The Possibility of an Island Read Online Free PDF

began to flood in. Curiously, I was contacted once again by Jamel Debbouze, who wanted to break out of his usual character type to play a bad boy, a real villain. His agent quickly made him see that it would be an error, and finally nothing was done, but the anecdote seems significant to me.
    To contextualize it better, you must remember that in those years—the last years of an economically viable French cinema industry—the only attestable successes of French production, the only ones that could pretend to, if not rival American productions, then at least more or less cover their costs, belonged to the
comedy
genre—subtle or vulgar, they all managed to work. On the other hand, artistic recognition, which enabled both access to the last remaining public subsidies and decent coverage in the respectable media, went first of all, in cinema as in the other arts, to productions that praised evil—or, at least, that challenged moral values conventionally described as “traditional,” in a sort of institutionalized anarchy perpetuating itself through mini-pantomimes whose repetitive nature did not blunt their charms in the eyes of the critics, all the more so as they facilitated the writing of reviews that were predictable and clichéd, yet in which they were still able to present themselves as groundbreaking. The putting to death of morality had, on the whole, become a sort of ritual sacrifice necessary for the reassertion of the dominant values of the group—centered for some decades now on competition, innovation, and energy, more than on fidelity and duty. If the fluidification of forms of behavior required by a developed economy was incompatible with a normative catalog of restrained conduct, it was, however, perfectly suited to a perpetual celebration of the will and the
ego.
Any form of cruelty, cynical selfishness, or violence was therefore welcome—certain subjects, like parricide or cannibalism, in particular. The fact that a comedian, who was known as a comedian, was able to move easily into the domains of cruelty and evil, was therefore necessarily going to constitute, for the profession as a whole, an electric shock. My agent greeted what can truly be described as a
stampede
to his door—in less than two months, I received forty different script proposals—with qualified enthusiasm. I was certainly going to earn a lot of money, he said, and he was going to as well; but, in terms of notoriety, I was going to lose. The scriptwriter may well be an essential element in the making of a film, but he remains, first of all, absolutely unknown to the general public; and anyway, second of all, writing scripts represented a lot of work, which risked distracting me from my career as a showman.
    If he was right on the first point—my participation, as scriptwriter, co-scriptwriter, or simply consultant on the credits of around thirty films, was not going to add one iota to my notoriety—he made a wild overestimate on the second. Filmmakers, I quickly realized, are not very intelligent: you need only bring them an idea, a situation, a fragment of story line, all the things they would be incapable of thinking up themselves; you add a bit of dialogue, three or four silly witticisms—I was capable of producing about forty pages of script per day—you present the product, and they are thrilled. Then they change their minds all the time, on everything—them, the production, the actors, anyone. You need only go to the meetings, tell them they are completely right, that you will rewrite according to their instructions, and Bob’s your uncle; never had I known such easy money.
    My biggest success as a principal scriptwriter was certainly
Diogenes the Cynic;
contrary to what the title might suggest, it was not a costume drama. The cynics—and it is a generally forgotten point of their doctrine—instructed children to kill and devour their own parents as soon as the latter, becoming unsuitable for work, represented useless