Original subtitles

"Moullet is like Courteline interpreted by Brecht."

It was Lubitsch who said, "Before you can understand how to film actors,

you need to understand how to film mountains."

THE MAN OF THE BADLANDS (Luc Moullet's high places)

I'm of North African Kabyle extraction.

as you can tell from my name.

Moullet is an Arab name which means "leader".

I'm the descendant of Arab immigrants

who were defeated at the battle of Poitiers amongst others

and who took refuge in the south of France.

You can clearly see my Arab origins... well, my Kabyle origins,

in my relative tallness,

my leptosomatic characteristics, and also the shape of my nails.

I have very square nails.

Ocri�re de Bouvesne, 1,312 feet.

I came here in 1970 for A Girl is a Gun.

We stayed in Ocri�re for about six days in a row.

There was this idea that to be a great director in American cinema

it was better to cover all the genres. The model was Howard Hawks,

who made the best comedy, the best crime film

and the best western. I decided to follow in his footsteps.

I found it interesting to have Jean-Pierre L�aud running around

in a landscape reminiscent of Arizona.

Another advantage of making genre films

is that it was easier to sell with a "label".

I managed to sell the rights to A Girl is a Gun

to about 40 countries in the third world.

Hello? How are you?

Me too. You know I'm always here for you.

Come on, Sylvie, you know I'm always there for Bongabo.

Sorry? I don't understand.

The audience is afraid of what? The lions?

Can't you remove the lions from the cinema in the evening?

Listen, call me when you've resolved your lion problem,

send me the money, and I'll send you the film. OK?

Agreed? Goodbye. Thank you. You're welcome.

We had hired a horse for one day.

So there was a horse.

And also a donkey, which is a more comedic version of a horse,

and we hired that for a week.

It wasn't very expensive. And for a Western, you need a donkey.

It was the Americans who stole our landscapes to make Westerns.

The landscape I was filming in dates from the end of the Mesozoic era

and the Rocky mountains date from the beginning of the Cenozoic era.

So these were here two million years earlier.

Ribiers, 1,902 feet.

I have a house, which is just above the level of the badlands,

on the little plateau just above.

My brother, who co-owns the house, and who comes here more often,

has given me a set of instructions for getting in.

He says, "In front of the house you'll find the wood pile." OK.

"And there's a 23 inches wide by 9.75 inches high window."

"You need to remove the things which are blocking it..."

Right, let's see what we have here. It's heavy.

One... two... three... four...

I'll see if I can get through.

Yes. Here we go.

Ah, there's the ladder.

There we go.

What next? "Take the ladder,

open the door, and exit with it."

"Lean the ladder against the wall, and climb up."

It's OK. Come up.

I remember I had to be audited, because I'd asked for a VAT refund.

They wanted to check, so they came to Ribiers.

I'd given them a map so they didn't get lost,

because it's a bit complicated.

And I saw them coming in the distance though my binoculars.

They went left, right, and eventually got here, not without difficulty.

It was January, and it was absolutely freezing.

So I got out all my accounts and put them on a table, there,

and I made them check my accounts on site.

The tax men claimed... They were looking at my lab bills.

And they said, "You don't do anything,

it's the laboratory that makes the film."

It was quite funny to be told that, because in general

I have a reputation for doing virtually everything on a film.

I was a producer, writer, director, actor,

porter, and first assistant, probably.

Laragne, 1,879 feet.

Over there you can see the psychiatric hospital in Laragne.

Actually the official term is "specialist hospital."

The inhabitants of Laragne usually just call it "up there".

We're going "up there".

There's another term, which my grandmother often used,

She used to say "at the pie-in-the-sky-atrist's"

as if it were "at the baker's". Pie-in-the-sky-atrist.

My grandmother was losing it a bit, when she was 75,

and she went to the pie-in-the-sky-atrist's.

Ordinarily she should have been let out

but The Smugglers was supposed to be filmed at her house

and my father arranged for her to stay up there for three more weeks.

It was the perfect house for the film.

Lots of people from my family have passed though there.

When I was younger,

there was always a certain fear of madness.

And I'd say to myself, on the day I die, I'll be very happy,

because I'll know that over the course of my life

I've managed not to strangle my wife or rape my daughter.

Perhaps I'm being over optimistic, that could still happen,

but it seems unlikely.

It's sort of a comfort to me, that up there

in my mind, there's always a room reserved for me.

I'm standing next to the ruins of Moullet Fr�res,

Laragne's wheat merchant.

