The year was 1986, and I had just graduated from high school—both in real life and in the films of John Hughes. Onscreen, the high schools I attended were big and Midwestern, mostly situated in the suburbs of Chicago. In reality, if I wasn’t filming or ditching class, I went to a small French school on the west side of Los Angeles called the Lycée Français, an institution I had so rarely attended in person that when I flew back from New York for one day to accept my diploma my mother referred to it as my “honorary degree.” At the time, I was arguably one of the most recognizable high schoolers in America, but it had been a while since I had felt my age. When I left school a few weeks early to star in “The Pick-up Artist” with Robert Downey, Jr., in New York, I was already incorporated—and yet I still couldn’t legally order a drink in a restaurant.
During that film shoot, I got a call from my agent telling me that the Franco-Swiss film director Jean-Luc Godard—who died this past September, at the age of ninety-one—wanted to meet with me to discuss the possibility of my playing the role of Cordelia in an adaptation of “King Lear.” My only association with Godard at that point was a poster in the French clothing store agnès b. It was a collage of images from some of his most iconic movies—“Contempt,” “Alphaville,” “Pierrot le Fou.” I was drawn to the style, especially Jean Seberg’s fetching pixie cut in “Breathless.” I bought the poster but had yet to watch any of the films.
The prospect of performing Shakespeare was daunting. I had never tackled it in its original form, though coincidentally my first movie role had been in another modern adaptation of a Shakespearean classic. At thirteen, I played Miranda, the daughter of John Cassavetes’s Prospero (renamed Phillip), in Paul Mazursky’s “Tempest.” My agent told me that “King Lear” was worth considering, since Godard was an important if esoteric director and she knew that I was itching for something less mainstream. As much as I loved working with Hughes, I didn’t want to be seen as only a teen starlet, and I had never felt entirely comfortable being thrust into the role of spokesperson for a generation when I was still trying to pass algebra.
She said that Norman Mailer was also involved (though she wasn’t exactly sure in what capacity) and encouraged me to at least take the meeting. To prepare, I read a paperback of “King Lear” I had picked up at the Strand and then rented “Breathless” at a video store and watched Seberg and her co-star, Jean-Paul Belmondo, entranced.
On a day off from work, I took a cab alone to meet Godard and the producer Tom Luddy uptown in a suite at the Sherry Netherland. Luddy greeted me at the door and led me into the living room, where we both sat making small talk—so small, I don’t even remember what it was about. The director made an entrance after a couple of minutes, and from then on I was aware only of his commanding presence. Godard paced the room, scrutinizing me through his glasses, which had thick, tinted lenses. His curly hair was wild and unruly on the sides, and he was mostly bald on top. He seemed old to me then, and it’s astonishing to think that he was actually only a few years older than I am now. I politely inquired if there was a script that I could read. As he puffed on a big cigar, filling the room with pungent smoke, he shook his head no but said that he would explain the idea to me.
For the next forty minutes or so, he outlined the film in his heavily accented but distinctive monotone. I tried my best to follow his interpretation (what he called “an approach”). He never sat down, but stopped pacing every so often to relight his cigar. Tom Luddy shot nervous glances at me as I listened. I gleaned that in Godard’s version Lear was an American mobster named Don Learo—which he pronounced “lay-ah-ro”—and so it followed that his youngest daughter, Cordelia, should be American as well. When he finished speaking, I asked only two questions. The first was: Why did he want me to play the part? He smiled as if he had anticipated the question. He replied that, as a young movie star, I was the closest thing America had to a princess. I suspected the more likely truth was that, based on the success of the John Hughes films, I was bankable and could help him secure financing.
The other question was where the movie would be filmed. The answer: either Switzerland or Malibu, depending on who would be cast as Lear. It was down to two choices: Rod Steiger or Burgess Meredith. Steiger, who won an Academy Award for “In the Heat of the Night” in 1968, the year I was born, would do it only if he could film near his home in Malibu. Meredith, an actor whom I knew primarily from reruns of the nineteen-sixties TV show “Batman,” in which he played the Penguin, but whose multifaceted career began in the theatre in 1929, was willing to travel. If he was cast, the shoot would take place in Switzerland, which is where Godard lived and, I believe, at that point preferred to work. I wasn’t sure what had happened with Mailer. The shoot was supposed to take two weeks, much less time than I normally had to commit to. The project was just strange enough to spark my curiosity.
