Private Fears In Public Places: The Film

This section contains details of articles relating to the French film adaptation of Private Fears In Public Places, directed by Alain Resnais. Click on a link in the right-hand column below to access the relevant article.

This is an extract from an interview with the French film auteur and director of Private Fears in Public Places, Alain Resnais, by François Thomas.

Extracts From An Interview with Alain Resnais

I've been a fan of Alan Ayckbourn's plays since 1972. I like his plot constructions, manipulation of time and conception of directing which gives the imagination pride of place.

What struck me first when I read Private Fears in Public Places was the characters' constant determination to shake off their solitude, with all the obstacles that implies. The sense of solitude is irreversible. There's no cure for the desire not to be alone. It's the eternal quest for happiness. It's easy to believe it's within your grasp and hard to accept that it is a figment of your imagination.

With Private Fears in Public Places, I realised that I could take an opposite track compared to Smoking and No Smoking. In both those films, which were a declaration of my love of England, I pushed attention to detail to fanatical extremes, by ensuring that all the props and costumes were as English as possible, and by recording, for example, the church bells and seagulls in the small Yorkshire town which provided the backdrop. This time, we were dealing with a typically London play, which offered the possibility of transposing it to Paris. It occurred to me that the equivalent of the new London setting was the rapidly expanding district around Bercy, the Avenue de France and the new National Library with its very singular light. Also, it's a neighbourhood that fits in well with a modern-day story about real estate brokers and their clients.

I asked Jean-Michel Ribes to write the French dialogue. It seemed to me that he was close to Ayckbourn, that he could understand how his brain worked. Like Ayckbourn, not only has he written a large number of plays, but he is also a phenomenally dynamic director and artistic director of a theatre. In Musee haut, musee bas, to take just one example, there is a kind of drift into madness that one also finds in Ayckbourn. And I like his Alphonse Allais side. Unlike Smoking and No Smoking, where we had to squeeze eight plays into two films, we couldn't cut anything out this time. The writing is very sparing. As soon as you lose one line, you sense it's missing. The screenplay is very faithful to the play but it is as French as Ayckbourn is English, especially in all the nuances of everyday spoken language. We had to find a delicate balance: keeping the characters' feelings without replicating the English mindset or imitating the rhythm of spoken English.

The great challenge when you have around fifty scenes, some of which are very short, is to get across the perpetual interactions between the seven characters, even though some of them never meet. The relationships between the characters remind me of a spider's web draped between two gorse bushes and covered in dew by the night. Thierry, Charlotte, Gaelle, Dan, Nicole, Lionel and Arthur are like insects struggling to break free of a trap. Each time one of them moves, it impacts on another part of the web and on another character, therefore, who may have no links whatsoever to the first.

Copyright: François Thomas. Please do not reproduce without permission of the copyright holder.