At the time I ran Moullet Compagnie, based at Sal�rans.

A film production company.

And I had a piece of luck. My bank, the Cr�dit Lyonnais

had the ludicrous idea of becoming computerised,

computerising all their accounts. So during that period,

there was all kinds of crap and chaos

and the Cr�dit Lyonnais made a mistake.

A sum of 80,000 French francs... This was thirty years ago,

so that's about 300,000 francs or 59,000 USD in today's money.

It was supposed to go to Moullet Fr�res for wheat sales.

- What's up? - Yesterday I checked my post box.

And I saw that my bank account had been credited 7 million francs

in payment for arms sold to Chile.

You're joking. Are you selling arms to Chile now?

No, not me, but a guy with the same name as me.

He doesn't have the same address, but since they brought in post codes,

and he has the same post code as me,

the computer cocked it up, and they sent the 7 million to me

instead of to him.

They paid it into my bank account.

And it was thanks to that that I was able to get by from then on.

Or to get by more easily, at least.

And it enabled me to film my next feature.

The bank realised its mistake later on, and I lost the court case,

but I didn't have any assets.

And I put all my furniture in the cellar.

The bailiffs came, they found nothing, so I never paid back a penny.

This windfall couldn't have come at a better time.

I see that cheque as divine intervention.

It did start me wondering though.

I don't understand God. I've been plagued with problems all my life.

And now I get this handed to me on a plate.

Why is he giving me a gift after all that crap?

I have to ask myself, who is this guy?

Just because I'm French, it isn't necessarily the Christian God.

This contrary God might be from Asia

or from South America or Africa or Oceania or anywhere.

So I went to the National Library to look for him.

I looked for him for three hours,

and I didn't find him.

But in a way I was happy not to find him,

because if I'd found him I'd have been in contradiction with myself.

Because I don't believe in God. But I did find the explanation.

God never existed. Obviously.

But he came into existence for ten or so seconds, a moment,

solely to cause the computer to mess up, to make me happy.

And then he died.

Digne, 1,994 feet.

In 1960, for Terres Noires,

I filmed the Digne livestock market.

In fact it was just sheep. There were about a hundred sheep

in a little enclosure surrounded by a little fence.

Digne is a magical town.

For me it's the real capital of France, rather than Paris.

The prestige of Digne doesn't lie in the town itself,

but in its location.

It's a huge surprise, when you've been roaming the surrounding desert for days

to come to the Avenue Gassendi

which is very shady, and very soothing.

And also convivial. It's better than the Champs Elys�es.

Barret-le-Bas, 2008 feet.

I'm standing in the middle of my meadow.

I co-own this with my brother.

We bought it with our inheritance. This is Moullet Meadow.

It's not very big. It was just the vanity of owning property.

This meadow isn't really any use,

unless somebody wanted to build on it.

I advertised in the paper when I was passing though about seven years ago

to sell the meadow. Someone might have wanted to build on it.

So if you want it, it's 55 paces long

by 38 paces wide.

It's for sale. I'll give it to you for 500 bucks, if you're interested.

OK.

Castellane, 2,375 feet.

On A Girl is a Gun, we stayed at the Grand Hotel de Levant

in Castellane. And we had some problems because...

There aren't very many people... Maybe it was a car that went past.

I've got exhaust fumes in the back of my throat.

Gorges de Tr�vans, 2,394 feet.

Why did you fire?

Why provoke them?

That way they'll attack the patrol. They won't see us.

On the ground. Cue "The Smugglers", scene two.

Check the union regulations. Request help if necessary.

We came here to film The Smugglers and A Girl is a Gun.

As the terrain is quite difficult,

we chose gorges with easy access.

The heroine was trying to seduce Billy.

And as Billy was going past her, she literally cornered him

so he was forced to press against her breast.

So there was quite a beautiful love scene which started here.

The filming was very easy in the end.

Because when the natural conditions are a bit hostile like this,

there's a sort of complicity

between the actors, the director and the technicians.

Everyone felt very much at ease.

I remember the actors were getting very cold.

But I wasn't, because the difference between actors and directors

is that actors feel the cold, but the director, when he's really focused,

doesn't notice whether the water is hot or cold.

That way, based on whether you're cold or not,

you know whether you're more of an actor or a director.

It's like you can tell whether it's a documentary or fiction.

When you're the director, you weigh yourself afterwards

and if you've lost weight, that means it's fiction

because there's more work with actors.

And if you've gained weight, that means a documentary,

because there's not much to do.

