Listen to Your Elders

Jean-Luc Godard, at 84, can still do a good enfant terrible. See Sofilm #30 (May 2015):

–Since you’re interested in History, what do you think about the Greek demand that Germany pay them war indemnities?

— They’re completely right to do so! And I suggest you watch Chris Marker’s film The Owl’s Legacy” which shows how we owe everything to Greek thought, which lasted two thousand years. He even shows it influencing Japan. Give yourself one evening to watch “The Owl’s Legacy” and you’ve solved the Greek-European-German problem. Europe and Germany ought to get down on their knees and say thank you to Greece. That’s all. Every time you utter a sentence and you use the word “therefore,” the Greeks ought to get ten dollars of royalties, and that would take care of the Greek debt.

— Do you consider yourself an “auteur”?

— These days everybody’s an “auteur.” The guy who claps the clapperboard wants to be the auteur of the clap. This question of royalties has swollen to grotesque proportions, especially with the Internet. … I got paid, and I don’t have any further rights in it. Afterward, let people do what they want. If they want to make off with the film, it’s not my business. A director should know how much he wants to be paid for his film, and once he’s received that, he can just hand over the excess to Amnesty or the Red Cross. …

The whole idea of intellectual property, of patents and copyrights, goes right over my head. I don’t even know who came up with three quarters of the dialogues in my films, I don’t write them down. I take snippets that interest me and I don’t care about the rights. If somebody sues me– but nobody ever has; sometimes I’d have welcomed a lawsuit. Once Anne-Marie [Miéville] and I were imagining she might sue me, just to create the precedent… Bottom line, it’s just literature, because it doesn’t exist except through texts, on paper. When the judge sentences you and says, “By virtue of the law such-and-such,” somebody is the author of that law too, and often the law bears the name of its author, the Tom-Dick-and-Harry Act, and so on. In France, there’s the Evin Act that regulates smoking. Somebody should ask the judge, “And how about you, are you paying royalties to M. Evin?”

— So the idea of the “auteur” is misused?

— Absolutely, but there’s a lot of money riding on this kind of thing, they put a sixty-year limit on it, pretty much the same time they put on archives before they’re declassified. What about news agencies, what royalties do they handle? Plenty of dead people have never seen a penny of their royalties. Three-quarters of the pictures in the paper come without a statement of ownership, you see a guy in poverty, a drowned girl. The TV stations and newspapers could put a little money aside and try to find out who really owns that. When there’s a close-up on the front page of the paper, the photographer got his salary, but the crash victim, she never got a penny. There are thousands of cases like this.

— The industry’s terrified of the Internet.

— Yeah, but “the industry,” it’s like “the market,” it’s made up of men and women. People say “the markets” the way they’d say “the dragons.”…

— Why did you give up your studio?… And are you happy like this?

— If you’re even slightly well-off, if you have a roof over your head, if you manage to think a little on your own, and have a few people around you that you can talk to, some landscapes and a dog, that’s such a huge stroke of luck that in some ways you just say: this is an amazing world. Because for a long time, it was changing and nobody saw it change; today, three-quarters of people can see that it’s changing right before their eyes. Whether it’s climate, politics, whatever…. People feel that it’s changing, and it’s beyond their control. …

Merci Jean-Luc.

(Translated HS. In the spirit of the interview, I didn’t ask anyone’s permission.)