Director Patrice Leconte’s films have long been celebrated for their poignant touch, their dark comedy and their deep emotions. With Man on the Train, his 19th feature film, Leconte presents one of his most tender and emotionally provocative stories to date, the story of two completely opposite men who develop an unlikely friendship that sparks lingering regrets and awakens long-hidden dreams. Borrowing the sepia-toned atmosphere of a classic Western, yet imbued with a sense of surreal magic, Leconte’s film is, like many Westerns, about last chances. But in this case, the story is about the last chance to explore the bittersweet question of who a person really wants to be, or can be, in life.

Man on the Train stars two of Europe’s most popular performers in unexpected performances, which have drawn accolades at film festivals (among others, the film won the Audience Award for Best Film at the Venice Film Festival). Veteran leading man Jean Rochefort, known for his roles in some of France’s most popular sex farces and comedies, takes a poignant, thought-provoking turn as the charming retiree Manesquier who, at the end of his cautious, well-tailored life finds that he had swaggering cowboy dreams of grand adventure.

Meanwhile, French rock and roll star Johnny Hallyday, who is often referred to as the “French Elvis,” brings a comic charge to his portrait of a hardened bank robber disillusioned by the criminal life (and the dimwitted criminals with whom he must work), who discovers a long-repressed desire to settle down in an easy chair, live the easy life, even be loved, for the rest of his days.

Rochefort and Hallyday not only explore the thirst of their characters for a completely different fate, but also provide an affecting portrait of the mysterious nature of friendship, which so often unfolds in the face of envy and regret yet brings even the most disparate hearts and minds together in surprising ways.

A Paramount Classics presentation, Man on the Train is directed by Patrice Leconte from a screenplay by Claude Klotz. The producer is Philippe Carcassone and the cinematographer is Jean-Marie Drejou (Girl on the Bridge).
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PATRICE LECONTE AND
THE MAGIC OF THE UNLIKELY ENCOUNTER

A man passionately in love with the power of movies, Patrice Leconte is known for constantly reinventing his moviemaking style. He does so again with Man on the Train, which is at once more simple and more optimistic than his previous work and more directly examines the most basic existential questions of love, friendship, aging and the pursuit of impossible dreams. As he puts it: “In this film, I wanted something very different from my other films, something new -- a real feeling of heart and grace.”

Leconte’s films have ranged from costume dramas (the Oscar-nominated Ridicule) to black comedy (Monsieur Hire) to unconventional romance (The Hairdresser’s Husband, Girl on the Bridge). Still, they almost all share one thing in common. In each case, the action is sparked by a chance encounter that one way or another causes his characters to emerge with a more profound understanding of their own existence.

This theme comes even more to the fore in Man on the Train, which begins with a chance meeting between two men who, as Leconte explains it, “would be unlikely to have met if weren’t for the sorcery of a filmmaker and a screenwriter.” Once their encounter is put into motion, however, Milan and Manesquier affect one another more than they could ever have imagined.

In the beginning, Patrice Leconte’s vision for Man on the Train was sparked by the desire to put together two actors so divergent they are essentially yin and yang: Jean Rochefort and Johnny Hallyday. Leconte couldn’t think of two actors more contradictory in style and personality, and he loved the idea of watching honest emotions fly as they evolved from strangers to admirers to true friends not only on the screen but off it, as well.

Summarizes Leconte: “I believe part of what makes this story work so well is that it is just as much about the encounter between Jean Rochefort and Johnny Hallyday as it is about the encounter between the characters they play. The worlds of Rochefort and Hallyday are not supposed to get along and yet here they are, brought together.”

Once Leconte imagined the casting, the story began to unfold like a tapestry. He brought the idea to screenwriter Claude Klotz, who developed it further. When Leconte received the final screenplay, he was so stirred by it, that he shot it almost to the letter.

“Claude Klotz wrote such a beautifully simple story,” says Leconte. “What I found so moving was his ability to capture the human desire to experience a life we haven’t lived. I think we’re all disillusioned to one degree or another and we always want what life hasn’t given us. Manesquier and Milan are no different. It wouldn’t be as interesting if only one of them wanted the other’s life. But since each man dreams of becoming the other person, a certain complicity arises.”

The director specifically wanted the screenplay to capture a sense of heightened reality, but reality nonetheless. “A full exchange between the two men was never a viable solution,” he comments. “Jean Rochefort holding up a bank in a leather jacket while Johnny Hallyday passed the time of day with the gardener would have become ridiculous. After all, if you've been a little squirt all your life, you can't suddenly become a sort of Schwarzenegger. It's impossible.”

