Thespo X Film Club

Claude Regy – Le Passeur - Alliance Française de Bombay

Run time: 92 Minutes
Direction: Elizabeth Coronel and Arnaud De Mezamat
Production: Abacaris Films, La Sept-Arte
Language: English | French

Plot: Elizabeth Coronel and Arnaud de Mezamat's film (made during rehearsals for Maeterlinck's The Death of Tintagiles in 1997) takes us into the heart of Claude Régy's theatre and the director's choice themes. The film explores the universe and career of one of the most radical and extraordinary directors in French theatre. Regy talks simply and clearly about his theatre and his relationship with writing, actors and scenography. Excerpts from plays and interviews with actors who have worked with him and authors whose plays he has staged add to this film. Régy still stands out in the world of French theatre today for his actors, the authors he has staged and the man himself.

He talks to us in the outlandish and eerie setting of a huge derelict building, a sort of architectural no man's land where young people regularly act out scenes from Büchner's Woyzeck.

He talks about his favourite writing and writers (Sarraute, Duras and Handke) whom he feels hold the key to theatre like a secret hidden, buried, curled up in the writing itself. He talks about directing whose role is precisely and exclusively to reveal and touch this secret. And he talks about actors whose urge to interpret and action he challenges, but whose role he sees as feeling and conveying the writing and the words. Interviews with Valérie Dréville, Marcial Di Fonzo Bo and Michael Lonsdale express the actor's intense, disturbing experience when working with Régy. Scenes from productions and rehearsals (The Ride Across Lake Constance and The Death of Tintagiles) and profound, sensitive words from Nathalie Sarraute add the finishing touches to this film that is more than a portrait of a man; a film with a sharp focus on the path and thinking of an exceptional director.