Élise Baudouin is a documentary filmmaker and columnist. She directed the documentary entitled Claude Lelouch, la vie en mieux about the great French filmmaker Claude Lelouch whose career has spanned 60 years and more than 50 films. We talk to Élise about her film.
Élise Baudouin, you are a journalist, columnist and documentary filmmaker. When did you realise that you wanted to work in journalism, and especially television journalism, because you’ve done a lot of that?
To be honest, it was very accidental. I first studied philosophy and then political science. At the end of my university studies, while talking to my research supervisor, I realised that I didn’t actually want to do research, but rather journalism. But getting into television was completely accidental.
When it came time to do an internship at the end of my studies, I thought that when I looked for work, all the doors would be closed because it’s difficult to find work. But when you’re a student, you can still have a bit of fun. Internships aren’t too difficult to get. So I told myself that I could still have a bit of fun before making a thoughtful choice about my future career. And I thought to myself, you know, it’s funny, I’ll never work in television. I don’t watch it. I don’t know anything about it. I wanted to work in print media or radio. And in the end, I told myself, well, I’ll do my end-of-studies internship at a television station, so at least I’ll have seen what it’s like before making a choice. Well, in the end, I was hired at the end of my internship.
And in fact, it was a discovery of the power of storytelling, especially what you can do when you have both sound and image. So it’s funny that you ask me that question because I met a man called Michaël Guedj, who was barely older than me but who was my boss in that first job. And now, more than 17 years later, he happened to be my producer for the film about Lelouch! We worked together, then we went to work elsewhere and we ended up back together again not long ago. So he was the one who suggested I make this film about Claude Lelouch.
I was going to ask why you decided to make this film. Was it when you heard that Lelouch was making his film Finalement (At the end of the day)? So it was actually Michaël’s idea?
No, the starting point was actually my co-writer. I directed this film, but to make it, I worked in tandem with Stéphane Boudsocq, who is a film journalist for a radio station called RTL in France. Stéphane specialises in cinema. At the time, I didn’t know him yet, but he had known Claude Lelouch for about twenty years. And there was already a relationship of mutual respect between Claude Lelouch and Stéphane.
When Stéphane learned that Claude Lelouch was about to start shooting what could be his last film, because it was called Finalement (At the end of the day), everyone said it would probably be his last film. He began to think that it would be a good starting point for a documentary around that. In any case, there was an opportunity to be seized because filming was about to start. Stéphane talked to Michaël about it. And Michaël said, ‘You’re right, let’s send a camera to film behind the scenes of the film, and we’ll think about what to do with it later.’ They had to decide quickly because filming was about to start.
So Michaël and Stéphane started like that, a bit blind, without any specific idea, but they said to themselves, well, we have access, Lelouch has agreed to let us be there for a few days during filming. He is, after all, a legendary director. It might be his last film. With Lelouch, you always have to be wary because now he’s starting another one. I really think Lelouch will keep filming until his last breath. He loves it. So there you go.
But at the time, we thought, damn, this might be his last film. And so once they had done that, it was just a starting point, and then they got in touch with me – I already knew Michaël – so we could see together what we could do with it. Very quickly, the desire and the idea emerged to use the film as a starting point, but above all to use it to tell the journey and trajectory of Claude Lelouch, who is one of the most famous French filmmakers in the world. He is someone who has won Oscars, Golden Globes, awards, who has had an incredible career. He has been making films for 60 years and has made more than 51 films. And in any case, here in France, in the world of cinema, even those who are not familiar with his films, even the younger generation, know his name because it is almost part of our heritage. He is part of the heritage of cinema. He invented too many things in film to go unnoticed today.
So we wanted to make this film, and that was the real starting point. But what was decisive was the fact that Claude Lelouch agreed to open up his professional and personal archives to us. That’s what makes the film so good and, I think, so interesting. So I admit that, on a personal level, it was pretty crazy because Stéphane and I spent days and days at Claude Lelouch’s production company, looking at his 60 years in cinema. So it’s really a career. And the walls of his production house are lined with boxes, files, and shoeboxes containing the treasures of his film shoots. So we spent days and days opening these boxes. Inside, you have administrative documents, etc., and annotated scripts. And you have lots of photos from the film set. You have contact sheet prints. Sometimes you have reels. We found reels, sometimes 8mm and 35mm. He didn’t even know what was on them anymore. And that’s how we got our hands on those very first camera tests from his very first film.