Instead, Leconte wanted to focus on what he calls a “possible dream.” He explains: “I'm wary of naturalism but I wanted the film to be sufficiently realistic for us to believe in the characters and truly be touched by them. A retired teacher who has practiced immobility for the last fifteen generations and who dreams of being a cowboy is a character we can believe in. And the fact that a bank robber who has traveled all over and taken every blow that life can bring should dream of settling down somewhere is just as credible. But you can't take those ideas to their full conclusion. Their dreams must be possible to be believed in.”

Ultimately, the screenplay for Man on the Train presented Leconte with something he was unused to: a twist ending that brings a measure of redemption and satisfaction to his character’s souls. “Many times, in my recent films, the characters seem to be on rails leading towards a fatal conclusion,” Leconte admits. “With this film, I do a sort of pirouette, and turn things around. I don’t think I’m likely go back to sad endings in the near future!”

He adds: “Originally, Manesquier and Milan both died, each in a different setting, at the same time. But, when I reread that ending, I felt a sort of weariness; once again, I was making a film that ended with the characters' death. Killing off your characters after using them is the easy way out. Nowadays, I feel life is too short to kill off characters in films! So I told Claude Klotz, ‘let's try not to kill off the characters completely.’ And, together, we came up with this slightly strange ending that is at least positive. It was important that Manesquier and Milan's dreams come true in some way.”
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MANESQUIER: JEAN ROCHEFORT

AS THE POET WITH COWBOY DREAMS

In his seventh film with director Patrice Leconte, actor Jean Rochefort takes on a role quite different from the nearly 80 film roles he has starred in before. Most recently, his long face and whimsical quality inspired Terry Gilliam to cast him as Don Quixote in Gilliam’s doomed film adaptation (recounted in the documentary Lost in La Mancha). Often, he has played policemen (as in his best known American film, Robert Altman’s Ready To Wear) or characters at the center of sex farces (as in the international hit Pardon Mon Affair).

But in Man On The Train, Rochefort is an endearingly gentle human being who feels he has taken the routine to an extreme. His life is so well organized, precise and peaceful, that he yearns to know what it would be like to go wild, to act on impulse, to experience spontaneous, unabashed adventure.

Rochefort was immediately drawn to the film’s themes of reflecting back on life and facing one’s regrets and lost dreams, which at the age of 72 held tremendous appeal for him. “The question of whether one would have liked to have led an entirely different life is a very meaningful subject, especially when you’re getting older,” he notes. “These two heroes, in the twilight of their lives, provide a mirror into our own reality and fantasies, into what one can dream of. I think it is a role that speaks to many people.”

The actor was able to relate to both Manesquier’s serenity and his yearning for adventure late in life. “I share a certain amount of his tranquil and sedentary sides,” he admits. “But from time to time, I am also hit with hurricanes of desire. I am probably somewhere between the two characters.” Most of all, Rochefort was ready to take a risk. “I don’t know if this is a privilege of maturity or not, but I am increasingly curious and daring in my work as an actor,” he notes.
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MILAN: JOHNNY HALLYDAY AS THE
BANK ROBBER WHO WOULD RATHER WEAR SLIPPERS

To play Milan, who arrives by train to rob a bank only to find himself reading poetry, playing school teacher and liking it, Patrice Leconte cast a man who is known more as an icon in France than as an actor: Johnny Hallyday. Hallyday rose to fame in France in the early 60s with a string of hit rock songs– and has gone on to become France’s most famous native rocker. Leconte found Hallyday’s hard-edged persona to be perfect for Milan, who is named after the Spaghetti Western character actor Thomas Milan.

“Johnny Hallyday comes to the film with a very powerful aura,” says Leconte. “When his character arrives, a disenchanted figure entering a deserted town with a gym bag, he brings with him everything Johnny’s rock ‘n roll personality entails. But more than that, during shooting, Johnny impressed me. In the scene with the schoolboy, he doesn't play it comic but sincere. It's the same when he tries on the slippers and says, ‘My life's all wrong.’ He is unfailingly sincere, and that captures this character.”

Leconte found himself repeatedly surprised by the nuances of Hallyday’s performance. “I loved working with him,” he says. “I felt as if we had already made ten films together. This complicity was founded on one magic word: trust. The idea of making this film with me delighted him, and he trusted me blindly.”

Also inspired by Hallyday’s performance was Jean Rochefort, who was not sure what to expect from this encounter between two such different human beings. Says Rochefort: “I found Johnny to be a very authentic person who really shows his vulnerability. Rather than bring the essence of a rock and roll star to the character, he brought more fragility, which was very impressive. He was intimidated at first and I made an effort to give him more confidence. That brought us closer.”

