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Patrick Bauchau: Film Comment Pg. 4

Secrets at Play - Patrick Bauchau

From Film Comment -- July/August, 1998
by Beverly Walker (continued from Page 3)

The State of Things was to be a free-form experiment to help Wenders come to terms with a disastrous collaboration with Francis Coppola on Hammett. That noirish "biopic," starring Frederic Forrest as the author-to-be of The Maltese Falcon et al., was the first production filmed at Coppola's new Zoetrope Studios in Hollywood. Though launched with fanfare, it ran into trouble a few weeks into the shooting. Wenders was not following the letter of the screenplay as Coppola and his team thought he should. Wenders's wife, singer-actress Ronee Blakley, was implicated, since most of the rewriting expanded her (subsidiary) character. Coppola issued an ultimatum; executives Fred Roos and Lucy Fisher policed the set to be sure it was followed. The intrusion contradicted Coppola's proclamation of "total freedom" for directors working under him, and was shocking even by standards of the day. Wenders attempted to negotiate a compromise but Coppola withdrew and shut down the production. Wenders was devastated. As a kid in postwar Germany, he had grown up with American movies and music. Hammett, shot mostly on soundstages, was a chance to realize his dreams under the tutelage of a master filmmaker. In shock, he returned to Europe.

Bauchau didn't know any of this history; he was a film dropout, after all. But what amazes is how little he learned in Lisbon - not even that his own character was based on Wenders. "I didn't know what I was getting into and neither did Wim, really. He said, 'For me this movie is about being 32 or 33, in the middle of my life, but lost as if in a forest, not knowing where to go.' As we moved along, I vaguely figured out that it had autobiographical elements. But Wim said very little except that he wanted to make a film about artistic destiny and competitiveness. I decided that if he didn't know what he was doing and accepted it, I would accept it also."

The situation was fraught. There was no script, little money. Producer Paolo Branco was diverting funds from Raul Ruiz, whose film The Territory he was producing simultaneously. Wenders shot sporadically, when inspired - or when he could poach Ruiz's actors and technicians. Ruiz was outraged but helpless.

Shooting ground to a halt after about six weeks. Bauchau returned to Louveciennes. A few months later, he was abruptly summoned to Los Angeles. Wenders had come up with an idea for the ending, and funds to pay for a few days' shooting. Allen Garfield was cast as a repellent gangster/financier who toys with the desperate director (Bauchau) about money. Irony compounded irony.

About 18 months later, Wenders invited Bauchau to Paris to see a rough assemblage. The film had been sitting in the lab all this time because the producers hadn't funds to get it out. (Meanwhile, Wenders had completed Hammett with a rewritten script and new actors dictated entirely by Coppola.) At the Paris screening, Patrick Bauchau learned for the first time that he was the film's star! And there were other pleasant surprises. "Even though parts of the negative had visibly deteriorated, I was awed. Thanks to the affinity between Wim and his director of photography, Henri Alekan, it resembled an Ufa film by Murnau or Fritz Lang. I remembered that my character's name, Friedrich Fritz Munroe, honored those two giants, along with Casper David Friedrich, the great German Romantic painter. In fact, many of the shots directly evoked his canvas."

A few months hence, Bauchau again joined Wenders for the film's premiere at the Venice Film Festival. "We were sitting in the auditorium. I felt edgy and impatient, like I needed to take a piss; Wim was about the same. But we didn't move. At the end there was a moment of silence and then the audience stood and gave him a standing ovation. We were astonished, disbelieving. Italian audiences are known for being so rowdy. But the sheer romanticism of it - an artist dies because his creativity is thwarted - struck a chord. German Romanticism was reborn." (A decade later, Wenders would decide the director didn't die, he just went to the hospital. This allowed him to reprise the character for another film, Lisbon Story.)

Though Wenders may have appeared disengaged during their meeting - looking at his shoes, not disclosing the true nature of the film - casting Patrick Bauchau as his screen surrogate was clearly an inspired choice. In Bauchau he found someone who not only bore a remarkable physical resemblance to himself - with similar body language and rhythms - but, more importantly, was a man of compassion and lucid intelligence well able to illuminate and dignify his anguish. For his part, Bauchau apprehended Wenders's creative process and functioned on two levels, as actor and as aesthete. "It's quite interesting," he commented, "the way the film drifts from existential time into real time, and then does a 360 turn into the fictional time of a thriller." But it is Bauchau's incarnation of a tormented filmmaker in existentialist hell that gives The State of Things its emotional resonance. He created a real, palpable character who seems unaware of the camera. There is no actorly preening or posturing - just the simmering pain of an artist undone.

More than perhaps any other, it is these twin qualities of audacity and modesty that amaze his directors. "He's a very adventurous person, unafraid of not knowing where he is," comments Rick Wallace. "His strong presence comes in part from how natural he is - he doesn't force anything. He's willing to identify a lot of things within himself to make the character accessible and cover a wide range of emotion. What's on the page gets translated by him in his own fashion, spontaneously." Michael Tolkin (The New Age) says Bauchau "works for the labor itself, not just the way it looks."

Scholar/filmmaker Peter Wollen, who made two pictures with his old friend (Crystal Gazing, 82, and Friendship's Death, 87), feels the actor's deep knowledge of cinema and wide-ranging personal interests can be simultaneously a strength and a problem. "He's not a mechanical actor and that can be disconcerting. He might suddenly do a scene differently. The others don't know where he's coming from because he doesn't live in an actor's world."

"He's a guerilla willing to break all the rules and a director's secret weapon," says Alan Rudolph, who made the 1984 indie hit Choose Me. "There's a short love scene outside a bar between Patrick and Lesley Ann Warren that illustrates his unique way of doing things. He made the scene - kissing her in a way which suggests a history behind it, the way people act when they know each other. She loved it. Patrick doesn't require much direction because you know he has all sorts of secrets at play which will come out in their own way. I don't need to know them."

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Image from La Collectionneuse and Jenipapo (The Interview). Les Films du Losange [fr]/Rome Paris Films [fr], 1967. & Boku Films/Duerto Productions/Ravina Films, 1995. Click the image to see the full-sized photo in a new window. Do not use photo without prior, written permission.