Film Show 054: Mary Stephen
An interview withe the Hong Kong-born, Paris-based filmmaker and editor about Marguerite Duras, working with Éric Rohmer, and her new film 'Palimpsest: The Story of a Name' (2025)
Mary Stephen
Mary Stephen (b. 1953) is a Hong Kong-born, Paris-based filmmaker and editor best known for working as Éric Rohmer’s editor during the latter part of his career—from The Aviator’s Wife (1981) to The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (2007). Stephen studied at Concordia University in Montreal, making her first films in the early 1970s. These works—Labyrinthe (1973), The Great Canadian Puberty Rite (1974), and A Very Easy Death (Mary Stephen, 1975)—were partly inspired by experimental filmmakers like Maya Deren and Charles Gagnon. She would crystallize her ideas with Shades of Silk (1978), a hidden gem of diasporic Asian cinema. The film takes Marguerite Duras’ India Song (1975) as its foundation and displays languor and longing through the context of societal and familial pressures placed upon Asian women. In her words, it is about people who are “stuck in their destiny.” Stephen’s newest work is Palimpsest: the Story of a Name (2025), a documentary that excavates the story behind her Western surname.
Stephen’s films are currently showing at Metrograph in New York. More information can be found here. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Stephen on September 30th, 2025 via Zoom to discuss her earliest memories of cinema, finding protection in Rohmer, and the stories behind her different films.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: I know you were born in Hong Kong. What memories stand out about growing up there?
Mary Stephen: It’s sort of what’s in Palimpsest: The Story of a Name (2025). It was a lot of going to cinemas, of being bundled off into a car and then going with everybody into the cinema, probably to see some American film. There are also memories of being at home. At the time, we were in our old place which had this large terrace and garden. I remember my mother had these potted plants and there was this patch with wild papaya trees in the back. You don’t find that anymore in Hong Kong.
Tell me about those early experiences in the cinema.
There were a lot of us—at least five or six—so in a child’s mind, it felt like we were taking up a whole row. I remember my first impression of a film was with a Hitchcock, or something like that—it was something suspenseful. I went to a Protestant school and I remember how, in Asia in those days, you would talk through a film while you’re viewing them. There’s a scene where the criminal or hero was being chased and something evil was happening, and I kept saying, “Don’t be too conceited!” It was a very moralistic judgment (laughter). I remember that very well.
After that, we “graduated” from Hitchcock to animation, and one of the earliest films that made an impression on me was Lady and the Tramp (1955). There’s a Chinese expression that says you’ll determine what you will like at 80 years old when you’re 3, that you’ll have all these character traits. I have this feeling that this idea of class differences, as well as this idea of an impossible romance, appealed to me even then. When I look back on works or things I like to research, it’s always those kinds of themes.
At the beginning of Palimpsest, you talk about how your father was really into film. That has me wondering if you feel like there are similarities between yourself and your parents in terms of personality.
It’s definitely in our storytelling. I never delved into this until I was researching. Whether I’m editing my film or someone else’s, the writing comes in the editing. Some of the stuff in the film I excavated very late in the editing process, and this whole thing about storytelling, when I am making up this story, I actually became my father’s daughter. I only realized this after editing.
A lot of the feedback I got about my father was that he’s a colorful, fascinating character, but the starting point was not fascination. We were very put off by him when we were children, when we were young adults. We didn’t like him. We went through phases of wondering if he was mentally ill because he was believing these stories he made up, and he was also glorifying himself in these journals as some sort of hero. So it started with that, but he comes off very fascinating in the film and, today, I’m now thinking… I did exactly what he wanted to do (laughter). He wanted a film that glorified himself. In spite of things, I did it for him (laughter).
How did it feel to come to that realization?
I’m glad it came now, while I have a little bit of wisdom (laughter). I can digest it. I dedicated the film to my brother and I think that if he were alive, he wouldn’t have been very happy, but maybe he would’ve gotten to an age where he would’ve had some wisdom too. It’s not a matter of “forgive and forget,” it’s just… they did what they did, and we should keep going and create our own path. We shouldn’t be stuck in these things.
Can you talk about your relationship with your brother?