Indeed, Leconte purposefully let the two actors slowly dance around one another and figure each other out, just as Milan and Manesquier must in the story. “When they first met, they were each a little distant,” recalls Leconte. “But since we shot the scenes between them in chronological order, the film reveals the evolution of their relationship, using the fact that Johnny felt increasingly comfortable with Jean and Jean felt more and more esteem for Johnny and that they were becoming friends.”
As for Johnny Hallyday, his view of Milan is very much in keeping with the character’s taciturn nature. Hallyday says: “Milan is a character who does not speak much, and I am the same way. But there is one phrase perhaps that sums him up: ‘an absence of pity.’”

Although Hallyday and Rochefort are the center of attention in Man on the Train, one other character plays a pivotal role in their unfolding friendship: Manesquier’s mistress, Viviane, who is played by Isabelle Petit-Jacques, previously seen in Leconte’s Girl on the Bridge and Ridicule.

Says Leconte: “Opposite Hallyday and Rochefort, Isabelle Petit-Jacques played her part to perfection. The view of a third person acts like a drop of developer in a test-tube. Viviane says what she thinks, and her character serves to redefine Milan and Manesquier on the day before the robbery and the surgical operation. She is wrong about Milan when she says ‘all people like you ever do is stir up shit’ because Milan and Manesquier truly envy and admire one another. But the fact that she is wrong is what makes Viviane so moving.”

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A WESTERN IN PROVINCIAL FRANCE:
THE LOOK AND DESIGN OF MAN ON THE TRAIN

Known for his visual invention, Patrice Leconte imbues Man on the Train with the rough-hewn style of a Western dream, bringing a touch of magic to the disillusioned reality of Milan and Manesquier. The style of Man on the Train takes many of its cues from Spaghetti Westerns, using such typical conventions as visual simplicity, textural rawness and extension of time – but here they are used to a more emotional, rather than action-oriented, effect.

Although shot in Annonay, in the Rhone region of France, Leconte uses an iconography that gives the audience a sense of two doomed men meeting in a “ghost town.” To heighten the sense of nostalgia and masculine longing, he had cinematographer Jean-Marie Drejou use a de-saturated film stock that looks more like a 19th century daguerreotype than a modern image. Later, in the climactic scenes where the men’s dreams are “exchanged,” the colors shift again to a dreamy blue and aquamarine, opening the world up visually to new possibilities.

Leconte explains his concept: “In my films, I always like to have things off-key, to stylize ‘real life.’ It gets on my nerves when life is shown too precisely. I start the film very deliberately, with familiar images, Johnny Hallyday in this Western milieu and Jean Rochefort relaxing at home in the evening, but then I lead the audience towards something more surreal. I have always worked like that: lulling the audience into a false sense of security and then taking them somewhere completely elsewhere.”

Leconte also wanted to lend the film a sense of timelessness. “I strive to make films that are hard to situate within a specific period,” observes Leconte. “I want my films to allow audiences to escape to another world, to an undefined time where they take an interest in the characters’ lives rather than the context.”

Much of the film’s costume and color design was devoted to highlighting the disparities between the main characters, even as they grow stirringly closer. “I wanted every visual element to stress the difference between the two men,” Leconte states. “We felt Milan should have cold, metallic and bluish tones, while Manesquier is more the tobacco and velvet type. When they are together, these two aspects blend but when they are apart, each man recovers his own hues.”

To further illuminate and tie together the two characters’ dreams, Leconte turned his attention to the film’s sound, bringing in composer Pascal Estève who gave Milan and Manesquier each his own distinctive musical theme. For Milan, Estève used bluesy, Ry-Cooder style guitar twangs reminiscent of the whistling, hoof-beat themes from Westerns; and for Manesquier he used lyrical riffs drawn from Schubert. Then, for certain scenes, he created a unique effect by combining the two themes, the primal and the refined, into one.

“I told Pascal: Johnny Hallyday is Ry Cooder; Jean Rochefort is Schubert,” Leconte recalls. “I also told him: when the two are apart, they can each have their own music that accompanies them but when they are together, Ry Cooder has to play with Schubert.”

The soundtrack also blends physical sounds with the musical themes. “My sound editor, Jean Goudier, was amazingly inventive here,” says Leconte. “Once again, we needed the off-key aspect. The aim was to avoid naturalism and create a different world.”

Despite the emphasis on such artistry, throughout production Leconte’s focus was on attaining the greatest simplicity he has ever attempted, on stripping away any extraneous details and getting directly to the heart of the story between these two men who unexpectedly see their most fleeting dreams in one another’s lives.

Sums up Leconte: “I still love playing with cinema but I’ve learned to bring the most attention and care to the characters. Now I realize that I'm asking myself, ‘How can I be as simple as possible while still being exciting?’ I like that even the title of Man on the Train calls a spade a spade. It is a story about a man on a train, but the man who gets off the train in the beginning of the story isn’t the same one as at the end of it.”
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MAN ON THE TRAIN
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