Frankly, I found the French angle hard to resist. From the time I was a child in suburban Sacramento, watching Julia Child on TV with my mom, I viewed France as the epitome of culture. After my family moved to L.A., I chose to go to the Lycée because my beloved on-set tutor, Irene Brafstein, had tutored Jodie Foster before me, and Jodie (whom I admired) had gone there and was enviably fluent in French. Entering a French-speaking school in the tenth grade, however, made me feel as though I was playing a perpetual game of catch-up. Undaunted, I attended a camp in the French town of Hyères with a Lycée schoolmate the summer after I completed “The Breakfast Club.” By then, I had become a full-blown Francophile, devouring the books of Colette and Simone de Beauvoir, as well as of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, both of whom had carved out a life abroad, imbued with a kind of expat languor that I aspired to experience myself one day. In “The Breakfast Club,” I had even improvised a line that John Hughes kept in the final cut in which my character, Claire, daydreams about where she would like to be—in France. It seemed destined that I would eventually work with one of French cinema’s most important directors, so I signed on.
I had been told that Woody Allen, whose filmmaking clout was then at its zenith, was playing the Fool in “King Lear.” Accompanied by “The Pick-up Artist” ’s still photographer, Brian Hamill, who regularly worked with him, I stopped by Michael’s Pub, where Allen played clarinet with a jazz ensemble most Monday nights. After Brian introduced us, I mentioned that I had agreed to do the film with Godard and asked what his experience had been like, since he had already filmed his part. Allen described being draped in film strips while quoting Shakespeare and feeling like . . . well, a fool, although his character was referred to as the Editor. He told me that he hoped I would have a better experience. It was not encouraging.
I spent the fall originating the title role in the Horton Foote play “Lily Dale” Off Broadway, and then flew back to Los Angeles to spend the holidays with my family. I received multiple telegrams and a written outline with drawings from Godard, who seemed genuinely elated that I had agreed to do his film. Before the age of the Internet, a telegram was the fastest way to send a message without picking up the phone. By the late eighties, telegrams already seemed old-fashioned, but I found their conjuring of another era glamorous. I don’t think I’d ever been sent one before.
That March, I flew out of J.F.K. on the Concorde with Tom Luddy and Burgess Meredith, who had ultimately got the part of Lear. We were headed to Switzerland by way of Paris. It was only the second film I’d made without one of my parents accompanying me on set, and my contract stipulated that the producers had to fly a girlfriend of mine from L.A. to meet me in Switzerland, so that I wouldn’t be alone. The Concorde, with its sleek body and pointed nose, was as chic and elegant as an Irving Penn model.
We arrived in Paris a little less than three and a half hours later, and, in a panic, I realized that somehow I’d lost my passport. It was a testament to Godard’s status in France that I was able to obtain a new one almost immediately. With just a slight delay, we took off on another flight and landed in Geneva. From there we were driven to Nyon, to the Beau Rivage Hotel, where the cast would be both staying and filming.
By this time, I had some sense of the plot, which seemed to have changed since my original meeting with Godard and even since the outline he had sent to me in Los Angeles. The narrative was now roughly this: The world has been destroyed, post-Chernobyl, and a puckish little man named William Shakespeare Jr. The Fifth is tasked with re-creating his famous ancestor’s work. The avant-garde opera director Peter Sellars was cast as Shakespeare’s descendant, and Godard inserted himself in a role that doesn’t appear in any Shakespeare play: Herr Doktor Pluggy—an inventor who wears a contraption on his head, with cables dangling, doing research in pursuit of something called “the image.”
Before we started filming, I asked someone from the production team when I would meet makeup, hair, and wardrobe, and was told that I would be doing my own. I was also informed that Godard would be stopping by my room to choose Cordelia’s costumes from the clothes I had brought with me. It was the first I’d heard of this, and I suddenly wished I had been more selective in my packing. I went back to my room, picked out a nice sweater and skirt, tied a scarf in my hair, and carefully applied my makeup. Then I wrote postcards while I waited for Godard, the contents of my suitcase neatly arranged on the bed. When I greeted him and an assistant at the door, he took one look at my face and exclaimed, “No, no, no! Too much makeup! Take it off. If you must, just a little mascara, that’s all.” The “a” in “all” was pronounced as an “o,” articulated in the exact same way he later asked me to pronounce Cordelia’s answer to her father’s question about what she will say to prove her love for him. “Not no‑thing.” NO THING. He split the word in two, and I could tell that this distinction was important to him, without really understanding why.