Saint Cyrice, 2,896 feet.

There. Good.

There were no restrictions regarding decency.

Was the village really deserted?

Saint Cyrice, my grandmother's village,

is a very peculiar village.

At the beginning of the century it had seventy inhabitants.

Which later went down to about six inhabitants.

And then to cap it all, in 1944 the Germans burned the village.

Apparently the Resistance were hiding out there.

Between you and me, I think it was the people of Saint Cyrice

who told the Germans to burn the village

because they wanted the government to pay for new houses for them.

The village lasted until 1968.

It went gradually down to five, two and then zero inhabitants.

So you could say Saint Cyrice is quite a minimalist place.

But it's also a very poor area.

People become accustomed to nothing, or rather to living off nothing.

I think that's actually defined and helped my career.

Because I was always the one who could make the lowest-budget film.

And that came partly from the forced stinginess of my family.

They still remained stingy even once they were less poor.

They were so used to economising, they never kicked the habit.

There's a certain pleasure in making a film in the shortest time possible

with as little money as possible, as little time editing as possible...

Can I do it in less than a day? It's a kind of game.

It explains why I make my films,

and why they call me "Shoestring Moullet".

In 1968,

I decided to register my place of business in Saint Cyrice

because there was no business tax to pay here.

At the time it was much better. There was a roof.

It was great for me.

I asked my cousins' permission to run my business from here.

I had problems later,

because the tax office didn't want to recognise this as my place of business.

They said, "Saint Cyrice was destroyed by the Germans."

"There's nothing there still standing."

The real reason is that the tax men were quite lazy

and they didn't want to calculate a new business tax

for a parish in which mine would be the only business.

It went to the Council of State, and it dragged on for four or five years.

I won on all counts.

I don't want a fair trial.

I was very proud to have my offices here.

It was the highest film production company in France.

We're 2,896 feet above sea level.

There's no film producer situated higher up than me.

I've always worked on the basis of heights.

But as Saint Cyrice no longer existed, it was joined to another parish

where the tax was higher.

So the next year I decided to leave Saint Cyrice, though it was great,

to go to another parish.

Sal�rans, 2,427 feet.

So I was looking for a new home

and I found the parish with the lowest tax rate in the Hautes-Alpes.

I got my father, who was in the area,

to find me business premises in Sal�rans.

And he rented Les Ribettes. And here it is.

He rented it for 8 dollars per year.

And I remember...

I had to leave in the end, because of a union dispute over holiday pay.

They were demanding paid leave for Jean-Pierre L�aud.

So their representative came here,

and then the police, looking for me, to report me for non-payment.

Why didn't you shoot? You'd still get the reward.

First you're going to tell me where the gold's hidden.

In the left-hand cavern,

above the second holey rock before the red desert.

They didn't find anyone.

Because I went as far as to never go anywhere near Sal�rans.

Any letters which came to Sal�rans were redirected to a box in Paris.

In January 1973,

my uncle told me the police were looking for me.

And when I got home they'd been following me

and they said, "Where is your place of business? We can't find you."

All to do with this "debt".

They tried to ban me from going to the Rotterdam Festival the next month.

They told me not to go to Rotterdam

because I was forbidden to leave the country

because there was this case going on with the union.

I didn't owe anything, because I hadn't actually done the payslip yet.

I did it two and a half years after filming.

That's when the leave was payable.

Bayons, 2,912 feet.

The interesting thing about countries like France

or other Mediterranean countries

is that there's often a big central square

which is the focus of village life.

The typical example is in Spanish countries, with the Plaza de Armas.

People meet there. It's the heart and soul of the village.

And that's what makes southern Europe superior to America, for example.

They don't have any central squares and people are often lost.

For La Saga des Baronnies I was imagining the story of a town square

from 1918 to 2000.

So I went to look at dozens of villages,

about a hundred, in fact. And the best square I found

was the square in Bayons.

It's a perfect dramatic setting.

The joint dramas of life and the world.

I was glad when I got here to find it as it was 16 years ago.

It hasn't changed all that much.

Cinema always takes time. It's a screenplay I wrote in 1961.

I patched it up 1983, I had a look in 1984,

but I didn't have enough money in 1984 to make the film.

I got a grant of 2 million francs.

It might go ahead in 2009.

We can shoot without changing very much.

That would be great.

What I like is the space. There's some empty parts.

And we could arrange things

so that the audience is aware of that.

So Bayons is an ideal film location.

Draix, 2,952 feet.

