Jean-Claude Carrière has enjoyed a long and fruitful career as perhaps France's most important screenwriter, with extended collaborations with Buñuel and Pierre Étaix, as well as smaller stints with Milos Forman, Claude Berri, Jacques Deray and Jean-Luc Godard. He has also worked as co-director alongside Étaix, and his one solo job, the short film The Nail Clippers, is a little classic.
But Carrière has also carried on a modest career as an actor, playing small roles in many of the films based on his scenarios. 1971's L'alliance, directed by Christian de Chalonge, seems to be his one real attempt at becoming a movie star.
In a rather Buñuelian scenario, Carrière's Hugues presents himself at a dating agency and announces that he's looking to find a wife with a spacious apartment. It turns out that he's a vet and needs somewhere to both live and practice. He's...
But Carrière has also carried on a modest career as an actor, playing small roles in many of the films based on his scenarios. 1971's L'alliance, directed by Christian de Chalonge, seems to be his one real attempt at becoming a movie star.
In a rather Buñuelian scenario, Carrière's Hugues presents himself at a dating agency and announces that he's looking to find a wife with a spacious apartment. It turns out that he's a vet and needs somewhere to both live and practice. He's...
- 10/9/2013
- by David Cairns
- MUBI
"The imagination is a muscle, and it must be exercised."
This was agreed between screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière and director Luis Buñuel when they started to collaborate in the 1960s (six films in total, plus a screenplay for The Monk, which sadly Buñuel never got to shoot). Meeting in quiet bars, they would work on the current script in the morning and then separate for lunch. When they reunited in the afternoon, each would have to tell the other a story. Not necessarily anything to do with the film at hand. Just something to keep the creative fires banked. (One suspects that Bunuel's penultimate movie, The Phantom of Liberty, may be composed in part of several of these throwaway tales.)
The Nail Clippers, written and directed by Carrière in 1969, could well have grown from one of these lunchtime anecdotes, but whatever its origins, it's the perfect short film. Carrière's only work as director,...
- 10/22/2009
- MUBI
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