Bruce Dern by Bruce Dern

Author:Bruce Dern
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2014-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

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*A wry satire on beauty pageants, this forgotten gem rests easily alongside director Michael Ritchie’s other insightful takes on America, competition, and the wayward male made during the same period, including Downhill Racer, The Candidate, Bad News Bears, and Fletch. Scripted by notable TV writer Jerry Belson, the cast also included a very young Melanie Griffith and Barbara “Agent 99” Feldon.

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Le Dern Hot

I went to France to do The Twist in 1975. We arrived in Paris on Armistice Day, the eleventh of November. Everybody said, “Oh, great, you’re going to the City of Light.” Well, they must have meant electric light, because we got there on Armistice Day and I left the twenty-fifth of January and I never saw the fucking sun. I never saw it. I just saw grim, wall-to-wall gray. But it was fun, because it was director Claude Chabrol. Stéphane Audran, Claude’s wife, and I were the two stars, along with Ann-Margret. Chabrol was wonderful and a big devotee of Hitchcock. I guess that’s why he hired me. I never quite knew. He couldn’t have seen Family Plot, because it wasn’t out yet. I’d just finished it that summer.

I was quite enamored of the French workday, which started at eleven and went until seven with no lunch. You just shot eight straight hours, and the caterers served lunch all day long and you took whatever you wanted and kept working. I liked that. There was no break. I don’t like the break in the middle of the day. And the crew seemed to like it. The crews were very tight-knit. Everybody knew everybody. In the studio, it was the walking lunches, but when we shot outdoors, there was a lunch. Chabrol was a big gourmet and a great cook. The days we would shoot on location, lunch was a big deal. You started at seven in the morning, and you worked until dark. The whole day was planned around what restaurant we would eat lunch in. It was like an hour and a half to two hours. Chabrol was a nifty little guy. He had a wild imagination. I had only seen one of his films called Landru, which was fabulous.

I ran in a bunch of French races because we were there in the wintertime. They ran a lot of cross-country then, because France had the two best milers in the world. The French were knocked out that here was an actor starring in a movie for Claude Chabrol, running in the midst of two thousand cross-country runners, and I’m right up there in the front with a Santa Monica Track Club shirt on. And they thought, Santa Monica. Is that someplace in Spain? I said, no, it’s Santa Monica, California. Claude came out to the race, and they all got excited. They had a big picnic lunch. It was fun that way. But the city was grim.

I didn’t really enjoy my time in Paris. I enjoyed making the movie, but I speak no French at all.

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