I looked forward to meeting my fellow cast members, though I hadn’t been that thrilled to hear about Peter Sellars’s involvement. Two years earlier, I had been led to believe that I would be offered the role of Nina in his version of “The Seagull,” with Colleen Dewhurst, at the Kennedy Center, but at the last minute I was told that the part would go to Kelly McGillis. This seemed unfair to me at the time, since Nina was an actual teen-ager like me. I was still nursing a grudge, and as we began filming I confess I took some pleasure in watching Godard treat Sellars dismissively, when it was clear that the opera director idolized him.
I found out that Norman Mailer had been Godard’s original Lear, though I still didn’t know exactly what had happened with him. Among the cast and crew, I heard talk that the writer and his daughter, who’d been cast as Cordelia, had stayed in the same hotel—filmed in the same room, in fact, in which Burgess and I were now filming—and that, after a couple of days, Mailer had left following a dispute with the director, taking his daughter with him. It seemed peculiar and intriguing to me, and Godard was still grumbling about it.
The French actress Julie Delpy was playing Virginia (Woolf) in the film; the director Leos Carax had the role of Edgar (not Lear’s eldest son, as one might expect but, rather, Edgar Allan Poe). Julie was a year younger than I was but knew far more about Godard than I did. She had already acted in a small part in his 1985 movie “Detective”; it had been her first film role. “He’s a genius,” she solemnly assured me. When I wasn’t working, my friend Angie and I explored the town with her. Julie spoke broken English back then, and I spoke broken French, and we practiced our respective languages together while she went around inexplicably throwing bang snaps on the ground in front of strangers, howling with laughter at the alarm of her chosen targets. I don’t know where she got them, but I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if they were from Godard.
One day, Godard sneaked into Burgess’s room and short-sheeted his bed. I noticed that the director seemed to derive satisfaction from provoking people, but, fortunately for me, his pranks were generally directed toward men.
Burgess had an easy, unpretentious sophistication that I admired. Unlike me, he was no stranger to the avant-garde. He had made his Broadway début in Eva Le Gallienne’s “Romeo and Juliet,” in 1930, and through the years had worked with everyone—Kurt Weill, John Steinbeck, James Baldwin, Otto Preminger, Jean Renoir. Still, Burgess found it disconcerting that he would prepare the lines Godard had given him the night before and then arrive on set to find that Godard had thrown them all out. Burgess didn’t mind the experimental—he only wanted to be let in on the process. These kinds of games can feel infantilizing to an actor, and it was only thanks to his good humor that he didn’t abandon the production the way Mailer had.
Over dinners at the hotel’s white-tablecloth restaurant, which overlooked Lake Geneva, Burgess and I speculated about what our inscrutable director was up to. Burgess, a wine aficionado, would order the best bottles on the menu—a Château Petrus ’82, say—which greatly impressed the staff. We were joined often by my friend Angie, sometimes by Julie, and at least once by Sellars (whom I’d since forgiven). Burgess wore a variety of jaunty caps over his shock of white hair and regaled us with stories about his life. His light-blue eyes were sharp, and twinkled the way I had once imagined Santa Claus’s did. At the time, he was planning on writing a memoir disguised as a book of wines he’d enjoyed through the years. My favorite anecdote was when, as a young man, he was “summoned” by Tallulah Bankhead to her suite at the Gotham Hotel, in Manhattan. “That’s when you really knew you’d arrived!” he told us with a roguish grin. He wore his nicest suit, thinking that he was going to have a tête-à-tête with Bankhead. She greeted him at the door completely naked, a champagne glass in hand and a bacchanal raging behind her. “Burgess, dahling!” she cried. He said that one thing led to another, until eventually he found himself with her in flagrante in one of the bedrooms.
“And then, just before the petite mort, she whispers in my ear, ‘Don’t come inside me, Burgess dahling—I’m engaged to Jock Whitney!’ ” he said. “And the champagne she was drinking was . . .” Honestly, he made the Brat Pack seem like a bunch of Mennonites.
Godard never dined with us. It’s a shame that he sequestered himself from everyone, because, considering how much he revered cinema and old Hollywood, I have a feeling he would have loved Burgess’s stories. Looking back on it now, I think he was actually a bit shy, trapped in his mind. Perhaps the only way he could make sense of anything was to film and edit it.
One day, about halfway through the shoot, Burgess reported to me that there was fake blood on the bedsheets in the room where we were filming, and asked me if I knew anything about it. I didn’t.
