“What I said to myself this morning is that there are those who mourn the queen, we mourn our king. He’s the god of the movies, he shook it up, invented it, revolutionized it, he exploded it, transformed it, loved it like no one else. It will never be the same again. It was terrible for me to hear the news after having seen two films in Toronto which celebrate the love of cinema and its death, those of Steven Spielberg and Sam Mendes. Thereupon Godard dies, and that confirms that it is the end of a world. We don’t want to live it. We’ll have to be worthy of him, of what he taught us, of what he showed us. Let’s be up to it.
“When we first met, I was a journalist, there was a press conference following the screening of Detective at Cannes. Godard arrives terribly angry because he has just been tarred. I gather my courage and ask why he dedicated the film to John Cassavetes. When I say I work for First, he answers : “Ah well, since when First interested in cinema?” Everyone laughs, I persist and sink, trying to find out what states pushed him to make this film. Finally he says: “That’s a good question, I don’t know myself.” Press conferences were played on a loop in hotel lobbies, I was insulted all day for having dared to speak as I did at Godard… Months later, he called me to tell me that he was starting the shooting of King Learhe needs a “big mouth” for the role of editor-in-chief New York Times, and he thought of me.
“Years later I am a distributor ofpraise of love, there were three boxes that claimed to have it. He told us “It’s very simple, whoever makes the check will have the film”, and we got the movie. At each screening, Godard stops at the ARP logo, which he finds ugly. We tell him that he just has to make one, we make him a contract. He proposed six. The one that is our logo today, we loved it immediately without daring to use it. Until the day when Steven Soderbergh comes to the office in Paris and tells us: “Put it on, you’re crazy!” We used it for the first time on our crazy years of Téchiné, without warning him. At the moment of the projection, the logo appears and André exclaims: “Who is the moron who took himself for Jean-Luc Godard?”
“For the France Culture program Films that have changed our outlook, I spent three hours at his house where he was incredibly generous, without censoring himself. There were also things that were too nasty that I decided to remove… Her voice had taken quite a hit, we gave it a huge boost to the sound because it was quavering, but the brain was intact. Our last handshake was terrible, I said goodbye knowing I’ll never see him again. He still sometimes asked us about films we were releasing. Recently I sent him France by Bruno Dumont. Stay in the Fuchun Mountains I had brought it to him in person.
“He was a man who appreciated being spoken to normally. I had an immense affection for the man beyond admiration. I did not keep this passage in the France Culture program, but there was a moment when he mentioned his marriage to Anna [Karina, ndlr] and a smile of love crossed his face. It was a kid talking about his marriage. It wasn’t the wolf, Jean-Luc. I think he loved to scare people but he especially loved that we were not afraid.