“We can expect someone to die, not having seen it for a very long time, and when it happens, nothing helps, it does not enter into the course of things. Between Save who can (life) et Passion that we shot in stride, we spent almost two years together.
“These are flashes that come back to me, sentences, his voice, a sometimes surprising way of being. In his practice of cinema, he removed all the usual tinsel and heaviness of preparation. I remember, for example, how we went together to buy the costumes for Save who can (life) in a supermarket in Lausanne. He didn’t do what he did like the others. I really like our first meeting. He phoned me, he told me he wanted to meet me, I answered “When ?” and half an hour later he was at my house.
“Everything was simple with him. Finally simple, not always. Some scenes from Save who can (life) were far from it. He had asked me to stutter in Passion, the worst for an actress, to have her access to language taken away. I didn’t like it at all! He had gone so far as to have me take lessons from a speech therapist. It was, he said, to better show how the working class stutters! Seen from this angle… In the end, everything was made easy by his genius and, I dare say, by his delicacy, his poetry. No one has filmed faces like him. Even coming into conflict with him was different. Because deep down, conflicts with him were conflicts against himself, more than against others. On Passionhe wanted to confront us, Hanna [Schygulla] and me, to a job that was not ours. Shortly before filming, for a few days, Hanna was a bartender while I was a worker in a watch factory. Later, during filming, he asked us to write little thoughts that crossed our minds every evening, it was like homework, he liked to play schoolteacher, in an almost childish role-playing game . We had to put them in the locker in his hotel room. As I was reading a short novel by Beckett, I took a quote from it. He wasn’t happy at all. “I didn’t ask you to copy a sentence from Beckett. The next day, I wrote him an oh so Godardian question: “Should we work to love or love to work?” You have to believe that he liked it because he kept it in the film. One day always on Passion, the camera stopped working and filming was interrupted. Later that day, when it was fixed, he decided he didn’t want to tour anymore. He said this sentence:There is also my own desire that counts.” It was a supposed but real echo to the recalcitrant camera.