“What do you think he’s up to?” he mused. I figured it was another one of Godard’s jokes, a prank meant to get under Burgess’s skin and rattle him—turn him into the blustery, confused old man he had envisioned as Lear. Years later, however, I found out from this magazine’s film writer Richard Brody, in “Everything Is Cinema,” his 2008 biography of Godard, that the blood was meant to symbolize Cordelia’s virginity. Brody’s analysis confirmed something I had heard from Mailer a decade before: that Godard had been exploring the idea of a sexual relationship between Lear and his daughter. That was never a consideration in my mind on set, but I came to understand later that it was part of the reason Mailer had left the production (apart from having the script he had written thrown out by Godard).
In 1998, I had run into Mailer at a party, and as soon as I mentioned the Godard film his eyes bulged and he grabbed my arm to lead me into a quiet vestibule so that he could tell me his side of the story, which was basically that Godard was a monster. Mailer told me that he was offended by the incest angle, both because the director had cast Mailer and his daughter Kate in the roles and because he was using their actual names. Godard had been furious when he lost his Lear, and he was no less forgiving when he cut the finished film, choosing to leave in much of what he shot of the Mailers during the opening credits and adding a withering voice-over in which he refers to Norman sarcastically as “the Great Writer.” After ten years, Mailer was still incensed, and it seemed that the act of recounting Godard’s audacity was both painful and pleasurable to him.
Godard didn’t try using Burgess’s and my real names in the movie, as he had with Norman and Kate. He must have known that he would have met with the same resistance. But, anyway, Burgess wasn’t my real father. Both of us were mature enough to have handled the interpretation—it wasn’t as if he was asking us to do a sex scene—but, clearly, he didn’t want to take the chance. Perhaps he just enjoyed the clandestine, the getting away with something.
All the clothing I wear in the film is indeed from what I brought with me, with the exception of a thick, heavy white linen nightgown that I have on in the scene in which Cordelia dies. Spoiler: she dies in Godard’s version, too, but not much else corresponds to the original text. Aside from a few lines that I quote from “King Lear,” much of the Shakespeare I was asked to read was either from a sonnet (Sonnet 47, which Godard handed me to read into a boom mike while I perched on the edge of the tub in one of the hotel’s bathrooms) or, as I recall, from Joan of Arc’s lines in “Henry VI, Part 1.” Godard’s whispering narration in the film, which overlays the sound, gives an impression of what it might be like to hear voices, as Joan of Arc did, although I’m not sure if that was his intention.
During filming, I would sometimes ask Godard questions, like “Why is it such a small crew?” I had never done a film with so few people before. On “King Lear,” a lighting adjustment would entail just moving a table lamp from one surface to another. “It’s not necessary. These big film crews, c’est ridicule. . . .” he said, scoffing. “You don’t need so many people to make a film.” This may be partly true, but it’s also possible that by 1987 Godard didn’t command the kind of budget that would have allowed him to hire a large crew, even if he had wanted to. He was also essentially an introvert who didn’t like to be around too many people. Small crews are easier to control, and in order to work with him you had to submit to his vision absolutely. This couldn’t have been more different from my experience with other directors, particularly John Hughes, which had always felt collaborative.
When I watch “King Lear” now, I’m struck by how extremely still and vigilant I seem. My back is straight and at times it almost looks as though I’m in a photograph—until I speak or move. Godard was exacting about every single gesture, and I found that it was easier to do precisely as he liked. Once, before I filmed a scene of Cordelia waking up in bed, I asked if he wanted me to wake up slowly, and he looked at me as if the question were absurd: “No, you just wake up. Don’t act.” He expanded on this a little, telling me that in American films people were always acting, which to him was a cardinal sin.
I wish now that I had talked to Godard more, but I confess that my own shyness prevented me from doing so. I was intimidated by him. To me, the French were authority figures—they were my professeurs in high school.
Toward the end of the shoot, Godard mentioned that he deemed everything I did in the film completely authentic except for one moment. Of course, I was instantly riveted, and I asked him which one.
“I’ll tell you when it’s over,” he said.
I didn’t forget. When I finished my scenes, I approached him to ask which moment, and he told me that it was the scene in which Cordelia lies next to her father, dead. This was completely nonsensical, since it was the last scene that I filmed—it hadn’t even been shot when he made the comment. So maybe my gender didn’t render me entirely safe from his mischief.
After filming ended, Burgess, my friend Angie, and I flew back to the U.S. Burgess navigated us through the airport, barking out orders in the voice of the Penguin.
