 |
[Gilles Carles]: [...] indeed, there was Léopold Z, a so-called documentary on snow |
| For me snow, my love of snow is really not something very unusual and you know |
| I love Montrealers, but I don't love snow, so snow and physical things without humans do not interest me. |
| Never in my life have I shot scenes without a human in them. Scenes alone are uninteresting. |
| Like in art, we've had scenery painters for 50 years, nude painters for 50 years yet a no one has ever painted a nude amid scenery. |
| It's a form of fragmentation and I don't find it interesting so in Léopold Z I took the cameras and crew and I created a scenario where there was lots of snow and people in the snow. |
| [journalist]: There were real people in it |
| [GC]: Yes, there were real people in it. And hem, I shot it in the east end of Montréal that I know well |
| And I started to look for characters that I had and I put them in it. |
| Méo and Léo there, it was an idea that dates back to I don't know when, but it was not exactly the same, although it was the same characters. |
| So I took those characters and made them come alive onscreen. |
| I shot for a half-hour. I was allowed a half-hour. |
| But the film could not be completed start-to-end because [laughter] because it wouldn't result in a movie. |
| In my mind, at the back of my mind, I wanted to produce a feature film. |
| But I said to myself that if I spend all my money. Then I'd be stuck and there would be nothing else to do but to continue it. |
| I presented it to the regional resources film manager. |
| I told him what I had done and I was voted another budget to continue shooting and it became Léopold Z, la vie heureuse de Léopold Z. |
| [j]: Your first feature film [GC]: my first feature film |
| [j]: Which was very successful |
| [GC]: With my dialogues, my story and me directing the actors and all that for the first time and hem, |
| [j]: It worked [GC]: it worked out very well, yes very well. It worked in movie clubs and it was, in fact, the first successful Canadian film |
| [j]: So you did it with the help of the NFB |
