Jean-Jacques Annaud has worked with an impressive roster of actors across his 60-year career including big names such as Sean Connery, Tony Leung and Brad Pitt as well as Christian Slater and Jane Marsh, who were emerging talents when he cast them in The Name Of The Rose and L’Amant respectively.
Talking at a masterclass at the Lumière Film Festival in Lyon on Sunday, the French director revealed how he found the casting process one of the most exhausting stages of making film.
“I never write with an actor in mind because a character often evolves, someone that starts out as 60 years old, may end up working better as a 35-year-old… I don’t want to ensnare myself. I wait until my ideas are clear,” said Annaud.
The director – whose varied filmography also spans the 1976 Africa-set Oscar winner Black and White In Color, The Bear, Enemy At The Gate, Wolf Totem and most recently Notre Dame On Fire – said his casting process tended to be long.
“The only days when I come home exhausted are my casting days,” said the director, who prides himself on never letting his enthusiasm flag.
“Why? Often I can tell it’s not going to work as soon as the door opens. I feel it. But I also know that the actor in front of me could work for other projects in the future, so I make a big effort to get a sense of who they are. I never ask them what they’ve done, I’m more interested in what passes between us.”
“Sometimes, I see 30, 40 people in a day, like a doctor. They often tell me such personal stories that they end up crying. This helps me understand who they are but at the same time I’m also upset by what I’ve heard.”
Annaud suggested that while technicians were generally easy to work with on set, actors had to be treated with more care.
“Actors are often scared, especially when they’re very famous. Acting is a profession of fragility. We [the directors] are kind of like bulls, charging in to make our films, while they have this human fragility that we need to shine a light on and protect,” he said.
“When you find yourself with Sean Connery and Christian Slater, in his first big role, and little Christian is just 15 years old and full of admiration for Sean Connery, who in turn sees the danger in this kid, how do you manage that? That excites me, and while everything else is prepared in advance that is the most delicate thing on the set.”
Annaud said he took different approaches to preparing his actors, depending on the production and role. For big screen novice Marsh, he had it written into her contract that she was not allowed to taking acting lessons ahead of arriving on set.
“I didn’t want her listening to a teacher who had no clue about what I wanted to do, so she would arrive on set not as the person I had chosen, but rather as someone trained by an unknown,” he explained.
Annaud was speaking ahead of a 5,000-capacity screening of a restored 4K copy of 1986 feature The Name Of The Rose as the closing film of the Lumière Film Festival, which has been running over the past past nine days with Wim Wenders as the main guest of honor and other filmmakers in attendance including Wes Anderson, Alfonso Cuaròn and Anthony Payne.
The director revealed that it was on this film that he had his worst experience with an actor, citing the behaviour of F. Murray Abraham, who had won the Best Actor Oscar the previous year for Amadeus.
“Everybody warned me that Sean Connery was impossible and an extremely difficult character. He was an absolute dream and I got on with him fantastically,” he recounted. “My only bad memory of an actor across my whole career, and I’ve directed, I think, thousands of actors, was F. Murray Abraham, who played the inquisitor.
“He was terrible, not so much with me, but rather with Sean. He would say, ‘I’ve got the Oscar, and he’s an old idiot’. They would both arrive late because Sean didn’t want to wait for F. Murray, and F. Murray didn’t want to wait for Sean… it was like the school playground.”
Annaud revealed Connery disliked Abraham so much that he mounted a petition calling on the actor to be booted out of SAG.
Things came to head, for Annaud, when Abraham turned up late for his scheduled final day of filming, having gone shopping instead.
“We called him to remind him of his contractual obligations, but he refused to come. He was supposed to be there at 7 a.m. and he turned up at midday,” said Annaud.
“He came to find me, and I said, ‘It’s no problem, we’ve moved your final day of filming to the end of the shoot. The people over there are lawyers and bailiffs, you’re in breach of your contract. You’re going to stay here and pay your costs out of your own pocket’. He looked at me and said, ‘Touché’. He stayed on at his own cost and we shot his final scene on the last day.”