It's over. I'm fed up of you carrying me.

The forest on the border isn't far. If you want you can look for horses.

I just want to stay here.

We're now right in the heart of the badlands.

Draix is badlands country.

You find it elsewhere, for example the badlands of South Dakota in the US

and also in southern Tuscany

and near Almeria in Spain, where the Westerns were filmed.

But there are less. It's a very French phenomenon.

And they're in places where they're both very accessible

and very extensive.

So what's so special about badlands as a location?

Firstly, the fact they're so little known, especially in France.

Secondly, it's very convenient. There's very little vegetation.

Cinema involves a constant struggle against vegetation.

It's a sort of miniature world.

There are little passes and peaks, the slope is constantly changing.

Characters may be unable to see each other

while the audience,

who are on a crane with the camera or at a vantage point,

can see them both.

It's a bit like a studio or a theatre set

because you have everything within a few square metres.

You have the whole world at your fingertips.

The desert is a special place.

It befits my affinity for nudity, for keeping things out in the open.

Everything is visible.

My cinema consists of taking things out rather than putting things in.

It's about removing all the pretension and fussiness,

everything that might be hidden. Hence the tabula rasa.

It's a desire to cut through the chaff to reveal the truth.

And on the other hand, nature's splendour

can serve to negate underlying truths.

Naked landscapes can help you to discover that.

Which can be seen in films like that one by Stroheim,

Greed, which was filmed in part in Death Valley.

After my badlands films,

The Smugglers and Terres Noires and A Girl is a Gun,

there was a surge of interest in the badlands.

There were painters who painted nothing but the badlands.

Marie-Christine Questerbert, my female lead,

said the badlands were an overtly sexual landscape

because there are lots of feminine curves

and also phallic forms.

She was exaggerating a little, because you could say that about anywhere.

Everything has it's concave and convex aspects

and it's easy to extrapolate. But it's true in a way.

There's a whole badlands subgenre.

A good example is a film by Nicholas Ray called Run for Cover,

or Jodorowsky's El Topo.

I'm always a bit annoyed when I see other people's films of the badlands.

I don't like people invading my patch.

One of the especially interesting things about the badlands

is that they emphasise the notion of relativity.

You can film a section of badlands, and you can't tell if it's 10 square feet

or 20,000 square feet

because there's no point of reference in the vegetation

which would enable you to judge.

So it's good to start with something that seems very small

and then reveal that it's very big.

Or the opposite.

Les Tourniquets, 3,608 feet.

A love of mountains is often linked with right-wing ideology.

There's a whole "mountain" camp in German cinema.

There were two mountain specialists, Fanck and Trenker

and also Leni Riefenstahl, to an extent.

Filmmakers who specialise in mountains or in sport

are always quite conformist.

The great mountaineers of French cinema

were all right-wingers.

They sat on the censorship committee, or even founded it;

people like De S�gogne and Ichac.

Above all, it's the acceptance of nature.

So everything that exists is good.

Col D'Espr�aux, 3,745 feet.

I came here in April of 1991

to film La Cabale des Oursins.

It was quite a paradoxical shoot, because I had a big budget.

We travelled 992 miles by car

to film three little ten-second shots.

But it was necessary. It wasn't a film about the badlands.

It was a film about the slag heaps in the north.

But the slag heaps in the north do resemble the badlands in a way.

Someone I knew, a secretary, Tamara Dalma, pointed it out.

She used to mix up the two.

And I thought, "Yes, actually, the man-made slag heap

does quite resemble the natural badlands."

So I made the comparison, showing shots of badlands, like this here,

intercut with shots of slag heaps.

The audience had to guess whether they were seeing badlands or slag heaps.

It's quite easy to get it wrong.

Rougnouse, 3,772 feet.

There's a proverb in this region,

"He who knows Saint Cyrice, Pomet and Rougnouse

knows more than God himself."

And here we have the town of Rougnouse.

I believe it's the most inaccessible town in France.

The first time I came here was in 1942.

I came over the mountains.

And when my parents and I arrived,

the whole town came out to greet us.

Because they don't very often get any visitors.

Rougnouse's main problem

has to do with another parish called Eourres

which is on the other side of the pass.

The town of Eourres refuses to subsidise

the little road running from Rougnouse to the valley, by the easy route.

They say it's not part of the parish, it's a desert road.

So the head honcho of Rougnouse, Mr Andr�,

decided to build his own road, to Ribiers,

which is much more accessible than Eourres.

