him, as it did for many people. Especially at the time of the debacle, when he saw the government fleeing Paris, the army retreating, people not fighting, and so on. The opposite of the values he had been taught. He was deeply disappointed and I wouldn't say that it made him bitter, but it changed him. What's more, on a personal level, the war took his two brothers away from him and his own father died of grief as a result.

You were born in 1968, and your father stopped making films five years later to devote himself exclusively to television. Did he have any regrets about this decision?

Fabrice de la Patellière: In fact, I was born in the year of The Tattooed One, after which my father made only three more films for the big screen. One of them, Death of a Jew, directed in Israel, is almost non-existent, although in my memory it was quite good. He didn't just give up cinema all of a sudden, he continued to try to make films, without succeeding. In particular, he had a project in which he had invested a lot of time, a film about Victor Hugo that would have starred Jean Gabin. It's a shame that this film didn't see the light of day because he had a great passion for Hugo. I think it was Gabin's death in 1976 that put a definitive end to it.
When the doors to the cinema closed, he was still a young fifty-something, so he certainly had regrets, but again, without bitterness. He was a very positive person and, at the end of his life, he told us how happy he had been with his career and how lucky he had been. He saw the cinema as a working-class affair. He liked the idea of people coming together in a movie theatre to experience a powerful story, well directed, well written, with good dialogue delivered by good actors. Quite an artisanal vision. He didn't have such a big age difference with the New Wave filmmakers, but his method was more traditional: his films are very well lit, many of them shot in studios, often with Gabin, old-school style cinema. He didn't see himself as an auteur. I think that for him, auteurs were writers. He had a veneration for literature.

Your father directed many literary adaptations...

Fabrice de la Patellière: This reflects his close relationship with literature. I always saw my father reading. His literary favourite of all time was Proust. He read and reread In Search of Lost Time all his life. Of course, he went to the cinema, but he wasn't a movie buff. On the other hand, he was a true bookworm. He didn't read to find subjects for films. There were projects that he initiated, and others where a producer brought him a book that he adapted. He wasn't against commissions. This was the adventure of his first film: he agreed to adapt a novel by Michel de Saint-Pierre, Les Aristocrates, which was supposed to be directed by another filmmaker, and finally Pierre Fresnay, whom he had known as an assistant, appointed my father as director.

A story about the provincial aristocracy that has an autobiographical dimension for him...

Fabrice de la Patellière: Yes, in any case, there are themes in my father's films, even if they're often quite concealed. But in many of his films, for example, including Les Aristocrates, of course, the father figure is quite overwhelming. There is a conflictual relationship between the father and his sons, sometimes with reconciliation, sometimes not... And money is omnipresent too. There are many films in which there is a question of inheritance, which we seek to appropriate or which we fear squandering. Money and the father figure are obsessions. After that, my father wasn't at all into analysis, he wanted to do things spontaneously. Of course, he was aware of it, but it wasn't something he talked about.

In your opinion, does this have anything to do with his own father?

Fabrice de la Patellière: Certainly. He spoke to us a great deal about his father, but very little about his mother, who was a wonderful woman, I think, but with a withdrawn personality. His parents had seven children; my father was the youngest. His father, on the other hand, had a very strong personality and was very imposing. He was an ex-serviceman who had left the army. He had made a fortune at the beginning of his life, then lost his small fortune and that of his wife in some unfortunate business ventures and became a maths teacher in La Rochelle. He was quite rigid, right-wing, very Catholic and anti-Dreyfus. On his deathbed, his last conversation with his youngest son was about Dreyfus, whose guilt he remained convinced of, because the army could not be wrong. He was born in 1873 and passed away in 1944 or 1945, devastated by the death of his sons.

The filmmakers of the New Wave were not kind to your father. Was it hurtful for him?

Fabrice de la Patellière: He suffered from it, of course. But he forgave them. That's one of the things he and I talked about. I think how he must have suffered, and how surprised he was by the violence, its trial aspect. My father was a man who didn't like the courts or the figure of the judge. I think this stems from the criminal prosecution epuration period, an era he had lived through and hated, and which had a profound effect on him. Criticism seemed natural and normal to him, but not with such violence or with the use of moralistic language.
And, above all, he didn't understand why young people would say that one film was “cinema” and another wasn't, which seemed rather ridiculous to him. That didn't stop him from liking the films by Chabrol and certain ones by Godard very much. He was honest and intelligent enough to understand what they had contributed, a sense of freedom with that kind of new energy. By comparison, they made his cinema seem old and probably hastened the end of his career.
Years later, in the 70s I think, he found himself not far from Truffaut in a café on the Champs-Élysées and Truffaut came to apologise. Not by renouncing his opinions, but by telling my father that everything he had written was before he started making films, before he knew what it was like to shoot a film and all the difficulties that come with it, and that he regretted a certain number of things. My father was very touched.