From an interview with Colin MacCabe:
Once Godard told me to meet in the Nyon train station. So I go into the station and Godard is sitting there. He does business with lighting speed. What you think would be a half-hour, or an hour, meeting is 90 seconds. Then I said to him, There is this book, and he looked at me and he asked, Is it a proper book? Of course it wasn’t, it was just a little collection of essays. I said, Yeah, it’s a proper book, and he said, If it’s a proper book you can come to my apartment, you can go through all my stuff, I’ll invite you onto the set of my next film, and I’ll do any interview you want. I was kind of in total shock. Here’s the man who can’t be interviewed, who can’t be seen. I spend 24 hours on the phone and I turn up to him with a proper book commissioned and then I write the Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics and in the course of that I go spend two days on set with Godard.
Sauve qui peut?
Opening scene: Jacques Dutronc is hammering on the wall in the hotel and Godard says, You sit there. He puts me right in the middle of what is happening but given where the camera is I’m completely invisible. It was like the most brilliant lesson in film. Then we break and Godard talks to the crew because it’s still in an attempt to make a collective 1968 kind of thing. He talks for an hour-and-a-half about the labor process of cinema. It was the most brilliant lecture about the speeds of money; that money is always either too slow or too fast in film. First it’s too slow because you can’t get it, and then you’ve got it and you have to spend it too quickly. It was equally clear that the guys who were listening to this hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about. We are all going to collaborate but Jean-Luc is just going to talk, and talk, and talk. (laughs)
From an interview with Oliviero Toscani:
What color was 1980 and 1981?
Probably green. The Benetton logo, the green rectangle. I decided it had to be green, and then the Green Party and the environmental movement started. It was kind of a greenish decade. Through the 1980s it was this same damn color. I actually kind of like green because it’s a very difficult color.
Content
13 Intro
22 Hey man, are you a reader?
Interview with Colin MacCabe
58 80*81 film list, by Michael Althen
62 Don’t ask me to be an object of interest. I’m not a usual suspect.
Interview with Jean-Pierre Gorin
83 What’s the story with You and the Marlboro Man?
Interview with Michael Conrad
93 KARIN a reverie, by Niklas Maak
102 Billboards are fantastic. Michelangelo would have loved that.
Skype with Oliviero Toscani
108 timeline October 1980
116 timeline March 1981
126 acknowledgments
Designers: Christopher Roth and Holger Friese