Not a so-called “adaptation” of the novel. And we didn’t ask the actors to “perform” their text in any particular way, but “to recite” it, like a very precise score. “I have always liked,” says Jean-Luc Godard, “the sound of the first talkies. They have a great truth, because it’s the first time that you hear people speaking.” Brecht: “To dig out the truth from the rubble of the self-evident, to make a marked link between the specific and the general, to capture the particular within a general process, that is the art of the realists.” My film is exactly how it would be if I had had seven million [German marks] at my disposal.

J-M.S.