Interview: Bertrand Tavernier, film director on the mystery of history

AN HOUR in the company of veteran French film-maker Bertrand Tavernier is a masterclass in cinema. It's not that the man once dubbed by Martin Scorsese as "France's leading director" makes heavy weather of his considerable cinematic knowledge. Not at all. It's that he cannot hide his love of film, and in his enthusiasm everything - at least everything that we talk about - one way or another comes round to his chosen art form. It's nothing less than you'd expect from a man who fell in love with cinema when he was a boy and who quit law school to write film criticism for Cahiers du cinma, became an acquaintance of the founders of the New Wave, Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, and then an auteur in his own right.

The Princess of Montpensier, Tavernier's new film, is a swashbuckling, romantic epic set in 16th-century France at the time of the Catholic-Protestant wars. The film, based on a short story by Madame de Lafayette, is the story of Marie de Mzires (Mlanie Thierry) a young noblewoman struggling against the strictures of her social position and her desire for personal freedom, not least access to education and the ability to be with the person she loves.

Tavernier admits he didn't know much about the historical period before he began working on the film, but insists that was no impediment. In fact, he says it was beneficial: "The fact that you know or don't know is not important because the film is not about a period.

"It's about a moment of history as it is felt, seen, understood by a young woman who is practically as ignorant as the audience of today. She does not know, she is not educated. She's trying to learn, trying to educate herself and her discovery of things allows me to allow the audience to discover things at the same time as her."

For Tavernier the film is about experiencing a certain kind of emotion, a certain kind of desire. The costumes and settings may be accurate, but the film is not a history lesson. Tavernier was emulating a technique of the man he describes as the "great master", the writer Maurice Stendhal.

"In Le Chartreuse de Parme (1830) there is a chapter about the battle of Waterloo but it's seen through the eyes of a young man who doesn't know anything of what is going on," Tavernier says. "He doesn't know where he is, he doesn't know who is winning or losing. Stendhal gives us with that one of the most exciting and vivid accounts of a Napoleonic battle.

"We understand what it was to be in a battle from that better than we would from most historical books. We understand because we don't really understand what is going on, it is concentrating on only the emotions of the characters. That was what I tried to do." Working with a mainly young cast of French actors, Tavernier's aim was to create a film set in the past but in which the characters seem very much alive. Fighting, sex, intrigue - these are the concerns of Tavernier's characters.

"I think a lot of period films are done in entirely the wrong way," Tavernier says. "They are very ponderous and academic. But these people wanted to live and live fast, so the film had to feel fast. We needed to capture that in the way that the camera moved, the energy.

"They are behaving like rock stars. I had to film them like that, not like something from a museum. Someone said that the Duc d'Anjou is dressed like Prince. I said, it's quite the opposite, it's Prince who saw paintings of that period and took that style."

Lambert Wilson as the tortured Comte de Chabannes is the stand-out performance of the film, but for Tavernier it is Marie who is the heart of the piece, or as he puts it, "the pulse". So important is she, and so moved was Tavernier by Thierry's performance, that he changed the ending of the novel, in which Marie is killed off for submitting to her passion. Tavernier, who says he was often moved to tears by Thierry's performance, just couldn't bear that ending for her.

"I didn't want to kill Mlanie Thierry because she's one of the most wonderful actresses I've ever worked with in my life," he says, "and I know about wonderful actresses - I've worked with Romy Schneider and with Isabelle Huppert twice. Mlanie is stunning."

Tavernier explains that it's partly that Thierry's beauty fits the period - her high forehead, the colour of her eyes and skin and, of course, her breasts, an aspect of the female form that was "very very important at the time" he explains. But there was something else too.

"She's one of those actresses, and it's not true of many, who does not look disguised in period dress, she looks completely at ease."

Ever the film buff, Tavernier says American actors rarely look comfortable in period dress, but not so the British. He reels off a list of classic actors: Charles Laughton, Basil Rathbone, Laurence Olivier, James Mason, Stuart Grainger.

"I discovered during the test I did with Mlanie that she had all the colours of the part. In a minute she could go from being a playful schoolgirl, a teenager, to an aristocratic princess, very condescending and class conscious, to a woman who is very sexually attracted to men, to someone both romantic and vulnerable.

"You never see the moment when she changes from one colour to another. I was always caught by surprise. Always. It was like a bird, she was flying from one colour to another. There were many moments when she moved me to tears on the set." Tavernier's oeuvre is idiosyncratic, as you might expect from a director who is as much a fan as an auteur. He's immersed himself in the booze-soaked jazz scene of the 1950s in Round Midnight, the colonial oppressiveness of Senegal in the 1930s in Coup de Torchon and the Middle Ages for The Passion of Beatrice. Historical dramas may interest him, but he's under no illusion as to how hard it is to get them made.

"They're not fashionable," he says. "But I've always had to fight against that. My second film was a period piece, and even after the success of my first film, which had originally been turned down by everyone, it was also turned down by everyone. I could only do it because I had the backing of an American company, no French company would back me."

Tavernier speaks as a man who knows how to follow his own instincts, no matter what prevailing trends or commercial interests deem important. He trusts his gut; he always has. Back in 1980, he ignored "every British film producer" who told him not to shoot his film, Death Watch, in Scotland lest he be mugged or have his gear stolen.

"I love Scotland," he says with a smile. "And that was one of the happiest shoots I've ever had in my life. People were so warm, so hospitable, so nice. I spent months here for that film and I've come back several times on holiday since. I went to Callander, Oban, to the Isle of Mull, to check out all of the locations that Michael Powell had used in I Know Where I'm Going. I even went to the Western Isles Hotel. I asked for the same table where you see Wendy Hiller having dinner." Cinema, that's what it comes back to. Tavernier's love affair with film has been his life's passion and at 69, he feels it just as he did when he was 13 and he knew that he wanted to be a film director. "I think I've had a beautiful, lucky life," he says. "I've done everything I've wanted to do.

"I've done only the films I wanted to do, which I originated, financed, created the original screenplay. And I've survived. I'm very, very respectful of the people before me who fought and gave me the freedom that I have enjoyed, people like Jean Renoir, Jack Baker, John Ford, Michael Powell. All the victories they won, the success they had, that allowed me to be the director that I am. I am grateful to them and I am very humble in front of them. And I want to go on."

• The Princess of Montpensier is on selected release from Friday