FRANCIS VEBER SAYS MEMOIR WILL BE FRENCH THRILLER
Neala Johnson
Melbourne Herald Sun
April 16 2009
Australia
MEMO to everyone in the French film industry: now is the time to be
afraid. After 40 years in the business, director Francis Veber is
writing his memoir.
Veber, 71, has worked with stars such as Daniel Auteuil, Kristin
Scott Thomas, Jean Reno, Jean Rochefort and Gerard Depardieu, and
he’s planning to tell all.
"It’s not to be a sheriff, I don’t want to punish anybody, but the
more sincere you are, the more interesting the book," Veber says.
In holding a mirror up to himself, Veber has been exploring his
relationship with his most famous character, Francois Pignon.
CLICK HERE TO READ LEIGH PAATSCH’S REVIEW OF A PAIN IN THE ASS,
AND THIS WEEK’S OTHER CINEMA RELEASES
Pignon appears in many of Veber’s films — The Dinner Game, The Closet,
The Valet, Les Comperes and Les Fugitifs among them — mostly played
by different actors, but always providing a fall guy, a sad sack, or,
as the title of his new film not-so-subtly alludes to, A Pain in the
Ass (L’ Emmerdeur).
"It’s amazing to see how much we look alike," Veber says of Pignon.
"It’s a bit sad, because Pignon is a clown. But I see there are a lot
of scenes in my own life that look like what Pignon could have done.
"You don’t know it when you’re writing, but when you see, after a
few films, that the hero remains almost the same, you start asking
yourself why you are so attached to this kind of character. Then you
understand you are just talking about yourself.
"I would have preferred to be the other guy — the tough one, scary
and strong — but you don’t choose."
In A Pain in the Ass, Pignon (Patrick Timsit) checks into a hotel
with a plan to kill himself.
In the room next door is an ice-cool hitman (Richard Berry) waiting
for his mark to arrive. With the bumbling Pignon around, the hitman’s
job just got a lot harder.
As are most of Veber’s films, it was a sure-fire hit in France. But
why do people love Pignon so much when he truly is a pain in the ass?
"I think it’s because he’s so lonely," says his creator. "This is
the story of two people who are very lonely. The killer — because
it’s his job to be lonely, he has only his gun as his friend.
"The other one is suicidal — Pignon is alone because his wife
left him.
"Pignon is so obnoxious, you can feel his desperation is big, and
he’s trying to have a friend. And this killer is supposed to be like
a Swiss watch, he’s so precise, but little by little he’s destroyed
by this pain in the ass."
It’s a surprise to learn Veber, a filmmaker so quintessentially French,
has lived in Los Angeles for the past 20 years.
When he first arrived he thought he would be churning out Hollywood
films — "I had the American dream at that time," he says.
But he’s done only two.
"The problem is I’m very French," he says with a laugh. "I didn’t know
I was so French before coming to America. When you are living in Paris,
the fact that you have the same blue jeans, the same music in your
radios and the same movies on your screen as Americans, you think
you look like them. It’s not true — they are two different planets."
Veber eats and breathes comedy. He says the funny stuff is his
birthright.
"The two first lines of my memoir, I’ll try to translate — ‘I was
born from a Jewish father and an Armenian mother. Two genocides,
two wars . . . everything to become a comic’.
"I’ve had mild depression since I was born, and the only way for me
to survive this is to make people laugh."