Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (97 page)

Nonetheless, Luddy had remained active behind the scenes and contacted Woody Allen, getting him to agree to appear in the film with the promise that Godard would come to New York to meet with him, to discuss the role, and to shoot “for a day or two.” However, Godard did not come to New York, did not meet with Allen, and was not ready to shoot anything. Luddy was concerned that Allen, if ignored, would drop out of the project, so he came up with another idea.

I heard that Woody’s film
Hannah and Her Sisters
would be at Cannes in’ 86 and I knew [Allen] never goes to Cannes, and unlike all other major films there is no press conference with the auteur… so I suggested to Godard as away to keep Woody engaged that he ask Gilles Jacob [the festival director] if Cannes would fund him to do a filmed interview with Woody about
Hannah
.
⁶

Godard liked the idea, and with the additional backing of Swiss television, he came to New York in the spring of 1986 to film Woody Allen.

Godard has one crucial affinity with Allen: both artists film themselves and stories derived from their own lives in their own milieus. In the videotaped discussion, however, Godard makes a distinction between them that he considered crucial: he criticized Allen’s way of filming New York buildings in
Hannah and Her Sister
s, stating that some of those images conveyed the unfortunate impression of having been made “under the influence of television.” Allen, looking dismayed, said that television affected him like “radioactivity.” When Godard edited the tape, he rendered his inquisitorial stance comically explicit, repeatedly intercutting the images of Allen with a shot of himself surrounded with cigar smoke and lighted from below like an ogre in a horror film. Another inserted element was a photograph of Fred Astaire in full swing, superimposed on an image of Orson Welles, as if to suggest Allen’s redoubled career in comedy and tragedy as graceful performer and solitary director. The interview had the desired effect on the fortunes of
King Lear:
Allen agreed to remain involved.

While in New York, Godard finally met with Norman Mailer (along with Tom Luddy). As Mailer later recalled:

We had our first set of talks—we had probably four or five talks before the shooting of the movie began. Each time he took the Concorde to New York and we’d meet for an hour or two and make plans and then he would leave, and go back to France. Each time, we were supposed to go off on a trip, because he was thinking of shooting it up in Maine or in Provincetown or in places that I knew… The assumption was this: he wanted me to play King Lear. I had done a little bit of acting. I was more than a little uneasy about the idea, because we didn’t even have a script yet, and he also wanted… my daughters to play Goneril and Regan and Cordelia. One of them was an accomplished actress, Kate Mailer. She was going to play Cordelia.
⁷

Mailer found the discussions with Godard unsatisfyingly vague and Godard himself “taciturn and heavily depressed.” Though Mailer and Luddy came to their lunches prepared to leave at once with Godard to go location scouting in New England, they instead always went back home. “He would just sit there in this depression that was so heavy you could almost reach out and touch it,” Mailer recounted, “and then at the end of the lunch he’d say, ‘I think I’m going back to France again, I will see you all in another month or so, and then we will go look for a place to shoot the film.’”
⁸

At the time of the first meeting, Mailer had not yet written the script. Luddy warned him that Golan would want to see it very soon, and Mailer got to work. He recalled asking Godard for a clue to his intentions and getting none. This lack of direction spurred Mailer, as he later maintained, to imagine a modernized Lear as a Mafia don—although both Golan and Godard claim that this idea originated with the director himself.

