Le franc-tireur (1972) by Jean-Max Causse
How did you start out in cinema?
J.-M. C.: I did all my studies in Clermont. I was already reading a review called La cinématographie française, a professional magazine, which a movie house director would give me – I took care of a movie club when I was in the Sup de Co business school. I did an internship in directing with Claude Chabrol and an internship with Pathé. In short, I was immersed in cinema.
Then I did my military service and found a job in an insurance company. In the morning we were in the offices and the afternoon we thought about what we’d done in the morning. It was gruesome. There was a movie theater not far away, the Lafayette, managed by a pied-noir who bought it when he got back to France. Jean-Marie – my partner – and I took over the theater in the beginning of ’67 and from the start, business was pretty good. Our clients weren’t around anymore in ’68 and we closed down to join them at the roadblocks. Afterwards, we bought the République, split the Lafayette in two, and then moved to the Left Bank with the Grand Action, Les Ecoles.
Did you show current films or were you immediately in the sector of “heritage cinema”?
J.-M. C.: I consider current films a sort of “necessary evil.” For example, when they release the latest movie by the Coen brothers, four of us have it in the Latin Quarter: two around Odéon, the Grand Action and us. As soon as a movie is a bit “auteur”, everyone wants it. So financially, it’s not very profitable. What’s interesting is the professional statement: we’re saying that we don’t just show old movies. There aren’t thousands of different kinds of films; there’s just one kind: good films. Contemporary films are the logical result of heritage cinema. The idea is not to say we only show old movies, but instead to make people understand there aren’t old movies and recent movies: there are just good movies and the others. So you have exclusive releases of certain titles, retrospectives either by filmmaker or by genre, and re-releases with a new copy. These are the three areas of our program. I bought this movie theater, which we’re trying to get back on its feet. My accountant and my lawyer only gave it six months to live, but it ended up with a 60% increase last year. The theater is coming out of a rut and I’ll be able to go back to my other projects by the end of the year.
You’re especially a fan of American cinema. Where does that come from?
J.-M. C.: It’s the basis of it all. All the great movements in cinema hark back to America. For me, the history of cinema is a bit like a tent, with different pegs: the first peg is Murnau’s Sunrise. The second is Rio Bravo, a fabulous classical drama set as a Western – it sums up all progress in cinema and points out an opening towards a glorious future. The third peg is Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, with the arrival of doubt. Cinema is always linked to the sociopolitical context – here, it’s the Americans in Vietnam, and Peckinpah’s characters defend a set of values that are no longer valid and only interest them. And the last peg for me is probably the greatest film of all times, Martin Scorsese’s Casino, because it’s the collapse of everything. It’s a magnificent film that groups together a little of everything that’s been done, with the use of slow motion and complicated editing. It’s sort of the end of cinema, which rises from the ashes. It turns a page. Of course, these aren’t the only important films, but for me, they’re the pillars. The current generation of filmmakers, like David Lynch, assume they’re not working for television and that they have a captive audience. You’re there and they’re going to use you. It’s a wonderful idea, which goes against a certain idea TV has that they need to constantly repeat things so you can understand, even if you go out and walk your dog during the movie. We like showing a little of all that. And the advantage of American cinema is that over there, rebellion that’s necessary against the system must come from the artists – it can’t be in the streets or in Congress – and that’s very important for the filmmakers’ freedom.
When did the phenomenon of re-releases begin? When did it start happening in parallel with current releases?
J.-M. C.: At the end of the ’70s, the American studios formed a group. It’s expensive to keep reels on the shelves, and so they made large cuts. When we started the Action movie theaters in the ’70s, there was a huge selection, because we kept at least the copies that were in the original language, and we ended up with a lot of movies that had disappeared. The only solution was to re-release them. First we did it with the companies, guaranteeing the cost of the new copies. Everyone insulted us, saying it wasn’t up to movie theaters to do this, but it was that or nothing. If we didn’t give them guarantees, they wouldn’t do it. Then came the idea of distributing films, and therefore buying the rights for a certain number of years, often five years, and distributing them in theaters. Once we’d come up with this policy of re-releases, the second idea was to re-release them in their entirety, by making a director’s cut. One of our successes was Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid. The original credits told the plot of the whole film, including the end, which obviously wasn’t possible for MGM; it’s all edited with flashbacks, etc.