He paid for it himself, and he's banned virtually everyone from using it

by way of revenge against Eourres for not helping him.

Mr Andr� does let cyclists pass

but not necessarily cars. He decides on each one individually.

Not everyone who has a car is an idiot

but what is certain is that all idiots have cars.

The bicycle is the epitome of culture and the car is a symbol of barbarism.

For La Saga des Baronnies, I was envisaging filming at Rougnouse.

It's the kind of village you hear about in legends.

It's France's Xanadu, if you like.

It's the magical land

that you discover by chance in the middle of a closed valley.

Majastres, 3,936 feet.

Cars pass, but none take the chance.

UNEVEN ROAD SURFACE

There you have the town of Majastres.

Do you know why it's called Majastres?

"-astre" means "earth".

And "maj-" is "bad". So it's "bad earth".

Les Eaux Chaudes, 4,001 feet.

This is where Mr Roux, the mayor of Mariaud

used to leave his van.

And from here he'd go up on foot.

I think he was probably the only man in France to own a motor vehicle

whilst living in a village with no road access.

It's still forty minutes walk from here.

So once we got to here, we'd go up via this bridge,

If we had a lot to carry, we had a mule

to carry the supplies and our camera equipment.

And then we'd start walking up the path.

Once you've crossed the bridge,

the Terres Noires rush up to meet you.

The locals call them "roubines".

From time to time, they crumble onto this makeshift path.

There's always a lot of work for the local road menders.

But the bridge hasn't been in use since 1966,

which is when they started building the road.

In the film Terres Noires, when you see this bridge,

the voiceover says, "Once you've crossed the bridge,

the badlands rush up to meet you."

Col de Corobin, 4,034 feet.

The problem is there's an unfortunate trend for "disbadlandisation".

To increase water retention, they're planting as many trees as possible

which helps to stabilise the soil.

If not it just crumbles away.

So the badlands are shrinking.

They aren't protected. They're seen as a negative thing.

But they're what makes this landscape unique.

Obviously it wouldn't be good to let the whole region become badlands

but some sectors should be preserved.

I don't want to cross the desert, be constantly thirsty, and die. I'm tired.

Sentiers des Bans, 4,146 feet.

In my family there's been a lot of madness.

It's quite common to link the notion of madness

with the notion of suicide.

Here, suicide is something which confronts you constantly. It's easy.

I like walking in these places

because in some sense I am conquering suicide.

When I walk in very exposed areas like this, or more exposed,

I'm always happy at the end of the day to find that I'm still alive.

It gives me a lot of pleasure.

It's as if I've proved that I'm not mad.

We're in danger of falling to our deaths, here.

But this is the first rule of cinema:

prune and cut back.

I'm a bit of a woodsman, a cave man even.

I feel at ease here.

Much more so than in a night club or a cocktail bar.

Which is the opposite of most of my colleagues, the technicians.

But this allows me to overcome my handicap.

I'm a bit excluded, but up here I exclude them, in a way.

Filming in a location like this is quite easy,

but you have to be careful.

After a couple of hours of filming

the actors and everyone get used to it

and act like they're in their own home.

And they forget the danger.

So you have play the slave driver a bit and keep them in line.

There are rules to follow. For example, you must never take a step back.

You must always go forwards

so you can see where you're treading, because otherwise...

You aren't far from the abyss.

Mariaud, 4,920 feet.

This is Mariaud, at 4,920 feet above sea level.

It's kind of a model village.

Because of its position, when it's fine,

it gets sun from six am to nine pm.

And it's also a legendary village, in a way,

because in 1968

all the settlements in France had a road, except one: Mariaud.

The road reached Mariaud in 1969

and they must have got electricity in about 1973 or 1975.

I've shot several films here. Terres Noires in 1960,

a bit of Brigitte and Brigitte in 1966,

part of The Smugglers after that

and A Girl is a Gun in 1970.

It's like a land that time forgot.

For me it's... I tend to look on it as a sanctuary.

I love Mariaud.

But at the same time, it's so perfect

that I don't come very often because I'm afraid.

It's my ideal village, in a way.

I don't feel worthy of Mariaud.

But I'm always thinking about Mariaud.

When people ask me what my favourite places are,

I say Mariaud, New York and Majastres.

We were coming down with the muleteer

and the mule, who was carrying 180 lbs of lighting batteries.

This path was a little bit wider at the time.

Suddenly I noticed

that the mule's flanks were smoking.

It was the effect of the batteries on the mule's skin.

