you don’t know how it’s done, I don’t
know how it’s done, nobody knows how
it’s done. You create chaos as a way of
destabilizing the surroundings that
could bring you to make something
that would otherwise be conventional.”
A
few days after meeting Denis, I ac-
companied her on a train trip from
Paris to Rennes, where she was serving
on the jury of a film festival. It was a
dreary morning, the sky damp and
rat-colored. “I am covered, as if on the
North Pole,” Denis told me, pointing at
her coat. We passed through the kind
of semirural landscape that surrounds
major cities all over the world, and which
appears quaint only in countries that are
not one’s own. Before settling into con-
versation, Denis braved the café car,
where an excruciatingly slow-moving
line had formed before the train even
left the station. She stood behind a fam-
ily, cooing at a baby in Breton stripes.
After buying cofee and taking her
seat, Denis began to talk about her
mother, who had died, at the age of
ninety-four, six months earlier, during
the filming of “High Life.” Still in mourn-
ing, Denis seemed incapable of avoiding
the topic, turning to it in many of our
conversations, with little or no segue.
“When she was pregnant with my little
brother, she had a bad pregnancy and
had to stay in bed,” Denis said. After giv-
ing birth, her mother became depressed.
“I remember very well, this little boy was
my son, for a long time, until she recov-
ered and took over. I remember when
she was an old lady and she would say,
‘My son, my son!’ She was really in love
with her son. And I had to tell her, ‘You
know, in the beginning, he was mine!’
And it’s true that at that moment I re-
alized how beautiful it was to see a new
baby born, the changes every day.”
Denis, who never remarried, also
never had children. Earlier, when we
spoke about the decision, or nondeci-
sion, she told me, “It was a pain, and
then it was a memory, and now I have
accepted it.” She added, “Maybe this is
just convenient for me, but I never
thought of being a mother as an accom-
plishment for a woman.” At the same
time, “loneliness, independence, soli-
tude—it’s heavy,” Denis said. Since her
divorce, a half century ago, she has had
two long-term companionships. One
lasted for twelve years, and the other,
with a man whom she would not iden-
tify beyond confirming that he’s “also
in film,” is, as she put it, “still going on.”
She continued, “It’s also heavy to be a
couple, but solitude is something very
special that clearly tells you at some mo-
ments, in the day or night, that if you
were to die in the next moment you
wouldn’t ever again see a human face.”
We had been speaking for almost two
hours, and Denis’s throat was beginning
to strain. There were quiet patches in
her speech that made her exhaustion
sound like sadness, even when she was
recounting joy. Denis, as many people
told me, takes real pleasure from the
world. Long after she had finished work-
ing with Aurelien Barrau, a French as-
trophysicist with whom she consulted
on “High Life,” Denis continued to call
him, to describe beautiful sights she had
encountered while walking—once, a tree
shivering in the wind in a way she
thought he would enjoy. Des Hamilton,
Denis’s casting director, told me about
her devotion to a particular brand of Ec-
cles cakes, and about how she adored a
silk scarf she had bought while in his
company. “You know when you purchase
something, you can get a little high?” he
said. “Well, with Claire, her high is sus-
tained for far longer than most people’s.”
Denis’s sensuality may play some part
in explaining her relationships with ac-
tors, which nearly everyone I spoke with
described in romantic terms. “It has a
taste of eroticism rather than psychol-
ogy,” Agnes Godard, De-
nis’s longtime cinematogra-
pher, told me. Hamilton re-
called witnessing the initial
meeting between Denis and
Pattinson, in Los Angeles,
and feeling like “these are
two people on a date, and I
really shouldn’t be here,
maybe I should actually re-
move myself ?” With obvi-
ous pride, Denis recounted
how Pattinson took the train from Lon-
don to visit her in Paris.“He came to me
like a friend,” she told me. “You know,
in London, Robert has to hide because
of girls?” (A representative for Pattinson
said, “He doesn’t hide from anyone.”)
Lauren told me, “Claire likes to be wooed.
She wants her actors and actresses to
want her as much as she wants them.”He said that on set “they become, met-
aphorically, either her babies or her lov-
ers—it’s a bit hard to tell which.”
The adoration is reciprocal, in large
part because of the sustained and ob-
sessive attention Denis pays her actors,
an absorption that resembles love. “I
got the sense she was contemplating
everything about me at all times,” the
actress Tricia Vessey, who appeared in
“Trouble Every Day,” told me. “You feel
like you’re being thought of in ways
that people don’t usually think of you.”
Thought of, but also felt. “I touch them,”
Denis told me. “I have to.” She worries
sometimes that actors find the approach
“shocking” and too French. “Instead of
telling them, ‘Can you please move your
head two centimetres to the left,’ it can
be so much better to come and slightly
move the head. And I know it’s not
normal, but I feel like I have to do that.”
Onscreen, Denis can make even the
oddest-looking faces appear iconic.
“Whatever happens in a film, the min-
imum of the minimum for the director
and for the D.P. is to see the real beauty
in the actress or actor,” she told me.
“And by beauty of course I don’t mean
perfection.” She went on, “I know that
maybe the script is not perfect, maybe
I am not the greatest director, but at
least I know I’m looking for something,
that little shine.”
When she finds it, she is overcome.
She nearly fainted when she saw Be-
atrice Dalle emerge on the set of “Trou-
ble Every Day” in her wardrobe and
makeup. “We had to stop
shooting,” Denis recalled.
“I couldn’t breathe.” Even
twenty years later, when she
speaks with Dalle, she sees
that night as though it were
just five minutes ago. “She
walked through these neon
lights. Everything was white
and red. It was too much,
it was too great.” “35 Shots
of Rum” was the same. Near
the end of the film, the daughter, played
by Mati Diop, appears in a white dress.
It seems that she is getting married. She
looks like a woman but also like a child,
and her father knows that he’ll soon
lose her. “It was a sequence shot,” Denis
said, “and we made two takes and I was
crying. Not one tear—it was rivers. But,
of course, it’s fiction.”