Beineix cites the characters of the two young lion tamers in his slight but charming 1989 film, Roselyne and the Lions, who are willing to die just to give the audience a good show, as “the archetype of what an artist should be.
“But as soon as you say that,” he adds, “immediately all the people in the studios think, ‘Oh my god, we are in trouble now. Over budget!’”
Kevin Scanlon
Fugitive from development hell
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Perhaps fittingly for a director so intrigued by the tensions between opposing forces — man and woman, moon and gutter, live and Memorex — Beineix has by now experienced the full yin and yang of not one but two national film industries. Even Diva was a flop upon its initial French release, picking up steam only after hanging on in a single Parisian cinema for the better part of a year. (Beineix had to fight legendary producer Serge Silberman to submit the movie to the Toronto Film Festival, where it ultimately received a standing ovation, on its way to earning more than $6 million at the North American box office.) When Montand died of a coronary shortly after completing the grueling IP5 shoot, a series of unflattering articles in the French press blamed Beineix for causing the star’s death. Meanwhile, Beineix’s only fiction feature of the past 19 years, 2001’s neo-Hitchcockian thriller Mortal Transfer, failed to return its $7 million investment, $2 million of which came from the director’s own production company.
When I ask Beineix what he’d been up to during his long breaks, “recovering,” he says, only half-jokingly. In addition, he has directed a couple of TV documentaries — one of which, Locked-in Syndrome (1997), is a remarkable portrait of the paralyzed Elle magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby in the midst of writing his memoir, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (and a welcome corrective to Julian Schnabel’s saccharine Hollywood biopic). He has also produced an elegiac essay film, Requiem for Billy the Kid (2006), about the myths of the American West; Allez, yallah! (2006), a feature-length documentary about the fight of Muslim women to be considered equal to men; and CosmicConnexion (2006), a television program for the French network ARTE, designed to be beamed into outer space for potential extraterrestrial audiences. And last year, he published a memoir, Les chantiers de la gloire, which, at 835 pages, is only the first of a planned four volumes.
Modesty, of course, has never been Beineix’s strong suit. Now 62, he still seems very much an enfant terrible, momentarily in retreat, perhaps, but ready to pounce, like one of the majestic cats of Roselyne and the Lions, as soon as the occasion calls for it. When he talks about his aborted Earhart movie, he does it so vividly that you can practically see the scenes playing out before your eyes, Earhart’s silver plane emerging from the hangar just as the first Hitler stamps are rolling off the presses in Germany. (“I wanted to show that an American woman is the last person who flew around a world that was going to collapse forever because of the Second World War,” he says.) And when he tells you that he’s seeking financing for an adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr.’s The Demon, updated for today’s corporate American workplace, it’s enough to make a journalist flirt with becoming a film producer.
“Business should adapt to art, not the other way around,” says the eponymous opera soprano of Diva, who insists that audiences experience her performances in person rather than on concert albums. It’s the epitaph Beineix says he would choose for his own. “But you have to know, it was the beginning of my troubles,” he adds with another sly grin. “The producers wanted me to take out this line. I remember a terrible fight: ‘Jean-Jacques, please take this line out. You will have time to make statements, to talk.’ And I said, ‘No, I’m doing the film for this line.’ I knew then it was a declaration of war. Forever.”