Each time I saw him I’d ask him if he had read
King Lear
yet but he hadn’t, he’d shrug and look away, and seemed totally disinterested in the thought, and I finally decided the only way to do a modern
King Lear
, because that was what Menahem Golan wanted, was to make him a Mafia godfather. I couldn’t conceive of anyone else in my range of understanding who would disown a daughter for refusing to compliment him. So I turned it into a script I called Don Learo [lay-AH-ro], which had its merits but generally speaking it had one terrible loss in it, which is, you couldn’t use any of Shakespeare’s best language. I was working with Mafia equivalents, and I didn’t try to stay too close to Shakespeare with it. However, I ended up with a shootable script, which to my knowledge Godard never looked at.
⁹

Godard admitted that he did not read Mailer’s script (telling Hervè Duhamel, “I didn’t ask for a script”).
¹⁰
Godard didn’t need Mailer’s interpretation of the play. His interest in it was the relationship between Lear and Cordelia, which, he noted, was “the smallest part of
King Lear
.” He had already found an essay that now served as his guide, “Le Silence de Cordelia” (Cordelia’s Silence), by the French writer Viviane Forrester, in which she
describes “a violent silence. Cordelia’s silence. To the question of the king, her father, to the question of Lear, she answers, ‘Nothing.’ No thing.”
¹¹
Godard said that this idea sufficed for him as “the first route on the ‘Shakespeare map.’”
¹²
Regardless of who initiated the project’s Mafia angle, it was not the film’s dominant aspect; for Godard, it was less context than pretext.

As the film inched forward, Godard thought of recruiting Richard Nixon for a “‘distancing operation,’ a sequence of about twenty minutes during which Nixon and Mailer would discuss ‘power and the loss of power.’”
¹³
Godard offered Nixon $500,000 for one day of shooting.
¹⁴
Not surprisingly, Nixon did not respond.
¹⁵

One firm decision was made, however: Godard decided to shoot the film in Switzerland. Money was a factor: the million-dollar budget was worth farless to Godard, as the dollar had dropped precipitously against the French franc between 1985 and 1986. Golan had offered to deposit production funds directly into his Swiss account, but Godard instead regularly took the Concorde to California in order to pick up the checks. According to Golan, Godard’s travel expenses consumed a significant portion of the production budget; by his own accounting, Godard made seventy trips by Concorde during the making of the film. To avoid additional foreign exchange costs, Godard brought suitcases of cash back and forth between Paris and Switzerland.

Golan was getting impatient. Tom Luddy would stall him by saying, “The bad news is, we’ve got delays. The good news is, we’ve got Woody Allen—and by the way, if we get Woody Allen, we’d like another hundred thousand.”
¹⁶
On this basis, Golan paid several hundred thousand dollars beyond the original million—and yet claimed at Cannes in 1986, “We already have one million dollars profit on the Godard film,”
¹⁷
on the basis of presales to distributors.

In September 1986, without a script or even a synopsis and with very few indications of Godard’s plans, Norman Mailer and his daughter Kate went to Nyon to begin the shoot. Godard, Mailer, and Golan have differing memories of these few days of shooting, but they all recall constant conflict. The differences would have been irrelevant if the shoot had gone well for the two artists, but it did not, and their relationship ended in recriminations: Mailer’s remain the subject of his illuminating and detailed recollections; Godard’s went into the film.

Mailer recalled that immediately on his arrival in Nyon, Switzerland, in September 1986, Godard wanted to begin shooting.
¹⁸

I was hardly playing
King Lear
. He said, “You will be Norman Mailer in this.” And then he gave me some lines and they were really, by any comfortable measure, dreadful… I’d pick up the phone and I’d say, “Kate, Kate, you must come down immediately, I have just finished the script, it is superb”—stuff like that. He was shooting, and we were getting some dreadful stuff. I said to him, “Look, I really can’t say these lines. If you give me another name than Norman Mailer, I’ll say anything you write for me, but if I’m going to be speaking in my own name, then I’ve got to write the lines, or at least I’ve got to be consulted on the lines.” So he was very annoyed and he said, “That’s the end of shooting for the day.” We’d only shot for about three hours at that point.
¹⁹

Godard felt that the breakdown was caused by other factors. First, he said, “The film was supposed to be made among his family, like reportage, and
King Lear
would be him with his daughters, especially with his one daughter.” According to Godard, when Mailer “saw that he was going to have to talk about himself and his family, it was all over in a quarter-hour.”
²⁰
Moreover, “he saw that, above all, I wasn’t very… that I don’t know very well what I want to do, so he couldn’t really have a discussion about it, he had nothing to do but obey, to have confidence in me.”
²¹

