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| Cheers! Bernard Campan and Isabelle Carré in Ivan Calbérac’s The Tasting Photo: UniFrance |
Unlike many in the profession he loves writing, can barely find a keyboard that keeps up with his bursts of creativity and is even happy to help friends who may have writer’s block as well as hiring out his talents on a professional basis.
He has made something of speciality of transferring his hit stage plays to the screen such as The Tasting (La Dégustation) about an odd couple. They comprise: Jacques (divorced, disgruntled and in his fifties), whose wine business is on the brink of bankruptcy, and Hortense, a nurse with a penchant for babies, who stumbles into his shop and eventually reveals she is determined to find love and have a child of her own.
Bernard Campan and Isabelle Carré, who played the pair onstage, reprised their roles for the film. Caldérac explained: “You almost don’t need to direct them because I have worked with them previously on several occasions and they have also worked together a lot.
“One of the main points about directing is making sure you choose the right actors and then all you need to say, ‘A little less like that and a bit more like this’. What I found out about directing Isabelle is that she is more of a clown than I had imagined. She is really funny and has a good sense of humour. She played around with this character and even Bernard [Campan] was surprised.
“She loved to play that character. And as for Bernard he is not as funny as he usually can be because his character has this dark side. He loved also playing again opposite Isabelle and being this kind of rather morose personality. It was more important that he did not make him too unsympathetic for the audience, he was afraid of that, but finally I think he got the pitch exactly right.”
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| Ivan Calbérac in action on the set of The Tasting Photo: UniFrance |
Caldérac suggests that when directing for the stage he can allow the actors to be more flamboyant and "out there", but on a film set where the camera is focused so closely on their every move, they have to be more subtle in the way they perform. “It is crucial to make the right choice of actors who know how to do that. Sometimes you can have great stage actors who are not used to be playing in the cinema. You take them on set and you have trouble trying to get them to be more realistic.
“Even though they may have a lot of technique, it takes more internalising to make the characters come across in a movie. In a big theatre they make things louder to reach the audience in the back row. The stage is a place of evocation rather than a place of representation as is in cinema. The techniques are close but not the same and some actors such as Carré and Campan know the difference almost instinctively.”
As a playwright he doesn’t start off with the idea of writing a theatre piece that might become a film. “To be honest a lot of it depends on the success of the stage production. The great thing about a film is that it lasts and is there for posterity whereas a stage production is over once the run is finished. I like the journey from one form to another. You can open it out and expand the number of characters which is what I did in The Tasting. It was a real pleasure to create some of these additional characters who had just been mentioned in the play.”
Another pleasurable aspect was to find an appropriate setting in which to film. The location had not been specified on stage but for the film shoot Caldérac put wine centre stage by filming it in Troyes between Champagne country and Burgundy. “It was the perfect place because it was a story about non-Parisian people – they were simple, with normal values and not at all snobby as can be the case with Parisiens,” said Caldérac.
He was born in Paris, but now lives in the south of France. His job involves him returning to the capital on a regular basis. At the time we speak in Paris as part of the UniFrance Rendezvous with French Cinema he is about to open a new play at the Comédie de Paris called Like which plays around with the shortcomings of our digital world and social networks and reflects on our dependence on technology.
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| Director Ivan Calbérac on stars Bernard Campan and Isabelle Carré: 'You almost don’t need to direct them because I have worked with them previously on several occasions and they have also worked together a lot' Photo: UniFrance |
Another of his stage plays which launched at the Avignon Festival, Glenn Gould, The Birth Of A Prodigy, about the celebrated Canadian classical pianist, is due to open in Canada with a Canadian cast later this Spring after a run at the Théâtre Montparnasse in Paris.
Meanwhile he is also basking in the success of Riviera Revenge/N’avoue jamais, an original script for cinema with André Dussollier as crusty old general in peaceful retirement with his wife (played by Sabine Azéma) until he discovers that she had been unfaithful to him 40 years previously – and to make matters worse the culprit is a family friend (Thierry Lhermitte) as seductive now as he was then. Cue for a comedy of reconciliation because as Caldérac suggests “it is hard to be vengeful 40 years down the line.”
Although he enjoys the challenges of transferring from stage to screen which began in earnest in 2012 with The Student And Mr Henri (L'étudiante et Monsieur Henri) featuring Claude Brasseur and Noémie Schmidt, he feels in some ways able to take more liberties with a script written specifically for cinema. “I have a greater sense of freedom because with a stage adaptation there is always the temptation to remember the laughs and where they came on stage. It is hard to avoid trying to get those same laughs again for the film – and it certainly doesn’t always work out like that. A movie is not a play,” says Caldérac as he heads off into the Parisian evening for to fine fine-tune the stage production of Like.
The Tasting now on release in the UK and Ireland through Parkland Entertainment. Richard Mowe interviewed Ivan Calbérac at the UniFrance Rendezvous with French Cinema in Paris.
