” Noon is approaching. The cicadas crackle in the dry air. One begins to wait impatiently for the moment of the pastis. This is how, in the Provencal way, one makes movies. You need to know all this to understand the life that drives Pagnol’s films. It is not only the truth of a film that rings true, it is also this sympathy, this communion.
Pierre Leprohon
Journalist, on the set of Manon des Sources
“We took him for a boulevard author, we took him for a regionalist author, whereas he was a great man, a great writer, a great playwright.Jean DutourdFrom the French Academy, writer.
When I accepted Angela, I said to myself, ‘If you don’t move the audience in this film, you’ll just have to play vaudeville all your life.'”
Fernandel
Comedian
“We’d come out of high school together, and we’d hold hands, and he’d walk me home, and I’d walk him home, and we’d talk endlessly, and we’d laugh and we’d love each other, and one day I blessed him in the Jewish way, grave Jewish child blessing his Christian brother.”
Albert Cohen
Writer
“In France, a genius author had managed to create a perfectly efficient organization for the distribution of his films. It was Marcel Pagnol. Not only did he limit himself geographically, like Bergman, but he also limited himself historically.”
Jean Renoir
Film director
“What is most striking about Pagnol is not his voice, which is wonderful but too easy to imitate, but his eyes. It is double: one eye always shines mischievously, the other one is rather sad, but it is the bright one that is shy, while the sad one has a very firm glint. A delight. In short, he doesn’t look like a Parisian at all. He looked like a Roman senator who had read Dickens.”
Bernard de Fallois
Afterword “The time of love
“The son of the Marseilles schoolteacher ended up as an author of dictations, and excerpts from La gloire de mon père figure prominently in the grammar books. I know of no finer victory of the secular and compulsory school than this coming and going from the communal to the Academy and from the Academy to the communal.”
Pierre Tchernia
Journalist and film director
“The shooting of Manon was on the whole very hard. It was during the summer of ’52, it was very hot and the village where we were playing was cut off from water for weeks, exactly like in the film. The cars couldn’t get there, we had to walk for miles every day… Apart from that, the atmosphere was wonderful.”
Jacqueline Pagnol
Wife of Marcel Pagnol
“Marcel is more demanding with his wife than with any of his other actors or actresses. For Manon, he sometimes got me out of bed at five in the morning for fittings!”
Jacqueline Pagnol
Wife of Marcel Pagnol
“Angela is one of the most beautiful films ever made.”
Jean-Luc Godard
Film director
“The father of neo-realism in cinema is not me, it’s you. If I hadn’t seen The Well Digger’s Daughter, I would never have shot Rome Open City.”
Roberto Rossellini
Film director
“We started shooting when Pagnol felt like starting or when all the ball games had been satisfactorily settled. And we worked anyway.”
Pierre Fresnay
Comedian
“Pagnol is unlike anyone else. With him, one must expect anything. Do you know that he wrote Le Schpountz on a daily basis? Our father in heaven, give us our daily text… And every morning, Marcel Pagnol would answer this legitimate actor’s prayer… He would give us our dialogues without us knowing what would come next.
Fernandel
Comedian
“Above all, never work on a masterpiece: it is the surest way to miss it… Your misfortune is that you are too educated… When you feel like writing, write: it is the public that will tell you what you are worth…”
Vincent Scotto
Composer of the music for his films and hundreds of hit songs from the interwar period.
“This text, which looks so easy and flowing, is in reality of such rigor, correctness, and logic that one knows it almost automatically and has nothing to add to it.”
Robert Vattier
Comedian
“He loved words and carefully chose the right expression. One day, before starting the interview, the sound engineer got busy, ran around and explained: ‘It’s dramatic, I lost my microphone!’ Pagnol took him back: ‘It’s not dramatic, sir, it’s embarrassing’.
Pierre Tchernia
Journalist and film director
“If Pagnol is not the greatest author of talking pictures, he is in any case something like his genius. He is perhaps the only one who, since 1930, has dared to show a verbal excess comparable to that of Griffiths or Stroheims in the silent era.
André Bazin
Author and film critic
“Jofroi ‘the first neorealist film’.”
Vittorio de Sica
Film director
“Before his cinema, the aesthetes had made a fuss: it was ‘filmed theater’, and millions of fools who didn’t know it had made the unforgivable mistake of going to see it with pleasure. The next generation has straightened that out.”
Pierre Tchernia
Journalist and film director
“The most vivid memory I have of him is of Pagnol wearing old pants, sneakers, an open shirt, having fun with his colleagues, his electricians, playing bowls, with a cheerfulness and an extraordinary fertility of speech, while directing everyone admirably.
Robert Vattier
Comedian
Plus d'informations sur "Marcel Pagnol and others" :