The ones we see at the very beginning of the film.
Exactly. And Claude didn’t even know they existed. I found this reel, we had it digitised, he had absolutely no idea what was on it. So it was a kind of archaeological dig we did inside these archives. Personally, I felt like I had access to a kind of treasure trove because, once again, Claude Lelouch has worked with the greatest French actors. He has worked with Belmondo, with Girardot, with Catherine Deneuve, with Jean Dujardin.
With everyone.
Everyone. Béatrice Dalle. Everyone. What’s more, everyone loved working with this filmmaker (and still loves him) because, and all the actors say the same thing, it’s a unique experience because no one directs actors like he does. He has this knack for making us feel insecure, for not telling us everything so that we’re more spontaneous and more alive than when we’re acting. It’s funny to see that Kad Merad today says the same thing that Annie Girardot said 25 years ago.
His style of directing actors hasn’t changed.
Exactly. And what an exceptional experience it is as an actor. So, it was pretty fantastic to have access to these archives. I think that in reality, the real gift that Claude gave us – there’s access to his archives, of course – but above all, there’s the fact that he let us do absolutely whatever we wanted with them. I must admit that he agreed to give us this access and let us tell his story in our own way, from our own perspective, according to our own rules.
And I realise what that must have been like for him, because he’s usually the one who decides how the story is told. And here, he had to let us do it; he had to let us tell it the way we wanted to. And he played along with this game of introspection and he did it, I think, with great elegance and, above all, the elegance of giving us complete freedom. And as a director, I found that extremely pleasant, coming from someone who is used to telling other people’s stories, to accept that we were telling his story, in areas that weren’t necessarily easy for him.
There’s a whole section on his films, and obviously that’s his subject. Then there are parts about his childhood that are more complex and painful, yet at the same time sunny. But Claude Lelouch is someone who lived through the war as a young Jewish child, so there is something heavy about it. And he also agreed to let us tell his story through the more complicated relationships he has with women and with his children. And I thought it was very courageous of him to agree to let go of a certain modesty in order to try to create an honest and truly accomplished self-narrative that goes beyond storytelling, especially because there’s always this challenge with people who know how to tell stories.
Yes, exactly, when you watch the film, because Claude Lelouch is the one talking, he’s the narrator. We don’t hear you asking the questions and him answering. It’s really as if he’s discovering things for himself like he is doing a bit of a retrospective himself.
So yes, the way we worked was quite specific, in that first of all, Stéphane and I watched hours and hours and hours of archive footage. I saw all the interviews he had given in his life. Obviously, that includes his entire filmography, behind-the-scenes footage, because our research in these archives also allowed us to get our hands on behind-the-scenes footage, much of which had never been seen before That’s how we found 15 DVDs containing the entire shoot of Itinéraire d’un enfant gâté (Itinerary of a spoiled child), one of Claude’s cult films. There are hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of rushes from the shoot, which was a real treat. It’s pretty amazing to go through them. First, there was a huge amount of documentary research and deciding in what order we were going to tell this man’s life story.
Then we decided to interview him, knowing that we would only use the audio, because we wanted him to be the narrator of this story, but we wanted him to open up and for us to put his testimony into images. But of course, I had already done a lot of selection work, so during the interview we showed him some images and he reacted to them. That’s how he rediscovered the test shots. We showed him certain film clips, certain passages from the making-of, so that he could remember. Because Claude Lelouch has had an extremely prolific career, we sometimes had to revive it, immerse him in those eras. And I think it was also a kind of journey through his own life for him, because we asked him to remember things he had completely forgotten, to confront images he had sometimes never seen before. So that’s how we put the documentary together. He was the narrator, but he gave his testimony. And then we made the film that you saw.
Yes, and it’s a beautiful film. With such a long career and extensive archives, how did you choose the films you were going to talk to him about and show us?
Well, we tried to allow viewers to see clips from his most iconic films. When talking about Claude Lelouch’s career as a filmmaker, it’s impossible not to mention Un homme et une femme (A Man and a Woman), which won him two Oscars.
The film that changed everything.
