Philip French, The Observer's film critic and author of Malle on Malle, talks to Chris Wiegand about the director's controversial work and passionate life.
BBC Four: Which of Louis Malle's films did you see first?
Philip French: The film I saw first, I think, was his documentary The World of Silence (1956), which was his first film, co-directed with Commander Cousteau and largely shot underwater during the voyage of the Calypso in the Mediterranean, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. I would have then seen, just after that, his first feature film, Lift to the Scaffold (1957), which I greatly admired - a film curiously influenced by two people who you might think are very different (though they're both Catholic directors), Robert Bresson and Alfred Hitchcock.
One couldn't see this immediately but there were two different strands in Malle's career. One was the documentary, coming from The World of Silence, and the other was the feature film, starting with Lift to the Scaffold. He went on, right up to the end of his career, alternating between documentaries and feature films. They're different kinds of disciplines: one is carefully prepared beforehand, the other something you work on as you go along and then put together or shape in post-production.
BBC Four: Aside from the obvious sense, how do the documentaries and feature films differ?
PF: While the documentaries were personal, they were at the same time sort of objective, with him looking outside himself rather than inside. They were not solipsistic documentaries. In his feature films, he was often drawing - if obliquely - on personal experiences: Au Revoir Les Enfants (1987) is quite closely autobiographical and so is Le Souffle au Coeur (1971), where the boy has heart problems.
BBC Four: Did these two disciplines merge in some of his films?
PF: There was one documentary element in his feature films, and certainly the ones that have contemporary settings, which is his finding a particular point of social change. He obviously had the ability to capture this kind of change and I think some of this may have come through his documentary training. In the background to Le Souffle au Coeur, for example, is Indo-China and the fall of Dien Bien Phu.
One of the most notable films in this respect is Atlantic City (1980), which I think is possibly his best American movie. It's set just at the point that Atlantic City - this once rather splendid seaside resort with its boardwalk and grand hotels, now rundown - is being transformed into what people thought would be the Las Vegas of the East but was actually one kind of tawdriness taking over from the other. He caught this social change in the city and used it as a background to reflect the characters' own concerns. He could have made a documentary about either of these subjects - Indo-China and Atlantic City - but he worked them into the fabric of his fictions.
The film which is most like a cross between fiction and documentary, and one of his favourite films, is My Dinner with André (1981), which is designed to look like a documentary. It looks like two old friends chatting over dinner in a New York restaurant, which in a sense it is - they are two old friends. [The film stars, and was written by, Wallace Shawn and André Gregory.] But the film was scripted to the very word and wasn't shot in a New York restaurant. It was shot in a small, improvised studio in a warehouse in Washington. The set was worked out in order to produce every shot that they wanted. There was no improvisation in the dialogue and no improvisation in the camerawork at all.
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