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When I had finished, I went by the high schools to see the lucky teenagers my age who wore a satchel on their backs. I envied them, I felt marginalized. I dreamed of being like them, 'normal'. Someone had the good idea to put a book in my hands: le Chant du monde, by Jean Giono. It was like a revelation. At the time I had some problems with life, with human nature. This book gave me the desire to see the other side nature, and that reconciled me with life.
And after Giono [what did you read]?
Dostoyevsky, Asimov, Lovecraft, Poe, Van Vogt, then, in Paris, again the fantastic literature and the science-fiction, the anthologies of Louis Pauwels.
Few classics, in short?
Very little. I only discovered Balzac in 1989, for example. By his biography of Maurois, first. Then I dove into his universe, into the puzzle that was his material and that he was himself. The novels of Victor Hugo pleased me less, I found them too descriptive.
And the theater?
I began there with Racine and Ruy Blas by Victor Hugo. Thanks to Claude Gleeful, a program has been established to produce about ten classic pieces for the television. We chose Berenice, whom Carole interprets. I play Titus and Jacques Weber [plays] Antiochus.
Still this craze to bring literature to the screen. . .
When I read a book, I see pictures [in my head] and I think that everybody is like me. These pictures, I want to transcribe them into the most popular media, the television. Because it is necessary to become attached to what is the popular. The public anticipates and sees all, especially the breath, the epic, the heart and the song. There is a truth in books, a truth about men. The one of Thénardier [in Les Misérables], who is masterfully interpreted by Christian Clavier, shows how people living in the sewers like rats can see themselves as the bourgeois in their luxurious apartments. The one that I would have liked to have shown is the adaptation of Nez-de Cuir by La Varende, if Truffaut had not died. The one that will restore surely to perfection François Dupeyron is the adaptation of the beautiful book by Marc Dugain, le Chambre des officiers. One often says that the French movies are lost. No. It is necessary to believe in directors like Dupeyron that have in them this small music of which one can make the big melodies.
Why aren't there more like Dupeyron in France?
I have the impression that a lot of producers feel unsatisfied. One doesn't know from what, besides. Maybe they are afraid. As a result, they drag everybody into their fear and then no one is satisfied. Back to the starting point.
With Francis Veber, with whom you filmed Le Plaçard, this risk doesn't exist.
Francis Veber is a man hallucinating. Remember The Fugitives? He was Chaplin. He succeeded in getting the attention and the laughter of the public with a character that had lost his work and his wife, wandered with his autistic daughter and was taken in hostage by the public enemy number one. All that could only hold if it were real. Le Plaçard, it is the same thing. The intrigue happens in a factory of condoms and it works because Francis restored to the inside the society as it exists outside the walls of the factory. There are not hosts of actors, just of the incarnate characters. But those characters are real.
You often say about the characters that you embody: "So-and-so, it is I"...
In fact, I want to say: "So-and-so, it is we". Each of us is a few Jean Valjeans, a few Cosettes. a few Thénardiers. No one is a total bum or a perfect hero, and it is this idea that one will discover in the eight hours of Napolean that I am going to film again for the television in the next few months. The writers knew how to create characters that are reflections of men in their complexity -- inexplicable always. It is very convenient. Me, when I didn't know how to say "I like you", I recite the Musset.
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