Duhamel offered another perspective:

[Godard] had just begun and he didn’t really know what he wanted to do. He had to do something quickly, to calm Golan and Globus… A guy like Mailerasks a lot of questions. They had a long discussion, which Godard doesn’t like. Godard started out in a very bad mood. Then there was a moment when Godard told [Mailer] to mention “King Lear,” and Mailer said, “Why King Lear? I’m King Lear,” and Godard said, “Be quiet and do as you’re told.”
²²

The next morning, at breakfast, Godard and Mailer had what the writer called a “terrible row.” After they calmed down, Mailer offered to withdraw: “Look, if you want me to go home, I’ll go home.” He added, “I will only go if you want me to go.” Godard reportedly replied, “Well, yes, under the circumstances perhaps it’s best that you do go back, and I will make the movie in another fashion.”
²³

In Godard’s telling, Mailer “still asked for $500,000, and he got it. It was in the contract, that we’d pay his lawyer. They said, ‘Oh, that’s very nice of you.’ That’s all there was to it. We made the film afterwards. We made it with what was left, with nothing.”
²⁴

Mailer contended that he was paid directly by Golan,
²⁵
although Golan himself maintained that Godard “had the budget and the money and he paid the actors.” Golan made a more pertinent observation, however: that Mailer “left because he refused the insinuation—you know his daughter was in the movie, too—so he refused the insinuation that King Lear had a kind of sexual attraction to his daughter.”
²⁶

Danièle Heymann, from
Le Monde
, who visited Godard during the shoot, concurred. Godard told her that Mailer “left, being unable, he said, ‘to see himself represented in a situation of incest.’”
²⁷

Mailer readily confirmed this:

My wife always felt that that was his secret kicker, and that that was why he wanted Kate to play Cordelia. But the thought of that was just anathema to me. To begin with, to play it in my own name would have been absolutely absurd. Is it a reasonable demand to ask someone to, in their own name, play that they have an incestuous relationship to their daughter?… He never put it that way directly. There may have been a few small directions like, “Put your arm around her,” or stuff like that… And of course there was this dialogue he was giving me, you know, “Oh, Kate, darling, I have finished the script and it’s wonderful, please come down,” you know. But it wasn’t overt. I think that may well have been the underside, the subtext that he had in mind.
²⁸

Of course, it was.

W
ORK ON
K
ING
Lear
, which had gotten under way so laboriously, now stopped cold. Tom Luddy had the impression that Godard would gladly have abandoned the project had he been able to do so without financial penalty. But Godard had to deliver a film to Cannon or else face the possibility of legal action.

To please Golan, Godard reportedly paid sixty thousand dollars to the Actors Studio in New York so that two actors—Al Pacino and Paul Newman—would read several lines of Shakespeare in order for their names to appear in the credits.
²⁹
He also wanted to add two pop stars, Prince and Sting, to the cast; Sting was willing, but Godard couldn’t figure out anything for him to do.
³⁰
On the producers’ insistence, Godard met with Tony Curtis and found him “charming” but did not offer him the role of Don Learo.
³¹
He did offer it to Lee Marvin, who accepted but then backed out. He offered the role to Rod Steiger, who accepted—with the proviso that the scenes be shot in Malibu.

The project remained stuck until, on a hunch, Tom Luddy brought Godard together with the theater director Peter Sellars. “I somehow knew,” Luddy said, that he “would be the catalyst to jumpstart the film.”
³²
Sellars, aprodigious director in both the opera and theater, served as Godard’s “guide” to Shakespeare, someone who, as Godard said, “knows Shakespeare as… as I know
Cahiers du cinéma
, say…”
³³