admin On maggio - 16 - 2014

Georges Simenon, born in 1903 in Liège, is the most read Belgian writer in the world and the third of French-language  authors, after Jules Verne and Alexandre Dumas. If the success  of his novels has partly overshadowed the rest of his work, it has to be remembered that Simenon also wrote short stories, articles and reports under his name and even gallant tales under a pseudonym.Simenon left school at the age of fifteen and began to write in the news in brief column of The Gazetteof Liège. His first workAu Pont des Archeswas written in1920. He moved To Paris two years later and began by publishing short stories  and tales in various newspapers. In 1930, he gave birth to his most famous character, detective Maigret. The following year,  Simenon began working on film adaptations of his works with Jean Renoir. While writing very prolifically, he spent much of his life traveling around the world. He even moved to the United States at a time, and then to Quebec. His last novel, Maigret et  Monsieur Charles (193rd of his career) was published in 1972.  Although he was celebrated all over, he then retreated gradually  from public life to write his Intimate Memoirs . Simenon died  In Lausanne on the 4th of September 1989


MATHIEU AMALRIC on the movie:

Is it the heaviness, or the slowness inherent in your adaptation project of  The Red and the Black by Stendhal  which precipitated the launching of  The Blue Room ?

No, it’s really just to meet Paulo Branco in the street during the shooting of Roman Polanski’s film. Paulo, he is like a soothsayer, he felt I would need centuries for Stendhal. It is deeply moving

when someone tells you

Do something, shoot! Don’t you want  to do something in three weeks?

I searched, and there it was, we all have a book by Simenon that we found and read some

day in the country house of we-no-longer-know-who. I don’t even know where this book comes from, who I stole it from. It is a book that I had already used for On Tour. In the scenario, we had call the final scene  “the blue room”, and there it was: a  man and a woman. What does finally remain in life, apart from  two bodies attracted to each other?

Very quickly, I said to myself: in four weeks, this, The Blue Room, is something I can do. It turned out that the rights to the novel were free, which surprised me a lot. There are so many people who wanted to bring it to the big screen: Maurice Pialat went very far into the adaptation, with Jacques Fieschi. Catherine Deneuve was supposed to do it with André Téchiné. Depardieu asked Chabrol to think about it. It is even said that the Dardenne brothers…It’ surprising that

The blue roomshould follow On Tour. One could imagine that The Blue Room is a way to turn your back on On Tour to do the opposite of an almost Dionysian  film, which advocated letting go and movement.

I haven’t thought about that at all. It was rather a novel that  haunted me for a long time, and written by Simenon, a guy who writes at full speed. Thereby inviting me to film quickly myself.

What also attracts me is the alloy of hot and cold, and what can drive men crazy: an illegible woman! “ I mistook her for a cold  woman, a haughty woman, a statue.” We are here facing the

abyss of sexuality and attraction, which is unspeakable. What  is fascinating with Simenon is that everyone forces him to put  it into words.

When he wrote this novel in 1963, in Epalinges in Switzerland,  Simenon was in a phase of permanent self-flagellation, such as  “Women are witches, I shouldn’t have done it.” It is a novel of

punishment regarding sexuality – or regarding his own exuberant sexuality. And with Stephanie Cléau – who adapted the novel with  me -–we tried to erase it as we could.

I drew up a list of enemy films, films I had to knowingly discard,  whatever their value.

The Devil is a Woman by Josef von Sternberg for example:

I did not want Esther to be a vamp. I wanted her to be just an unreadable woman, a priori without  seduction weapons. For other reasons, Garde à Vueby Claude  Miller was also an enemy film, as regards the interrogatories and the convocation of flash backs.

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