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Figaro Magazine (French), September 2, 2000
"Gérard: Heart of a Lion"
Interview by Jean-Christophe Buisson
pg 1
Copyright 2000, Figaro Magazine, Paris
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Note: This article translated from the French by myself with the aid of a machine translator. This is not a professional job, but you'll get the gist. Ginny
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"Gérard: Heart of a Lion"
Interview by Jean-Christophe Buisson
Pictures by Richard Melloul
Operated on in mid-July with a quintuple cardiac bypass surgery, Gérard Depardieu already returns to the set in the new comedy by Francis Veber, Le Plaçard. He talks about his stay in the Foch hospital, his career and his passion for literature. And especially for his role of Jean Valjean in the adaptation televised of the Les Misérables, of which the first of the four episodes will be aired Monday evening on TF1.
Le Figaro Magazine: After The Count of Monte Cristo, you again did an adaptation for television of a big French literary work. Do you think that the movies are not capable of making this kind of thing?
Gérard Depardieu - Certainly. For this type of creation [you need] a liberty that exists in television that doesn't exist anymore in the movies. The first reason is very simple: time. One cannot tell Victor Hugo in two hours. One was able to in the '50s, '60s, and '70s. One is not able to today. Already the version by Robert Hossein with Lino Ventura didn't do justice to the wealth of Victor Hugo and flirted with a certain academicism. The other asset of television is the size of the screen. One can allow approximations around the main stage, an impossible thing to do on big screen.
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After Les Misérables, he will film Napoléon and Notre-Dame de Paris for television. In the movies, Vidocq was shot in July, and he will continue the adventures of Astérix and Obélix when he has finished le Plaçard by Francis Veber. Gérard Depardieu the insatiable.
(click for close-up)
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No frustrations?
Surely not. First, Josée Dayan [director of Les Misérables] films under the conditions of the movies, in 35 mm, and the budget of a serial like Les Misérables (NDLR: 165 millions of francs) is as extensive as one for a movie. Besides, I can tell you that you don't often see on big screen the grand fights and the ampleness that she put in the scenes.
We also benefited from six hours of screen time. We could also allow the actors to develop their characters, to modernize them. Look at Thénardier, close your eyes and listen to him: he is not anymore an old soldier of the defeated empire, thrown into misery. He is an old one of Indochina or Algeria that speaks you his sufferings, of his misery.
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People are again going to blame you for having taken too much liberty with the original material. . .
That already came up with Cristo. But whether the hero is blond or brunette isn't important, no? What counts is the freshness. For Balzac, it is similar. When one reads the Balzac of Stefan Zweig, one sees this man thrown into a mad race to the heart of an era, and one sees this man living extraordinary adventures during eighteen years. There is in that the same despair that one discovers in Dostoyevsky.
And you like that?
Not only me, fortunately. What is great about these TV serials is that one makes the whole world discover our history and our literature. In French or in English, besides, since we filmed Les Misérables simultaneously in the two languages.
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Gérard Depardieu: a tranquil strength. In spite of the pace imposed by José Dayan on filming each scene again in English, the actor never lost his legendary serenity. No doubt: he is also a prisoner… of work. Click for Close-up
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You evoked Dostoyevsky. Another upcoming costume drama for Depardieu?
Why not? Hugo, Dumas, Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Simenon: I would like to make them all. But I would like to take advantage also of the progress of technology to adapt all the tales and the fantastic narrations of the nineteenth century -- of Poe, Leroux, and Dumas again with the One thousand and One Ghosts. These are at the same time popular material and the heavy artillery of the French literature.
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