Alain Resnais

It's not connected with any of the better known films or figures of the new wave, although Franju is generally well regarded by the members of the new wave like Godard and Truffaut and so forth.

At some point, apparently, Truffaut and Alain Resnais were approached to rewrite the script by the producer, which they declined to do.

So it could have been a more new, wavy film than it in fact actually is.

Mocky later, I think the same year, got to direct his first feature, so this was...

People who listen to FM radio in those days would go to a Bergman film.

They know who Alain René was.

All right.

David was himself, and he always has been himself.

As I said, the score includes a lot of incidental and background music, and it might be considered a bit of a harbinger for some of the work that he did later.

In 1974, he did some underscoring for Alan Rene's... movie Stavisky, and then certainly Sweeney Todd is full of sort of background scoring.

Was his involvement just with the score? No, he and Goldman really collaborated closely on this.

Sondheim liked Goldman's idea to use a story by John Collier, a writer that they both admired, whose stories appeared frequently in The New Yorker back in the 50s and 60s.

So at that time, I also took a class in the French New Wave cinema.

When I was in France, I studied, um, Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard films, and they're fascinating because of how, h- how much of the formula they break.

Um, I studied the Hollywood star system, so I studied, you know, John Ford movies and I s- I studied, um, screwball comedies and of...

And then really Hitchcock's.

And I think that there are versions of this film, films that are interested in time.

I'm thinking of like Alain Rene and his work.

I Love You, I Love You, yes, is a film I thought about

a lot.

It's supposed to be past, but it turns out they're not past memories.

So this complexity of time is something I really like, which also is a similar thing that I find in French auteur cinema, like Alain René or Marguerite Duras, to name a few, which kind of echoes each other.

I don't know if they're... intentional echoes, because I think the film overtly dialogues with psycho in its ultimate moments.

So I don't know if these are the right references, but what the film spoke me the most is these connections with the duration, like a very Bergsonian idea of duration and time.

Yeah, I think it's also this kind of moment, these two films in particular, this moment where you feel Damiano kind of wanting to break free of the cage of pornography a little bit.

And I wonder if that also is bleeding through to why Alonso is instinctively alarmed.

uh because if they do feel like you know movies that could exist without being hardcore films and maybe want to be that in some way also whereas i think in devil and miss jones it's very much part of the film like the film doesn't work without that um And it's interesting, like I know, Oku, you mentioned Alain René.

And that whole idea of conceiving of a film that way in an American context, I think is very strange.

French comic circles, where I think he's called Stroma- Strong Arm Brick or something like that in translation.

And so for people around Forest, including the filmmaker, Alain Resnais and, uh, Chris Marker, uh, these comics represent, uh, something of their lost youth, that they've grown up reading the comics before the war or, you know, actually before the war.

Imports of comics from America are then stopped because of the occupation, and then their young intellectuals, artists, and they've got this thing about, "Hey, can't we refind our American, uh, comic heroes again?" Resnais is always interested in this.

Marker is interested in this.