The Horseman on the Roof
Writer and director Jean-Paul Rappeneau
For the French filmmaker Jean-Paul Rappeneau, the roles of writer and director are not mutually exclusive. The script is not just words, but the "spine" of the film. "A good, well-written script has the directing inherent in it," he says. "When I'm writing a script, I already know how I'm going to be setting things up, how things are going to be."
The energetic 64-year-old Rappeneau was in Detroit recently to discuss his latest film, The Horseman on the Roof (1995), a lavish period film which is also the intimate story of two people discovering their limitations and strengths. Although the interview was conducted primarily with the aid of an interpreter, Rappeneau occasionally punctuated the conversation with enthusiastic bursts of English.
His career began over thirty years ago as a writer during the Nouvelle Vague (the French New Wave), which saw the emergence of a host of new voices in French cinema. "At that time," Rappeneau says, "there was a new director starting or emerging every month." He was reluctant to join their ranks right away. It was Louis Malle, with whom Rappeneau had written several screenplays, whose encouragement finally pushed him to direct. But only when he was ready.
"I waited longer than most directors of my generation to direct," he explains. "Most of them made films before me and I still continued to write for other directors. And in doing so, I think that I actually gained a lot because it taught me the prime importance of the writing, and that's what a lot of the movies that were made by directors of that generation are lacking."
He wrote and directed his first film in 1965. La Vie de Chateau (released here as A Matter of Resistance), a comedy set in the waning days of World War II, features Catherine Deneuve as a bored housewife who welcomes the arrival of soldiers preparing for D-Day. It was followed by Les Mariés de l'an Deux (1970), set during the French Revolution, and the more contemporary Le Sauvage (1975) and Tout Feu Tout Flamme (1981). He dove back into France's past, and shifted from original screenplays to literary adaptations, with Cyrano de Bergerac (1990) and The Horseman on the Roof.
Rappeneau laughs when asked why such long intervals exist between films and animatedly illustrates his process for selecting a new project by repeatedly scribbling on pieces of non-existent paper, mulling over the contents, and then crumpling them up and throwing them over his shoulder.
"Because the writing is so important," he explains, "it takes me a while to actually get ready and to decide between different subjects." Before the dedication to a script comes a prolonged period of sampling subject matter and indecision. "Then suddenly, I don't know why," Rappeneau says in English, "That's it! Perfect."
The long gestation period between 1981 and 1990 produced a phenomenal success in Cyrano de Bergerac, which many critics consider the definitive screen version of Edmond Rostand's play and featured a superlative performance by Gerard Depardieu in the title role. Rappeneau admits it was intimidating to tackle such a well-known story.
"What really helped was that I looked at what had already been done on the subject of Cyrano. There were a lot of films that were basically the play, that didn't come out of the theatrical framework. That gave me more confidence because I could see what not to do, and that there was another way."
Cyrano boldly opens up the play, giving the familiar text a new liveliness and immediacy by making it a thrilling, swashbuckling action film and a meaningful love story where the actions of the characters have real resonance. (A philosophy that Rappeneau carried over into his next film.)
The success of Cyrano de Bergerac brought with it the freedom to choose his next project, and Rappeneau thought of Jean Giono's The Horseman on the Roof. It had made a profound impression on him when he read it shortly after it was published in 1953. The story is set in southern France during the 1830s and follows a political exile, Angelo Pardi (Olivier Martinez), and an enigmatic woman, Pauline de Theus (Juliette Binoche), as they travel through the countryside during a deadly cholera epidemic.
Of the four books Giono wrote with Pardi as the central character, Rappeneau says, The Horseman on the Roof is by far the best. Pardi is a member of the Carbonari, a group of horsemen from the nobility fighting the Austrian Empire's domination of Italy, and represents Giono's version of the fearless, gallant hero epitomized in the French Romantic literature of Stendhal.
Although not widely known in France, Jean Giono has "a handful of fanatical readers, and that stifled me a little bit," says Rappeneau. "I had to walk a tightrope because I didn't want to betray the book to them." An American audience's lack of familiarity with Giono's book means they won't have preconceived expectations, a particular burden he faced with Cyrano.
Rappeneau's film version of Horseman is a sweeping epic in a grand yet intimate style. Central to Giono's book are detailed descriptions of the Provençe countryside, and Rappeneau and cinematographer Thierry Arbogast capture the region in glorious widescreen images that range from blazing sunlight to engulfing darkness. The Provençe here is the literal land and a metaphoric landscape, which Rappeneau describes as "images that I've discovered that, hopefully, express in a poetic way, other things."
The cholera epidemic has changed the atmosphere of the once placid towns into confining places charged with fear. Either by choice or by force, the surviving populace is driven out of their homes and on to the road.
"Basically the quest for space, to go beyond the horizon, is one of the central points of the film," explains Rappeneau. "That's exactly why the space in which one is just locked in, one wants to just get out and go and seek and go further and further." Angelo and Pauline's passage through a rural France marked as much by fear as by an actual disease, is their spiritual as well as physical journey.
As a writer and director, Jean-Paul Rappeneau has embraced and enlivened the period film. "To go back in those times, it stimulates my imagination," he explains simply. "I'm very interested in the time in which we live, but I wouldn't like to shoot a film taking place down my street. It just wouldn't do it for me."
© 1996, Serena Donadoni. All rights reserved.