Jean-Pierre Léaud (fifty-eight years after The 400 Blows):

“When Albert Serra offered me the role of Louis XIV, I said to myself that this film would mean a great deal to me, in my life and in my filmography. I said to myself that I must succeed, with all the energy that’s in me. So I was in Louis XIV’s bed, trapped within an apparatus of three cameras that filmed me continuously from eight in the morning until eight in the evening, every single day. Even though the apparatus was hard to put up with, I hung on until the end. Any other actor would have said, ‘This is too much. I can’t make it.’ Well, I decided to make it.

“Through this apparatus, I stepped into the shoes of an old man in his death throes, and you cannot avoid personal repercussions if you play someone like that. And that’s when I began to feel the proximity of my own death and realized that Serra was recording my own death through Louis XIV’s. At my age, you cannot banish death from your life. I was reminded of Jean Cocteau’s quote: ‘Cinema is death at work.’ ”*

LA MORT DE LOUIS XIV/THE DEATH OF LOUIS XIV (2016), is directed by Albert Serra, and written by Serra and Thierry Lounas.

The film screens daily at 4:45 pm only, through June 15, at the Laemmle Music Hall, 9036 Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills.

*Yonca Talu, “The Long Goodbye: An interview with Jean-Pierre Léaud,” Film Comment, March/April 2017.

(Top) Jean-Pierre Léaud in The 400 Blows, directed by François Truffaut. Image credit: Janus Films.

(Bottom) Jean-Pierre Léaud in the title role of La Mort de Louis XIV. Image credit: Capricci Films.