We were five children—four girls and one boy. You can imagine the dynamic. I didn’t realize, until I was editing the film, how important it would be as a tribute to him. He was extremely important to me. He was 10 years older and he was a scientist—he was in physics. In Hong Kong, it was typical for someone to study abroad and then come back to take over the family business and do big things, but at one point he said, “No way, I’m not going to do that.” He wanted a small teaching post at a small college and to just live a happy life. He was the one who taught me about music, poetry, and history; he was interested in all these things that had nothing to do with science. He taught me so much Chinese poetry. I wonder if things were different, if he didn’t have this family pressure, that he’d have a different destiny.
What sort of things do you remember him showing you?
He always thought that I was very smart, so what he would do—and I was 10 years younger than him—was bring me to play bridge with his classmates. He wanted to show off how smart I was, but of course I would lose. And he would get mad! (laughter). Later on, when I went to university and studied film, he went through a phase where we had this sort of parent-child clash; he would say that all these artistic films I was interested in were useless, and that the only thing that would be good is if I made something like a George Lucas film. He was very negative about my filmmaking. But then I went off to Europe, and then in his last years, he was very supportive and became very proud of me.
The funny twist in this is that one of my three children, Julien Chheng, is an animation director and has his own animation studio. He was commissioned to make an episode of Star Wars: Visions and he asked me to collaborate with the editing. They went to George Lucas’ place to do the sound mix and, you know, my brother had already passed away but I was thinking, “I finally made it!”
Was there a point at which you realized that you wanted to study film in school?
There were two moments like this, yes. I went into mathematics—again, this was my brother, as he said I should get into pure math. I went to Nova Scotia and studied pure math and couldn’t stand it (laughter) and the second year I took four or five different fine arts classes at Arcadia University. I realized that Loyola College, which was part of Concordia, was next to where my parents’ house was. One summer I went over there and found that the courses were exactly what I wanted to take—it was heaven.
They had very strict rules for gaining entrance—you needed a portfolio. I literally stood outside of the department head’s door at 9 o’clock on the first day and said that I wanted to join. He was a Jesuit priest and said there was no way to get in, that I needed to submit a portfolio. However, there were seven people that were enrolled who didn’t come, and I could have one of the spots until November. At that point I would need a portfolio and submit that. When November came, my television teacher heard about this—she was a woman who became very political later on, her name was Gail Valaskakis—and she said that I didn’t need to go through this entire process, that I was already doing fine. She just changed my status. Imagine if that happened today (laughter). Every step of the way I kept having ridiculously lucky breaks.
For the second year of that school, and I was in Communication and Arts, I had to choose a specialty. I chose film. Charles Gagnon, a famous painter, photographer, and experimental filmmaker, was teaching one of the two courses and said, “Why not photography?” I said, “No, in my head I see images that move.” The first years doing this Communication and Arts program was tough. This was the early ’70s and I was fresh out of Hong Kong, completely lost. At that time, when I wasn’t sure, [Tang Shu Shuen’s] The Arch (1968) was showing in Montreal. Coming out of that film, everything clicked. It felt like I had found a stillness in the middle of a hurricane. I knew from then on that filmmaking was my path. That was really the moment. I co-presented the restored version of the film in Toronto, and it’s also coming to the New York Film Festival.
You mentioned Charles Gagnon. Were there specific things that he taught you that were important later on?
As we keep conversing, I realize there’s one divine coincide after another, as I’m about to tell you another one (laughs). First of all, he never taught me because I wasn’t in his section—there were two, and one was taught by a Jesuit priest named Father Fisher. I kept up with Gagnon, though, and when I got my first Canada Council grant to do The Great Canadian Puberty Rite (1974), I showed it to him. I was horrified because I thought it was such a bad film. What would he say? And he looked at me and John Cressey, my partner, and said, “I wasn’t bored! I found good things in it.” He had always been an elusive figure, and he found ways to be a mentor without actually teaching.
