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Francis Veber plays the interview game ... and wins! | page 1, 2, 3
Actually, he's done some good material. The films he did with Frank Tashlin, or the one they remade -- I don't know how they say it in English, the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde thing, "The Magic Professor?" "The Nutty Professor." And "The Ladies' Man" is not bad either. But tell me -- I'm a bit like the medical man in "The Dinner Game." I've heard about fraternity boys competing to bring the ugliest girl to a party, but I've never heard of grown-ups competing to bring the stupidest man. Is that your invention? No, it's a real game. They still play it in Paris. A mean, a cruel game, and I didn't like it. So I decided to punish one of the guys who did. There's an exclusive, private club in Paris -- the members are people from advertising or the record business, the "media" -- and those guys were playing this game, bringing the biggest jerk they could find. I heard stories about it. I had friends who say they participated -- for example, an anchorman in Paris. He had to bring a jerk to one of these dinners, and his jerk was supposed to be a world-class one -- and was sick the day of the dinner. Now my friend needed a new jerk. So he called this TV director who was supposed to be amazingly stupid. But this TV director had already been invited! My friend was the second guy calling him! So you see, this is a real game. And a mean game. Have you ever been invited? Maybe I have been! Because you know, when I start to talk about screenwriting, I can be as obnoxious as the guy [in "The Dinner Game"] talking about his matchstick things. They punish you for being passionate about something. I meant, were you invited to be a "host!" Are you saying you based the lead character on someone you know? A lot of guys I know, guys who had everything when they were born. Handsome, tall, blond, blue-eyed, from rich families. The other guy looks like E.T. or the Hunchback of Paris next to these beautiful people. Two extremes facing each other -- I like the chemistry of that. We never feel too sorry for "the idiot" because in his own world he's just as snobbish -- he mocks Belgians, for example. And he works for the Financial Ministry and brings a killer tax collector into the other man's house. You are perfectly right. It's the ambiguity of the character, because he's not exactly an idiot. He's more dangerous than an idiot -- dangerous on two levels, because when a jerk wants to help, he's the most dangerous man in the world. And he's dangerous as a deus ex machina -- he knows when a guy can be audited. You see on his face, at one moment in the film, "I am holding you by the balls now." So he's more dangerous than he seems to be. Tax people are not the most popular people here in the U.S., but in France, they are hated. You made a movie called "The Dinner Game." But you never really show us the dinner game. If you try to show a real jerk talking, it's dangerous -- there's a potential that the audience can feel what he's saying is true. So I just had a few seconds of a guy at the dinner saying how he'd kill a wallaby or an ostrich with his boomerang. That was enough. When I was at school, we were taught Henri Bergson's theory of comedy -- that it derives from disrupted habits, patterns that are broken. I didn't think of Bergson when I made this movie, but I love his theory. I still remember a story told in his book about a preacher in church, giving his sermon. He's so touching, and so emotional, that everyone is crying except one guy. And a man turns to him and says, "You're not touched by what this priest is saying?" And the guy says, "I don't belong to this church." Does a comedy such as this one, that plays on social stereotypes -- like, say, the beautiful person with the charmed life and the haute bourgeois background -- play more naturally in France? It does play more naturally in France. But there is a kind of contempt for poor people in Los Angeles, and it's almost the same thing as the class difference in France. I have a house in the hills in West Hollywood -- very quiet, I can take my bike and ride in the hills, then go back and write. What I've found is that for a lot of people here, a man who is richer is more intelligent than a man who is less rich. Which is very stupid, because you can be very rich and very stupid. But Rupert Murdoch is supposed to be more intelligent than one of his lieutenants -- because he's richer. So this is a cliché, too, and it exists in America. I've seen the film at festivals here, with crowds made up of almost all Americans, and they were laughing as much as the audience in France. Maybe they understand this kind of humor, even if it's not about the same social structure you have here. Maybe here class has been replaced by wealth.
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