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Raoul Coutard - A film's length (96/197)

53 views · Published 30 August 2017 · 4:08 · Indexed 22 September 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2017 · Film & Animation

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To listen to more of Raoul Coutard’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYde0bcy2eo&list=PLVV0r6CmEsFz94HTVkL-hi8sRSrIWv0iD

French cinematographer Raoul Coutard (1924-2016) was originally a war photographer. He made his debut as a director of photography in the film 'La Passe du Diable' and became a leading figure in French New Wave cinema. [Listener: Bernard Cohn; date recorded: 2004]

TRANSCRIPT: So in the end, the film still encountered a certain amount of problems. Because at first, it had been planned to make it five hours long, so a part of it was going to... A part of it was going to be shown on television, in several instalments. So afterwards since the producer... since it was something that was still very very expensive, in spite of all the help they received from the French army. So... but we were on the French army's ground because the French army sent people over there, but you still needed to get clearance from the Viets, etc., because they didn't want Indochina to be reconquered. So... and in the end, after a while, from five hours we got down to three, and then from three hours we got down to a two-hour film. And then, a problem sets in. One of those that always occurs with screenplays.

Screenplays are always a little complicated, because normally a film is an hour and a half long. So in general, the people that make films feel that an hour and a half isn't long enough to be able to express themselves, so we go further and further. For years, the hour and half was absolutely compulsory because the film theatre managers being the number one French confectioners, they wanted to have time during the intermissions to sell their ice creams, their candy, their peanuts, etc. It seemed more important than to show a slightly longer film, so there needed to be a certain number of intermissions for them to sell their goods. So afterwards, it's something that has disappeared slightly. So films continue to be made in the same way so that they still fit in that hour and a half, maximum two hour program. It's true that after a while, when the film is longer, there's the viewers' tiredness which means that the film needs to be really really good for them to stay seated.

Making a film for the cinema is already obviously different from what is done for television, because for television it's quite obvious that when a film is made, written and therefore filmed, the action needs to start straight away because if not people switch channels. At the cinema, we can keep seem seated for 15 minutes by pestering them a little with loads of preliminaries, but since they paid for their seats, they're not going to clear off straight away. So writing techniques are very different. But at the same time, there's something obvious, it's that when it's too long, you need to be able to cut. So if it's too long... Before, for example, when I started making films, when we noticed at one point that it was too long, we would cut things out because we literally took scenes out. But at the same time, we filmed something else, because if you take out a scene, if the script is well-written, the scenes are like bricks in a wall and normally if you take one out obviously the house falls down. So we needed to... So, in general, we took one out and redid another little scene to be able to explain, to create a sort of shortcut that replaces the big scene we took out. So it's something that's now very difficult for people to understand. It's out of the question to say we're going to re-shoot but at one point when you do the film's timing, we're faced with continuity girls who do the pre-timing, so if there's a big difference we can have it checked by two people to ensure that we're actually... Because we definitely don't know exactly how the director is going to do it, but we can have a precise idea by a few minutes or so.

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