The one that changed his entire trajectory. Because thanks to that film, he made money, and thanks to that film, he was able to produce his own films with his own money. So it was pivotal. It’s impossible not to mention L’itinéraire d’un enfant gâté (The Itinerary of a Spoiled Child), which he made in the 1980s. It’s a film that did him a world of good at a rather difficult time in his career and which is still a cult classic for many generations. I’m only mentioning these two, but there are plenty of others. In any case, there are also films from which we have included excerpts because they were also emblematic of his way of working with actors. It was important for us to address the method in which he works, his way of not saying everything, of not telling the actors the ending of the film or what will happen to their characters.
I was so surprised to learn that.
Yes, that’s how he works. He says, in life, we don’t know how it’s going to end, we don’t know what’s going to happen to us. So, in cinema, he says, ‘I hope I’ve been the filmmaker of spontaneity.’ For me, that’s what interests me personally, even more than his films. What interested and fascinated me about him was his almost visceral way of completely mixing life and cinema. In other words, he mixes everything he experiences in life and recycles it in his films. It’s almost as if every experience he had only made sense if he could exploit it cinematographically.
But it takes on a rather crazy dimension because he casts his wives and children in his films. It is with a film that he tells a woman he loves her, it is with a film that he tells her he is leaving her. It’s with a film that he tries to tell his children who he is and why he was the somewhat lame father, as he says he was, which he is aware he was to his children. It’s with a film that he will say sorry to them, and for him it’s the same thing, he mixes everything up.
And I was very moved because, obviously, when you look at someone’s whole life in images… It turns out that his father loved images and bought a camera very early on. We have videos of Claude Lelouch as a baby, a child, a little boy. So that, for someone of his generation – he was born in 1976 – is extremely rare. So that’s crazy.
And listening to all the interviews he’s given in his life put me in a bit of a strange position, which is that you end up knowing the person, not intimately, it would be pretentious to say that. Claude Lelouch was my research subject. I am not intimate with Claude Lelouch. On the other hand, I am now very familiar with the discourse he has had throughout his life, about his work and about himself. You end up being able to finish someone’s sentences because you’ve heard everything. You know all his ways of speaking.
His mannerisms
Mannerisms, there’s the form. But you know that on such and such a film, he likes to tell such and such an anecdote, that there he’ll tell you what it brought him. You have lots and lots of information, and that also creates a situation where you can’t help but take a psychological approach to the person.
I’m telling you this for a reason, which is that when I started working on Claude’s childhood, I realised how much, in my opinion, in terms of cinema, everything came together at that moment. Because Claude Lelouch, he’s being hidden in cinemas, he’s a little Jewish boy. During the war, he’s in the occupied zone. His mother hides him in cinemas. That’s where he was safe. His encounter with cinema was pivotal. But it was also a period when the worlds of reality and fiction were blurred. For him, it was a time when, to protect him from himself and his Jewishness, he was taught to become a little anti-Semitic. So that he would be credible.
I couldn’t even imagine it.
Yes, that is to say, he is five years old, he knows very well that he is Jewish, but they tell him no, they make him –
Pretend he isn’t.
And above all, as if it were an identity that made him one of the bad guys. So he’s in total confusion. He doesn’t say it so clearly, but when I interviewed him, I thought to myself, at this point in his life, the line between what is true and what is not true is becoming completely blurred. In fact, I’m Jewish, and the people who love me tell me that being Jewish isn’t good, so he doesn’t understand anything anymore. There’s this aspect where there’s very clear confusion.
So I think it’s not insignificant in his relationship to fiction and what it means to lie, because somewhere there’s this question that arises in cinema about the good lie. We’re going to tell you this story. And so I also say lying for one simple reason, which is that Claude Lelouch is someone who was saved by lying in his childhood. There’s this scene he put in one of his films, in the film called Les uns les autres, which he even had his own son act in: at a time when Claude Lelouch was in a school hidden in a Catholic school and the Germans came in, asked all the little boys to pull down their trousers, and the teacher saved him by saying ‘Oh no, but he’s Catholic, and he was peeing crookedly.’ ‘Go on! Claude, recite this prayer.’ She had taught it to him a week earlier.
