role in Michka’s films

Far from where?  —  Costumes and props

The Snail Position  — Fundraising

Prisoners of Beckett  — Set design, props, extra

Spoon —  Poster

A Great Day in Paris — Poster

La Lune des coiffeurs — Cover

MF: It was your idea to come to Quebec with Michka in the late 1970s.

GH: We were in Ardèche so Canada was a bit of an adventure — we were going to the Wild West. When we arrived in Montreal the first time, we each had $500 in our pockets. We were very naïve, but we found a place to stay. And then it was back to university and Michka went to her film classes. I went to environmental design.

MF: Michka was always telling me about André Forcier, the Quebec filmmaker, and how she saw his film L'eau chaude, l'eau frette and decided she wanted to make films in Quebec.

GH: When we were together, maybe two years before we left for Montreal, she was always writing.

When she went from writing to directing, it was a natural progression. I don't know if you know the story of when I returned home to Paris. We had broken up, but we couldn't leave each other. I decided to make a short film about our relationship. At the time, I knew nothing about cinema, either technically or in a creative sense. I wrote something and assembled a kind of team — a guy who had a 16mm camera and another who was a sound recordist. And I met a girl in a shop in Place Pigalle who looked a bit like Michka. She was not an actress at all, but she agreed to play the role. I found a student actor to play me. We shot every weekend for six months. It was a mess. I didn't know how to edit, and the sound was crap, but I was very proud of it. One day, I put the film under my arm and went to Montreal and showed it to Michka. Only her. And I said to her, "Now what do you want? Are you coming back with me or are you staying here? Until the last moment, until I was about to fly back, she didn't know. And I wasn't sure either. And in the end, I went home alone.

 MF: It's a beautiful story. I didn't know it. She told me that every time she started a discipline — film, writing, visual art — you ran with the idea and did something even better.

GH: I don't know if it was even better, but there was an artistic exchange between us that was very strong. Every little anecdote became poetry. It was a game between us. We would see a little bird on the side of the road and tell each other a story about it. This was Ardèche, the land of the Babacool, people who didn’t want to be like everyone else. Michka was an anxious person, who was afraid of the future, who didn't really know what she wanted, but who wrote all the time.

MF: I didn't know she wrote so much. I found little bits and pieces in her files and of course the book that she wrote.

GH: She always had little notebooks. They belonged to her. I never opened them.

MF: Do you think there was also a complicity because you were both Sephardic Jews from Tunisia?

GH: It's really the heart of everything. We were born in the same clinic within a year of each other. Tunis was a small town, so everyone knew each other. That creates a bond, not ethnic but heartfelt, like you would have with a sister. We left France to live on a kibbutz together for about two months. I have a photo of her driving a tractor. Then she returned to Israel with my cousin after she graduated from high school to continue her university studies. I think she was still on a kibbutz.

MF: She told me how once she was late for an exam in Israel. The army stopped her at a checkpoint, and emptied her bag to humiliate her. She had done basic military training so she grabbed the machine gun off the soldier’s shoulder and pointed it at him. Time stopped. It was a tense standoff that could have been a disaster. Finally, the supervisor came out to calm everyone down, and he took the machine gun from Michka. He apologized, but she still missed the exam.

GH: I didn't know that story.

MF: Maybe it's apocryphal. You never know. The two of you remained very close throughout her life. You contributed to several of her films, like your cameo role as a tramp in Prisoners of Beckett. There’s also a scene in Beckett when Jan Jonson is holding a bag of vodka bottles. Michka had contacted you in Paris from Sweden to send a special kind of lace bag that allows viewers to see the bottles. Apart from these little things, she was always grateful how you invested in one of her early films.

GH: I don’t really remember. It was so long ago.

MF: I have a Jewish proverb on my shelf: "He who gives must never remember. He who receives must never forget." But apart from your own money, you also found funding for her fiction film, The Snail Position.

GH: A small amount. At the time, it was forbidden to advertise tobacco and alcohol in the cinema so the agents would go to scriptwriters and say, "If in one or two scenes the main actor smokes or drinks alcohol, we'll give you money.” The amount of funding was proportional to whether the actor was famous or very famous. I think it was a pack of Marlboros that Victor Lanoux was holding at the time, and she got 20,000 francs for that.

MF: In English, it's called "product placement".

GH: I also had a small input into the script. There's a moment in the film where the daughter remembers her mother. I had said to Michka, "Why don’t you leave the mother's glasses on the table?” It was an intervention like that, to put an object in the frame to heighten the emotion of the actress. In the beginning, she wanted to make the film with Maurice Garrel, who didn't want to do it. And then she asked a very famous North African guy who didn't want to do it, and he suggested his friend Victor Lanoux who agreed to do it. And I told her, "Seriously, you want to go from Maurice Garrel to Victor Lanoux?” I don’t think it went well with him.

MF: He didn't rehearse the scenes with the actress who played his daughter in the film.

GH: She told me that he thought he was a star, that he only wanted to do one take. I think it was a difficult film for her.

MF: As you know In the story she told me, Maurice Garrel really wanted to make the film. Garrel was waiting for a confirmation call from the producers, and he didn't get it. Finally, he had to choose another film. She told me that he had a voice full of tears as they spoke. He really wanted to do the film. The story of the mother's glasses is interesting because in the spring of 2022 I was contacted by a woman named Paulina who ran Encore +. This was a YouTube channel funded by the Canadian government to give a second life to Canadian films and TV series. We agreed to put four of Michka's films online. Unfortunately, the government cancelled the program in December 2022. I'm telling you all this because Paulina was an actress 30 years ago, and played the mother in The Snail Position!

GH: Unbelievable! I still think this kind of "coincidence" is the power of Michka. There are people who are at the opposite ends of the Earth, in another sphere, and all of a sudden you say "Michka Saal" and they are connected. They stick together like molecules or neutrons. Maybe that’s part of her legacy that comes from being uprooted — the power to bring things back together again rather than tear them down.