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BERTRAND TAVERNIER: SIMENON AND THE SURREAL IN CRIME
With the death of Bertrand Tavernier we have lost a master, one of the seminal presences in film for most of my lifetime. I interviewed him when he came to London in September 2008 to accept the first Master award as guest of honour at the late, lamented Crime Scene festival, which also mounted a retrospective of his (mostly) crime films at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. After we met in the ICA cafe, we were led through a kitchen, up a tiny works elevator, and through a maze of narrow corridors that made me feel like Eddie Constantine navigating Alphaville, before we finally arrived in a very traditional looking English office, redolent of something from Le Carre’s Circus — no wonder the ICA keep it so hidden — overlooking St James Park and Big Ben. But once we sat down to talk, the setting disappeared and the time flew past, which was a shame because the focus was on crime films and I also very much wanted to inquire about the specifics of the whole of his career. The Watchmaker Of St Paul was the first film of his I saw, viewed in rep one afternoon not long after I moved to London, skipping out from my news agency job.
Tavernier’s is a life spent within film: as critic, publicist, director, producer; his enthusiasm for his calling remains undiminished by the vagaries of the business. If you’d like to get a sense of what this felt like in…