On the day of our interview, at the age of 86, Claude Lelouch recited this prayer, which is not from his religion. He still knows it today. So it’s a little boy for whom everything is defined by this. Because Claude Lelouch, from the moment the war ended, told me, “For me, the day of liberation was the best day of my life. And from then on, I was so aware that we had come close to dying that the rest of my life has been a bonus. It’s extra time, and I had an appetite for life that was increased tenfold by the realisation that we had actually come very close to the concentration camps.” So there’s that aspect of things, and then there’s the thing about lies, stories, they save you. And telling stories, as he says in his stories, heroes are better than us, they’re more beautiful than us, they’re braver. And it’s with these people that I want to be. So I find that his cinema and his relationship to cinema tell the story of a man who, throughout his life – and this struck me while working on his career – tried to blur the line between reality and fiction in his films and sometimes even in the way he talked about himself. I was very touched that in the film, he says yes, ‘sometimes I embellish a little, I can’t help myself’.
I think it’s a very sincere contract with the viewer, and I loved that this first-person narrative was like that, tinged with this kind of very honest insight that allows you to really understand this guy.
In Claude Lelouch, la vie en mieux, Claude Lelouch says that cinema is the inventor of immortality? Do you think that by making this film about him, you are making him immortal?
Actually, I think he’s right to say that because then it exists forever somewhere. In fact, I would feel pretentious to say that the documentary I made with Stéphane has that kind of power. But what is true is that I am very happy – first of all, I really enjoyed making this film – but I am also very happy to have achieved such a high standard of quality. I’m proud of the work we’ve done in telling the story of someone who is at this point in his life, that is to say, he’s at the point where he’s starting to look back on his life today, when he was 86 at the time, but today he’s 88. Perhaps Claude will live another 25 years, I don’t know.
What is certain is that he was at that point where one cannot help but take stock. And I thought it was great to be able to do it together, and that, in the end, there is a testimony like this, of a real slice of life, a slice of humanity, because he is someone who has lived through some crazy things, but who has also lived through the history of France and the history of the seventh art. I would be delighted if this film helped to keep this man’s name alive for a long time to come. And we know that films like this can be rebroadcast, etc.
And yes, I’m very happy that this film exists and that it’s so comprehensive. And that was difficult. It’s quite funny, actually, because originally we had proposed this film to France Télévisions and we had agreed with them on a 52-minute film, the classic film that airs in the late evening on French television. But when we started showing them what we had edited, we showed the broadcasters the first 40 minutes and they said, ‘Oh no, it’s not possible, you have to make a longer film, it’s too rich, it’s great. In the end, they asked us to make a 70-minute film to be shown in prime time. This was because he really did the work of telling his story and giving access to these little treasures, these family photos, these personal photos. I was also very grateful that France Télévisions knew how to showcase a documentary of this quality. When I say ‘this quality’, I’m not so much talking about my work, but rather the richness of the content. It’s rare to have a film with such powerful archives, to see childhood and to have so many film clips as well.
It also allows us to revisit the past. I think there are lots of adults, people who are in their fifties today, who will revisit the cinema of their youth, which can also be a nice moment to remember all those films.
Yes, Claude Lelouch, la vie en mieux is a kind of retrospective on these films and on his life.
That’s how it is, because everything is intertwined with his life. In any case, I don’t know if our documentary will make him immortal. In any case, his work makes him immortal. So we will have told the story of the man behind the filmmaker. I think that was perhaps a little less well known. The filmmaker was well known, but the man was perhaps less so.
Claude Lelouch said in your film that he is always the first to watch his films and that each time he learns something about himself by watching them. Did you learn anything about yourself by making this film or by watching it?
That’s funny! Absolutely, but it’s true that I’m rarely asked questions about myself when I talk about this film, because obviously we talk a lot about Claude, so I never asked myself that question. I realised that the archives were extremely valuable material. Today, you see, in the famous boxes we opened, there were about a hundred of them, there was everything. As we went along, it became more and more dematerialised, of course. At the beginning, for the films from the 1960s, there were at least six boxes per film, then little by little, there were fewer and fewer, and in the end, there was one box with a hard drive inside. Claude and I were able to touch photos and contact sheets.
If I learned one thing about myself, it’s that I actually like to recount the past from the perspective of the present. I really enjoy that. That’s what I realised, that it’s thanks to these archives that we can tell someone’s story and try to shape the view we ultimately have of that person. I felt very privileged, honestly.
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We would like to thank Elise Baudouin for this interview.
You can see her film Claude Lelouch, la vie en mieux at the JIFF festival in Perth on 11 December 2025.