What happened was that my mother passed away. I made A Very Easy Death (1975), and I only made four copies for my brother and sisters. Many years later, I went back to Loyola and I saw a young girl walking. I thought it was a student, but it turned out to be Charles’ daughter, Monika Gagnon, who was also teaching at Concordia. Years later, Monica wrote me an email and told me that she was going to Paris to see me. Her father passed away, and she was putting together a posthumous film that he left called R69. It never got finished, but all the elements were in boxes, and when she was going through them, there was a reel for A Very Easy Death inside. It had no business being there! How did it end up there? We both felt it was a sign. We worked together on that, and I was one of two artists she asked to make a soundtrack from his elements for that unfinished film. In those elements, he had a lot of bits by Toru Takemitsu and, in fact, my films always had Takemitsu for the guide tracks. But then Suzuki-san, who I worked with, made the soundtrack for my film knowing that I wanted something experimental
I wanted to talk about these early films that you made. What were you trying to do with Labyrinthe (1973)? You’re obviously filming yourself and I think it’s interesting to see that alongside the superimpositions and high-contrast images.
I was interested in the idea of culture shock. The original version of the film is black and white but two or three years later—after I got out of school—I put the color pieces in. The original work was a school exercise made by three of us—the three names in the credits [M. Stephen, P. Bridgeman, A. Macleod]. I wanted to express culture shock and my two buddies, one was Italian Canadian and the other was English Canadian, were interested in this theme as well.
The way that it was cut had to do with the way we were taught; at the time, everything was about experimental films. I was brought up on Kenneth Anger and Maya Deren, who I still teach to my students. With literature, I was reading a lot of Anaïs Nin and the surrealists. There was a girl in our entourage who had the same haircut, and someone suggested that we both should run in the film. That was exactly how I felt, that I was neither white nor yellow. I can’t recall who had which ideas, but when we look at how the film was put together, you can tell that these themes were going through my work for my entire life.
When I watched The Great Canadian Puberty Rite, I noticed that with all this documentation, you’re the only Asian in the entire film. What thoughts were going through your mind? Were you grappling with identity?
Going back to TIFF recently, I was thinking about how different things are nowadays. At the time, especially in Quebec and Montreal, I was the only Asian around. Communication and Arts in Loyola was the only school of its kind at the time. It was a big, big time of disorientation—it’s something that can’t be imagined today. In Palimpsest, I mention that our mother told us to keep our garbage clean because our neighbors would judge us on the cleanliness of our garbage. That kind of thing stays with you. Going to this private English girls’ school didn’t help either. And going to Loyola, I was surrounded by young, hip French kids. They fascinated me, but there was no way I could be like them. On the one hand, there was this Asian family I had; even though we were Westernized, we would have Sunday dim sum and all this stuff. But I was very lost and had no way of identifying what this feeling was.
My whole life story is so strange. Why would I end up in France and become a collaborator with the most French of French directors? (laughter). It’s not like he was doing films about diversity or something. I’ve been living in France for almost 50 years, and it’s the one place where I feel least at home. It comes back to this cliché question: What is home? For me, home is where my children are. It’s as simple as that. Geographically, that’s where it is and they’re all here in Paris. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else or living far from them. My family is very close-knit and I raised them single-handedly.
This identity thing, however… I’ve never been vocal about it. France is always a culture I’ve admired since I learned about the French New Wave in Hong Kong, but it was always a distant thing. And it hits me all the time here because France is very behind with diversity. Even though the society is mixed, the media and their mindset hasn’t moved forward much. Whenever I go to Canada or even England, I feel at home. And that’s especially true right when I land in Canada. I feel it. And the question is, would I move back home? Still, the answer is no because my home is here.
When I go to certain functions at the cinematheque, I’ll ask my daughter, “Do you see anyone else of color here?” She’ll say, “Yes, the waiter who is serving the champagne.” It’s that kind of thing. There’s no Asian community; the Asians here are very lowkey. Being invisible is the best way for them to integrate, which is not the case in North America. I think I suffer more from that now at my current age than when I was young.
You mentioned that you feel most uncomfortable in France. Do you think that discomfort is important in motivating you artistically? Is there a benefit to being uncomfortable in this way?
Definitely. I was just thinking about this two days ago. We don’t do anything when we’re happy. You don’t create a great piece of work. But when you’re down or angry, it really motivates you, this anger and feeling of injustice and not being understood, of not feeling like I have my place here. In the last 20 years, since Éric Rohmer stopped working, almost all of my work has been outside of France and in Asia or Australia. But when you talk to a French industry person about me, they either don’t know me or think that I’ve moved back to Asia. Why would I do that? I’ve lived here my whole life.
I wanted to talk about A Very Easy Death. You’re still working with the same people: John Cressey, James Pogue. You have the techniques in Labyrinthe elaborated on here. What was it like to think about your mother and process things through this film?
