"It's often wrong to write for specific actors because one ends up using what is least interesting about them, their mannerisms and habits. I prefer not to write for specific people"
About this Quote
Chabrol is defending a kind of authorship that refuses the cozy shortcut of “tailor-made.” Writing for a specific actor sounds generous, even pragmatic, but he frames it as aesthetic capitulation: you don’t reach for the actor’s range, you reach for their brand. Mannerisms and habits are the actor’s most marketable surface, the stuff audiences already recognize and casting directors can sell in a trailer. Chabrol’s jab is that this surface is also the least interesting part of a person on screen, because it arrives pre-digested.
The subtext is a warning about cinema’s feedback loop. When a director writes to an actor’s ticks, the script becomes a delivery system for familiarity; the performance becomes an impression of the performer; the character becomes a costume hung on a public persona. Chabrol, who spent his career anatomizing bourgeois self-deception, isn’t interested in letting celebrity do the psychological work for him. He wants characters that trap performers into discovery rather than letting them skate on charm.
Context matters: coming out of the French New Wave ecosystem but never fully embracing its romantic mythology, Chabrol often positioned himself as a cool diagnostician of power, appetite, and hypocrisy. His preference “not to write for specific people” reads less like aloofness than control. It’s a bid to keep the film’s center of gravity in the writing and staging, not in the gravitational pull of a star’s known gestures. In an industry that rewards “perfect casting,” he’s arguing that perfection is often just repetition with better lighting.
The subtext is a warning about cinema’s feedback loop. When a director writes to an actor’s ticks, the script becomes a delivery system for familiarity; the performance becomes an impression of the performer; the character becomes a costume hung on a public persona. Chabrol, who spent his career anatomizing bourgeois self-deception, isn’t interested in letting celebrity do the psychological work for him. He wants characters that trap performers into discovery rather than letting them skate on charm.
Context matters: coming out of the French New Wave ecosystem but never fully embracing its romantic mythology, Chabrol often positioned himself as a cool diagnostician of power, appetite, and hypocrisy. His preference “not to write for specific people” reads less like aloofness than control. It’s a bid to keep the film’s center of gravity in the writing and staging, not in the gravitational pull of a star’s known gestures. In an industry that rewards “perfect casting,” he’s arguing that perfection is often just repetition with better lighting.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|
More Quotes by Claude
Add to List
