Jean-Claude Carriere en Stanford

Abstract

Jean-Claude Carriere en Stanford Samuel Gibson and Tom Winterbottom March 18, 2013, Stanford University You have talked previously about your adaptation of ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ and have said that although it appeared a very literary novel you could see that there was a cinematic story there. Could you talk more about extracting the cinematic elements from a story? Sometimes I have been offered, and this was the case with Buñuel, to adapt some novels that we liked very much but we couldn’t see a film. For instance, Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry, which is a very good novel that takes place in Mexico and would have been very convenient for Buñuel to shoot. Twice we have been offered to adapt it and twice we read it and we couldn’t see a film. We liked the novel but it was action-less, it was something totally introspective. You have to have an action, even when the action is inside the character. It can be almost invisible but something has to develop. When Kundera published The Unbearable Lightness of Being I read it in Paris like any other reader and about a year later I was offered to adapt it by Saul Zaentz, the producer, and I read it again. There are two ways to read a book. One is to read a novel to enjoy it and one is looking for a film. It is a totally different reading. Everybody was telling me, You cannot adapt this philosophical novel that is built upon a Beethoven symphony, there is nothing here to make a film. I had a totally different feeling. I could see, first of all, an action that included within it the history of Czechoslovakia, as well as something inside the characters that was really interesting for me. For instance, and this is the key to the film, it is called The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a strange title for a film, even for a book. It is more like the title of a philosophical essay. What does it mean? But, through working on the adaptation I found the meaning of the title – and of course I was talking with Kundera all the time. Tomas and Tereza are in Czechoslovakia and they leave for Switzerland when the Russians come. In Switzerland he is still a surgeon and makes a very good living and is still a womanizer, he flirts around. Tereza has nothing to do. She was a photographer and now she is [End Page 129] bored. They love each other but he is unfaithful to her and she knows it. At one point she comes back to Czechoslovakia, during the worst possible time for that society, and he remains alone and there is a beautiful moment in the book, very short, where he sits down on the terrace of a café on a sunny day and he is relieved. He loved her but she was a pain in the neck, she was always threatening him. And now he feels free, he can do anything he wants. But he cannot stand it for more than half an hour. That is the meaning of the title there. So, he also comes back to Czechoslovakia and that is an action that has a lot of meanings. It means – without even saying it – that he loves his wife more than he thought. That he loves Czechoslovakia, his country, more than he thought. And that he loves obscurity, danger, decline and even death, more than he thought and that gives the whole meaning of the film. When I found this – that the most important action is when he comes back to Czechoslovakia – I had the idea for the whole film. Anyway, it was one of the most difficult works I have ever had to do because from the moment he comes back until the end of the film, there are a lot of things that happen to them but no more action. Everything goes from bad to worse, until the death of the dog. There are a series of events but no action. We know very well what is going to happen. There is no suspense...