It was a piece that I made to get over the grieving process—that’s why I made it for the five of us. The whole film was structured by the text from the book, Simone de Beauvoir’s A Very Easy Death (1964), and some of it was removed eventually; as I’m doing it, the images and sounds are coming into place, and I knew that I wanted to have bookends with the Super 8 film, which I call my “mother movie.” The film was made the year after school, so we had the same team. The technique was really a continuation of Labyrinthe and what I had learned from Maya Deren and other experimental films. The use of [color] filters is very much a result of Charles Gagnon [Editor’s note: You can see this in his film The Sound of Space (1967-1968)].
A Very Easy Death was something that was made privately, and it was made for my siblings. I realized I was doing that with Palimpsest, too. I love that shot [in A Very Easy Death] of the hand that goes up to the photo, and I use that again on the grave in Palimpsest. I don’t think that was conscious, and I don’t know why I did that, but I loved it—it’s this shot of a hand going up to caress her face. After Toronto, I went to Bali because I was doing a workshop there. I was there for Minikino, a festival of short films, and they showed my three restored shorts. What was really touching was that younger filmmakers came and were very impressed with Labyrinthe and A Very Easy Death, by the film language, by the way they were cut. When you think of experimental language, you wonder if it touches anybody or if it’s very closed off.
You mentioned how text was a way of framing the work. And you were removing text too? How did you know to do so?
I had a nurse friend who explained that when there’s the death of a loved one, you go through these stages of grief and that it ends with acceptance. That’s what the last part of the film is about. At each point in the film, there is text from Simone de Beauvoir as well as stuff I wrote. But reading Simone de Beauvoir’s book, it really shocked me. That was the starting point of the film. There is a structure there, but I don’t remember the structure, really; I just remember the acceptance. I remember the dreamy parts, of when the departed one comes back in dreams and goes up the stairs. I was just putting everything I was feeling into images.
I wanted to talk about Ombres de Soie, or Shades of Silk (1978). I think that film is an overlooked masterpiece. You’re clearly thinking about silence and sound and how they can inform the scene, and you have still images, too. It’s hard not to think about both Chris Marker and Marguerite Duras. And it’s very much a culmination of your previous works. What was it like to take all your ideas and make a feature-length film with them?
Shades of Silk came after my first week in Paris. During my first week there, I went to see Marguerite Duras’ India Song (1975).
Wow, this makes so much sense.
I was completely blown away by that film—the soundscape! You can sense the feeling, you can almost even smell it. I was with John at the time—he was both my creative partner and my life partner—and I told him that I’d like to make India Song but from an Asian point of view, from my own point of view. I was in this American film program through the University of Wisconsin that had one year in Paris, and that was very theoretical. I decided to drop out of that and, with these friends, we got money together to make this film.
One of the professors in that program, in the short month that I was there, was a Marcel Proust and psychotherapy specialist. She only passed away a couple years ago. I didn’t speak a lot of French and with my friend Ann Martin who co-wrote it with me, we went to see her with the script and tried to get help. She was the one who suggested using the quote from Marguerite Duras in the beginning, to help people realize that it was deliberate. I wanted the same kind of mood, and that was the year after my mother passed away. All the clothes in that film are my mother’s clothes. If you go to Palimpsest and look at the banquet scenes, you can see the dresses—they’re in a basement somewhere now. All the sets, too, are things we found as students; it was the Southeast Asian students’ residence. There were tennis courts and all that. In Paris you can find all these atmospheric things.
I had a very close woman friend who was from a rich family. She had this pressure to marry someone who was “more suitable.” I dreamt up the whole thing with the other woman and the white lover—very Duras-ian. The story about the white lover, who said that he would wait for her for 10 years, was my mother’s story. It wasn’t a European lover, but it was somebody who was really in love with her, who would wait 10 years to see if she would divorce. And then there was another story about another girlfriend whose sister committed suicide. I put all these stories together for the film.
I knew what I wanted for music. I wanted Erik Satie songs that weren’t yet in the public domain. And I wanted Billie Holiday’s “Blue Moon” but it was out-of-this-world expensive. We were in Montreal and there was this royalty-free company that I wanted to buy things from. This French guy [Alain Leroux] who ran the company said, “Don’t buy it, I’ll make it for you.” So he composed everything, he made this Satie-imitation music, and the song where he’s doing a melody, I wrote the lyrics for that, and it was later rerecorded by a Canadian hip-hop artist (laughs). I get royalties from that.
