Former president of the Cannes Film Festival, Gilles Jacob published I lived in my dreams in 2015, a book of interviews with Michel Piccoli of which he was a close friend. For AFP, he looks back on the career of an exceptional actor whose "France is an orphan" .
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What should we remember from Michel Piccoli?
Michel was the art of the actor: class, elegance and modesty, tenderness and extravagance, the freshness of those who have kept their child's soul. He also represented the cocasserie. The desire to surprise and let germinate this touch of madness that makes the very very big. This is why the greatest filmmakers like Marco Ferreri, Claude Sautet and Jean-Luc Godard have used it magnificently. We weren't directing Piccoli. We were filming it. It was pointless to give him explanations. The character he played guided him. He welcomed the evidence of ... things in life. France is the orphan of a son. He leaves us his work and our sorrow.
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What memories do you keep of the Cannes Festivals where he defended so many films and where he won an interpretation prize?
He received this prize for interpretation ex-aequo with Anouk Aimée for Le Saut dans le vide , a film by Marco Bellocchio. Ironically, moreover: Michel was rewarded for a film in which he was dubbed in Italian! Another funny thing in his image: he was not upset and he even loved it! However, his voice was incredible: he could be booming or whispering to the limit of the audible. He had all the records and could play everything. One evening, I paid tribute to Youssef Chahine who had just edited it in Adieu Bonaparte . Michel jumped onto the table in the Carlton's dining room, raising his fist and shouting: "Vive Chahine!". Michel Piccoli has also made several films, always with the funny and extravagance that summed it up so much. With Godard, their collaboration has been splendid. Le Mépris is one of the most beautiful films in the history of cinema. Michel played a contemptible character. The actors love to play unfriendly roles. With Ferreri, he shot La Grande bouffe but also Dillinger died where he was alone for an hour with a revolver. And the film is extraordinary! .
How do you find him in The Things of Life , his probably most popular film?
Michel is magnificent there. It was the beginning of the 70s. He is physically superb as a seducer with a velvet eye. The slow motion of the accident is fabulous. Michel Piccoli was a theater actor, it should not be forgotten. For the cinema, he had an agent to start but very quickly, he decided to fend for himself, with always choices that should resemble him. Above all, stories and directors with a touch of madness were needed, as in Jacques Rouffio's Le Sucre . Michel was not a man interested in money. Likewise, he would not run after honors. He didn't like conventional things. He preferred to converse, share a meal or a kiss than honors.
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