I was afraid that the muleteer would get scared

and leave us there with all our lighting equipment.

So all the way down, I kept between the muleteer and the flanks of the mule

so that the muleteer wouldn't see anything.

You see, being a director isn't always easy.

You don't learn that kind of cunning at film school.

But situation like that come up all the time.

While we were shooting A Girl is a Gun,

as we were near Mariaud and we needed a house

I decided to take them there.

Not least because I wanted to show off Mariaud to the team,

to Marie-Christine and everyone.

I wanted everyone to share in my love of Mariaud.

So she gets out of bed,

pursued by the spectre of Jean-Pierre L�aud.

I told her to walk like a zombie.

She goes down these stairs, takes big strides to the right,

she runs, until she arrives here, in front of the tree.

And then when she gets to the tree, there's a few rocks

and she lifts her arms up as if to throw herself of the edge...

...and we cut.

After the second take, we lost sight of Marie-Christine.

I'd given her a limit where she should stop.

And in the first take, she stopped.

But this time she carried on walking.

And she rolled down to a point

about 33 feet above the path below.

Some branches broke her fall.

And we carried her out along the path.

The weird thing was she was in roughly the same position

as in a scene we had shot earlier

which was the aftermath of her character's fall.

It's like she was copying the film.

Cadi�res de Brandis, 5,333 feet.

We climbed up, for A Girl is a Gun...

This was me and the team. It was a 45-minute walk.

I took the lead

and I couldn't really see what was going on behind.

They arrived here well spaced out.

It took them an hour, and some didn't make it at all.

They'd put the food in a big crate.

You can't climb with a crate. You need rucksacks.

But rucksacks are frowned upon in the film industry.

So when they got here we didn't have any food.

So shooting had to be cut short

because in desperation you can not pay your team,

but not feeding them just isn't possible.

I remember somewhere round here, a little way away,

we managed to bargain for a few potatoes from a local forester.

So with that we managed to work until two o'clock.

I had no trouble coming up here.

I usually carried what we called the half-bowl head.

It's part of a leveling tripod. It's like a big ball

which goes between the tripod and the camera so that it can shoot smoothly.

It's the heaviest thing, but it's less bulky.

So I climbed up here with the half-bowl head.

I liked the half-bowl head, because at the time I didn't have any children

and I felt like I was carrying a child in my arms.

Now that I have a child, I no longer carry the half-bowl head.

People say there's a certain scatological aspect to my films.

You can blame that on a family obsession with shit.

My grandmother was a bit of a coprophiliac.

In 1896

when she was eight, she made her little brother eat his own poo

when she caught him shitting on the path on the way up to Saint Cyrice.

She told that story with a certain... frisson

and great relish.

I'm sure the little brother learnt his lesson

because I imagine shit doesn't taste very nice.

She also later made her husband eat his own shit, when he was 60 or 70.

He came back from the cafe having done it in his pants

She then threw his underwear in his face.

There might be a connection.

I think the scatological gene is mainly recessive in me.

It's more to do with exploring areas that aren't often dealt with in cinema.

Though they are in Italian cinema. There are some veritable specialists

such as Festa Campanile, Pasolini and also Citti.

Signal de Lure, 5,991 feet.

The team had arrived at ten am on the night train from Paris.

And when we got here there was fog and clouds

covering everything below us.

We couldn't see anything, only as far as 66 feet in front of us.

So we waited.

And I was thinking normally there's a change at around midday,

and the fog clears.

And that's what happened. But then there was quite a sense of urgency

because we could see it wasn't going to last.

And between midday and two, we filmed twelve shots.

In very cold conditions like that

the actors manage to work at unbelievable speed.

Wait for me.

So, how do you go about filming in scree?

I'm not sure if they teach that at La French Movie School.

The main problem is the sound.

You can hear how loud it is to climb up the scree.

The noise lasts a long time for each movement.

It drags on, and it kills the dialogue. You can't hear anything.

Don't you see?

You're doing all this work, for no pay.

I spend my time hiking because I enjoy it.

I may not get paid for it...

The day before, I'd come and marked out a route

for our hero.

And, a little bit lower, a route for Sabine Haudepin.

Down here, you can hear how loud each step is.

But I'd worked out where the loose rocks stopped

and so here, it's fine.

So you had the illusion of climbing up the scree

but the sound quality was very good.

We could do both sizes.

Is that all right?

I'm going to zoom out.

Make this signal when you're ready.

OK?

Ready.

Subtitles: Katherine Hodkinson