And that’s it. We bought some [film] stock and we shot it but the lab went on strike; we didn’t see any images until three months later. But when we saw it… I still think it’s John’s best work. It’s a masterpiece in image.
You mentioned that you wanted it to be like India Song but Asian. What do you mean by that?
Just the characters being Asian women rather than European women who were bored and stuck in that place. This is the other side—Asian women who are stuck in their destiny, where there’s a different kind of pressure from family and society. One of the interesting things is the friendship between the women. Three years ago, when I was doing a residency at the Camargo Foundation and making Palimpsest, there was a group of girls there who were doing a project on this dance critic [Jill Johnston]. These four girls discovered Ombres de Soie and they were saying that it was this hidden queer film. We had a big discussion about it as this was never in my mind, but this friendship between the two women in the film is so intense—it goes beyond these boxes of sexuality. And it is some kind of love story.
The film doesn’t have a distributor anymore, as the distributors at the time are all dead now, but one of the biggest champions at the time was this guy named Derek Hill of Essential Cinema. He distributed all kinds of indie films. I remember taking the reels and showing the film to him in London, and he told me that it was the most erotic film he’d ever seen. That was a compliment, of course, and it was very touching to hear that. There is an intentional way of shooting the film, too… you see this shot of an elbow and it’s meant to look like other parts of the flesh.
I wanted to talk about Palimpsest. What do you feel like you’d have missed out on if you hadn’t done all the research for the film?
So this question that I had about my surname subconsciously bothered me for decades. Even today, it still goes on—every time I say my name in the supermarket or whatever, it just doesn’t fit. It’s sort of weird. So the thing is that I was finally able to get rid of that. There are lots of layers to this story that I don’t understand. Basically, it was a very simple story—my father changed his name, and that’s it. But why, all throughout these years, when I saw my family members—like my cousins—would they say, “Maybe you can find out more from that auntie in Bozhou or that uncle in Nanjing.” Why didn’t they just tell me? Why didn’t they say, “Your father was our big brother and he just changed his name.” We all have camouflage, we all make smokescreens for ourselves to present a different personage, a different character.
In making the film, I also got rid of a lot of things, like… this question of what to do with all this footage (laughter). And whether I should get into these journals. I got into two of them and thought it was enough. It was a lot of this self-analysis, of knowing what I could now let go.
This idea of the smokescreen—is this something you feel like you’ve done yourself?
Yes. Even though we live in this self-centered and selfie-centered media age, most people don’t want to be branded as someone who’s talking about themself all the time. And usually we’re not doing that. One of the things that was the most difficult about constructing the film was—and this was the most difficult job I’ve ever had in my editing career—I needed to know how much of me I could have in the film. That is a question that, when I’m mentoring other documentary filmmakers, we address. How much of the filmmaker should we put in the film? What’s appropriate for the film you’re making?
I don’t know if this is particularly Asian but modesty is something we value; we don’t talk about our achievements and stuff like that. But if I don’t come back to that Fire Horse Award at the Reel Asian festival… I don’t come back full circle. It was a dilemma about whether or not I talked about what I did, about the recognition I got late in life. It was one of the most difficult things—we all hate hearing our own voices and seeing our own images. So I went through many, many versions of the film. It’s not even about what version I think is best in terms of structure, but what version I could live with (laughter).
What do you think was necessary to remove or add to get to the final version?
The earliest versions were much more intellectual. There were a lot more quotations from books—it was very academic—and they were organizing everything like different chapters. This was co-produced with ARTE, the cultural broadcaster in Europe, and some of my producers and my commissioning editor, we discussed a lot and one of the things they said was, “Maybe you’re hiding yourself behind these quotations.” It was about getting validation from Western sources; I was quoting all these philosophers and they were all white (laughter). Sometimes you’re so close to something that you need somebody to point these things out.