They thought the audience will never understand it so they reedited the movie chronologically and twenty five minutes were cut. So when we took the rights, a friend of ours had found the main editor of Peckinpah and told us he had his editing notes. So we went to meet Ted Turner and we told him we wanted to make a director’s cut. He told us to go meeting Pekinpah’s daughter who was suing him for years, we met her and she was very happy with our idea to follow her father’s will. So we went back to Ted Turner who announced us a big price. In Paris we met Patrick Brion who paid three times the price he was used to pay to show the movie on TV, we put some of our own money, Japanese put money, and thanks to us, US students can now discover Pat Garrett the way Peckinpah wanted it.
Is it as easy nowadays as it was before to get movies from the distributors for your theater?
F. C.: Stocks have melt. If you want a movie now, without buying the rights, without being its distributor, you have to talk to majors, which don’t care about their catalogs. So what can you do? You have to get the rights, for three or five years, make new prints -it costs about 15,000 euros. You cannot take that many risks. Without a big casting or a very famous director, even a very good film is risky.
J.-M. C.: Contracts are tough. You have to pay a warranty, 8,000 to 10,000 dollars, then you pay for the prints, you pay everything. You start to show the picture when you have already paid for everything, it’s a real funding problem. Then you have to make it profitable for years. And when you manage to do it, you have to share the profits with the major! They can’t ‘afford’ losing anything.
Did the DVD change the look of the majors towards their catalogues?
J.-M. C.: We benefit from the restorations financed for the DVD. The restoration of Barry Lyndon for example enabled us to show it in Dolby SR whereas it was never shown in that format. We often benefit from what was done for TV or DVD, not for us.
F. C.: This is how digital technology can be interesting for us, it can lower the costs by enabling us not to have to make new prints. With digitalized movies, saved as digital files, storage and transportation costs are largely played down and you can imagine renting costs for a week or even a single day. Then we could take more risks and show rarer movies we cannot afford right now.
J.-M. C.: In the future, Mister Warner will just have to press one button to show a movie on fifty screens. But there’s something more important. Currently, there’s one film for prints, Eastman. Every movie is printed on the same film but they are not shot with the same medium. The result is a single tone of colors, with the loss you can imagine. In the United States, major studios often give the printing job to small independent labs so as not have to care with specific baths. We had prints from the UCLA labs where they can take the time to prepare baths, to correct calibrations… With an electronic work we will be more easily able to get close to what the films were. Currently we’re stuck between 300 prints of something and 400 of another movie, they don’t make specific baths.
F. C.: It is not in the majors’ interests, it doesn’t make enough money, they don’t even care about it. They block their catalogues because they simply have more important things to do. They have to make money. Cinema history is not their business. There are catalogues that are blocked just because the new executive is not interested in taking care of it. We have to wait for a new person who will accept to look at it.
How do you expect things to evolve?
F. C.: Twenty years ago, a reprint could sell 10, 15 or even 20,000 tickets. Nowadays it’s extremely rare. And it’s more difficult in smaller cities than in Paris. Currently, we consider 5,000 admissions as a success, it has been divided by three or four. In theatres that show both new films and classics, the ratio of back catalog films has been lowered. In smaller cities, cinematheques take care of classics catalog, they have less pressure on profitability. The DVD played a role too. Why would you do 50 kilometers to go and see a movie when you can watch it at home? But we also see people who, thanks to the DVD, come and rediscover the films in theatres. They come to experience something else. That is why we are still optimistic, you can have a 15,000 euro-home-cinema, you’ll never get the theater feeling, the crowd.