JB to JCB

JULIEN BOIVENT — After Noce Blanche, which was an enormous commercial success, you could have had a studio career, or like Rohmer, who you knew well, gone into an intermediate system, creating a parallel economy in film, in which they are financed by their own success and investors get their money back. But you chose to stay out there on the fringe. Was that something you wanted or was it forced upon you?

JEAN-CLAUDE BRISSEAU — It was both. I discovered that a tiny group of “deciders” like having people at their feet, literally. They especially like it when people make great moral declarations, and then are forced to crawl on their knees in front of them. In order to get ahead you have to bend over, and I categorically refused. People thought I would bow and scrape like everyone else. They were mistaken. The bourgeois do that, but not the working class.

Purple Magazine #20