Then I got to several versions where I went very quickly through the archives, through my father’s things. At one point, we decided that I would have a consultant come in. I wasn’t even thinking of a consultant at the time. I was thinking, “If only I had an editor who could take over the whole damn thing!” (laughter). I wish I could have a me for me! My producers were quite astonished that I would agree to that because directors don’t want to give up their baby like that. But I wanted a consulting editor, someone who was a woman who was not from my own cultural background, but who also had this experience of exile.
So finally I got this woman, Chaghig Arzoumanian, who is an editor but also a director, writer, artist herself. We don’t agree on everything but one of the most important things she gave me was going through all of my father’s footage in detail. I’d want to fast forward through all this and she’d say, “Slow down, what are you doing? This is fascinating!” She saw things that I didn’t see, that I didn’t dare to see. She did a great job of finding a balance between the self and the audience. And that was necessary.
I wanted to talk about your relationship with Rohmer, and what you said right now reminds me of what you once said about being an editor, that your role is to draw out things that the director censors. What was it like working with Rohmer? I know you were involved with The Aviator’s Wife (1981), which you star in, and also The Adventures of Rosette (1983), but you became his official editor later in the early ’90s. Were there specific things he tended to censor? What were you able to draw out of him?
The last scene in Autumn’s Tale (1998), when Marie Rivière, this happily married woman, is dancing with her husband after having set up her friend with a perfect man. There’s this look when Marie looks up from the dance, this lost look, and I put that in without Rohmer asking. He loved it. For me, it crystallized this whole second layer of the film, that this woman may not be as happy as she seems and that there’s these regrets in her life, and now she’s wondering what would have happened if she was now in her friend’s shoes who found this new love. That’s the kind of thing he wouldn’t allow himself to explore, where if you get married, that’s it for the rest of your life. And in his life, it was a happy case of that. A lot of his other films have that theme, but in this case, he wasn’t thinking about that sort of ambiguity. That was really a case of drawing out something that I think was there but he wouldn’t do himself. He didn’t ask me to look for it.
There was another part in The Lady and the Duke (2001) when the soldier comes to search in a woman’s house. She’s hiding a dissident, and there’s an exchange of looks between the very handsome captain and this lady. I made sure there was a little bit more in this exchange, so that there’d be this second layer. I don’t think that’s something Rohmer would have done. He doesn’t do this kind of subliminal seduction—his seductions are very first degree (laughter).
How would he respond to you adding these additional layers?
He pretended that he didn’t know (laughter).
How do you know he was pretending?
I don’t, but I’m sure he was (laughter). For someone who makes all these films about seduction and lies and the way we tell stories about ourselves, I’m sure he saw everything.
Were there specific things that you two disagreed on?
It’s very boring to say, but no (laughter). Let me talk about something we both agreed on—we were both very musical. It was astonishing to me that when we would look at a scene, we’d invariably go to the same place and say, “here!” We’d understand the rhythm of the piece. Sometimes in his career, he would have these long discourses on religion, which I don’t share. That’s his own thing, and there’s not anything I could ever suggest to him about that, like “get rid of this.” In terms of his film’s themes, they’re all so obviously his preoccupations, and I just wanted to enhance them, to make them more spicy (laughter).
Do you feel like you two had different musical sensibilities at all?
I think that I like silence more. In my own films, I use more silence. For his films, he was very particular about the background sounds. And the use of sound was something that he brought a lot to the editing table. It’s something I learned from him… or, well, I don’t know who learned from who. I would edit dogs in Winter’s Tale (1992) and that’s something I carried with me. When I teach, I tell my students that when you have a scene made of two shots and you don’t think they go together, just put a sound at the cut point and it’ll work. When I’m mentoring someone, I always tell them to cut it first as a sound story, to start with a sound outline.
Did you two talk about music together?
Yes, quite a lot. I was one of his piano teachers, or at least that’s what he called me. He learned to play the piano when he was 70. He had a little electric piano in his office and several of us would go by and play with him. It’s amazing. There was no way that his fingers would obey what he’d think (laughter). He was such a strong-willed person that he would make them obey. But yes, he loved music. Especially when he was not thinking of a new film, he’d just listen to music for entire afternoons.
What artists did you both admire?
He loved Mozart and Beethoven. His taste didn’t go outside of this classical music.
Did you actually try to teach him piano?
He had these piano books on his piano, you know the kind for little kiddies. There was Chopin and things like this that he’d try to play. He’d also have me play for him. In fact, Marie Rivière made a documentary, In the Company of Éric Rohmer (2010), that’s about the last years of his life. It has scenes of me playing the piano for him.