At the age of twenty-four, I followed through on the promise I’d made to my younger self and moved to Paris. When I told my French boyfriend that I had been in a Jean-Luc Godard film, he was stunned. In 1995, looking someone up on IMDb wasn’t really a thing, and by then “King Lear” had reached a kind of mythic status in France for not having found distribution there. I don’t know if it’s an urban legend, but supposedly tomatoes were thrown at the screen at Cannes when the film premièred. I was never asked to attend the première. I saw the film with a couple of friends after buying a ticket to a showing in a mostly empty movie theatre in Los Angeles, where it played for a very short time. It was just as confusing to me then as it had been when I filmed it. Seeing the completed film didn’t clarify anything—even now, the fact that in 2012 Richard Brody put it first on his list of the “Ten Greatest Films of All Time” still bewilders me. In the theatre in L.A., I was surprised to see that Godard had kept the part with the Mailers, and I had to laugh at his nerve.
While living in France, I noticed that the people I met in the French film business seemed to define themselves as being either for or against New Wave cinema, Godard in particular. The newest crop of filmmakers was decidedly anti-intellectual. “Oh, he’s a bore,” a famous French comedic actor told me. “It’s everything that’s wrong with French film. The incessant navel-gazing.”
For my part, I couldn’t stop thinking about Godard. He was like a puzzle that I could never put together, but couldn’t quite put back into the box, either. My friend Victoria Leacock, the daughter of the cinema-vérité pioneer Ricky Leacock, and I got the idea to do an interview with him as a short film and call it “Waiting for Godard.” We decided that Victoria would film me as I took a train from Paris to Switzerland, and talked about the filming of “King Lear.” Once there, I would find Godard and ask him what the hell it was all about. We figured that the “waiting” in the Beckett-inspired title meant that we could do the film whether Godard agreed to be interviewed or not. “Call it ‘En Train de Filmer,’ ” my French boyfriend suggested. “Trust me. He’ll love the wordplay.” Victoria’s dad had formed a company with the American documentary filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker, which was nearly bankrupted in 1969, after Godard walked out on a film in which they were heavily invested. Her father had always told her that this led to the demise of Leacock-Pennebaker. We both had questions.
I took the chance and, using the French title my boyfriend had suggested, sent a letter to Godard’s office in Rolle, Switzerland—like a message in a bottle. Not long afterward, my boyfriend and I were awakened in the middle of the night by that distinctive monotone drawling on the answering machine, agreeing to do the project.
In the fall of 1995, Godard and I met for lunch in Paris at a café just off the Champs-Élysées. I brought him a cigar. He smiled and tucked it into the breast pocket of his tweed sports coat as if he’d been expecting it. To me, he looked more or less the same as when I’d last seen him, though somehow smaller and less imposing. I was shocked to see him pour water into his wine before drinking it, but I didn’t comment on it. We chatted about recent films. He didn’t think much of “Pulp Fiction,” the movie of the moment. “Not authentic,” he declared. (That word again!) However, we both liked “Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould,” a more obscure film by the French Canadian director François Girard. This time our conversation was conducted entirely in French, which was still difficult for me, and I struggled between the formal vous and the familiar tu. He didn’t ease my discomfort. On the contrary, he almost seemed to relish it. This wasn’t exactly surprising, since the tutoyer question was significant enough for him to include a line about it in at least one of his films. In the 1964 movie “Band of Outsiders,” Arthur (Claude Brasseur) asks Franz (Sami Frey) about a woman, Odile (played by Anna Karina, Godard’s former wife and subsequent muse), whom they both covet: “Have you used the tu with her yet?” When Franz says no, Arthur boasts, “I can have her whenever I want.” Words mattered to Godard—he was obsessed with them, in fact, and although younger generations had been chipping away at the formal usage for years, Jean-Luc Godard wasn’t having any of it. He was the most formal formalist I’ve ever known.
What was surprising was a moment, striking in its vulnerability, when he confided to me that he had been “moved” by my letter and told me that other actresses—American actresses, he implied, mentioning Jean Seberg and Jane Fonda—had never wanted to have anything more to do with him. I made a mental note to ask him more about this when Victoria and I shot our film, but then a job took me back to the U.S. for months, and our film was put on hold. I try not to have too many regrets in life, but not having pursued the making of this short film is one of them.
That day, at the end of lunch, after we left the restaurant, we walked out on the Champs-Élysées together. The autumn sky had already started to darken, and the neon lights of the stores and restaurants on the boulevard were just beginning to fluoresce. He asked where I lived, and I told him in the Marais, across from the Winter Circus.
“Near Père Lachaise,” he remarked.
“Yes,” I said. “Not too far.”
We strolled for a bit, as Belmondo and Seberg had on that same street thirty-six years before.
“What’s your favorite part of Paris?” I asked him on impulse. Without hesitation, he gestured toward the grand boulevard. “This. This is Paris for me.” ♦