What specific things were you able to bring to the table as a result of your own experiences as a filmmaker that he couldn’t?
I was bringing out this more overt play between the characters, between the sexes, really. My filmmaking since Shades of Silk has always been about this sensual, tactile thing. That’s not really in Rohmer, and I try to highlight those kinds of gestures and looks. Our communication was not him saying, “Oh, I like that.” It was more just him not opposing (laughter). There was this one time where I changed a scene because Diane Baratier, the DP, was astounded why we cut a scene a certain way in the last film. There were other takes that were more sensual, or where the clothes were flowing much more beautifully in the wind, and I thought she was right. I recut the scene, but without having him lose face, I exported it to DVD and put it on his desk in the middle of the night—I had the key to his office. I had to tell him, “Oops, I don’t know what happened, look what I found!” And then he said, “Oh, that’s exactly what I wanted.”
What’s something you miss about Rohmer now that he’s no longer here? What do you miss most?
My answer is the same that everyone else in his entourage would say: protection. He was not just a director or a collaborator; he was always looking out for us. Whenever we went through bad patches in our lives, he’d be there. I’d be somewhere else and he would be opening these letters that an ex would send me—he’d read them out to me on the phone. It was that kind of intimate trust, the sort of thing that only real family members would do. That was the sort of thing that we all experienced with him, and he never let us down. Once he was gone, it was like our safety net was gone. It was like losing a parent; you really have to learn how to be on your own. Before he passed away, he asked me many times, “Mary, what are your plans? How are you going to make a living when I go?” He was always thinking of me.
Wait, so he was reading your ex’s letters to you?
(laughs). He was there when we were going through divorces and separations—these heavy-duty things. There was this guy I was starting to separate from. He couldn’t reach me, so he would send these letters to Rohmer’s office. I would call Rohmer once in a while—I was on the road, or maybe I was on the run (laughter)—and he would tell me that I got a letter. I’d tell him I was miles away, and I would then ask for him to read them to me. It’s weird; this is something only your closest family member would do. He would read these to me over the phone, and I suppose he did it with a straight face (laughter). I don’t know how he could do it!
Did he give relationship advice?
He knew everything about all of us! He knew about all our relationships, from the day we met the guy till the day we separated. I don’t know if he ever talked about this in the press, as he didn’t do a lot of interviews, but for those of us in his close circle, our stories nourished his work. They weren’t word for word, but it’s not a coincidence that Winter’s Tale was about this woman who had a little girl and was trying to find her true love. I always said that Winter’s Tale was a gift for us. At the time, we were all in our 30s and going through divorces and separations and had our little children. He made a happy ending for us. It seems far-fetched, but I feel that way. And Autumn’s Tale, where you see this middle-aged woman… I mean, you see these characters getting older throughout his filmography, and those in his closest circle were getting older too. Every afternoon, he was always having tea with his entourage and learning about all our stories. It’s not a coincidence that he knew the human psyche by heart.
Who were the people in his entourage?
Me, Diane, Françoise, the closest actresses like Marie Rivière, Rosette, and Arielle Dombasle. There were those who were more invisible, too, like those in the script department.
I know you have this film from 1980, Justocoeur. Can you talk about that?
That film is lost. M+ wants to restore that, and me and John were just talking about it yesterday, but we can’t find the negative. I mean, we only made two prints—we were broke. The only thing that’s left is a U-matic copy of someone filming the film on the wall (laughter). Even Unifrance was looking for it because it’s a time capsule of the 1980s. It was at the Hong Kong Film Festival and Tony Rayns wrote the program notes. He said it was one of the only films at the time that was not condescending to its gay characters; he was saying that it was ahead of its time, that sort of thing. I hope to do something about it someday, to make a film within a film so it can still exist.
There’s a question I end all my interviews with and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?
Oh my god. What I love about myself? I can talk a lot about what I don’t like, but this is very tough. I think what I love is that I can get satisfaction from any exchange. I do a lot of mentoring, and I say quite often that it’s not just a matter of giving them something, but also taking (laughter). I can get satisfaction from any process of transmission.
Mary Stephen’s films are being shown at Metrograph in New York. More information can be found here.
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