My sweet baby girl
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Nadja - André Breton
Cover of the 1928 Gallimard edition of Nadja, collaged over by Marcel Mariën, 1938.
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I know that, from this film, you ended up rewriting Lynch’s adaptation of Fantômas. What are your memories of this experience?
I was flattered that Mary and David asked me to take that on. It was an illustrious, potentially massive project originally brought to David by Gaumont, with Depardieu likely to play Inspector Juve. David’s initial swing at it was a fairly direct and unquestioning transcription of the paperback book, an English translation that I’d read when it came out in 1986, from the original serialized Fantômas. (It has an introduction by John Ashbery, wonderfully enough.) But to get to your question: David approved my idea to slide the time period forward just a little, into the late 1920s, to get an overlay of surrealist aesthetics, the look and feel of Man Ray photographs.
And I rushed at the assignment, enlisting a particularly agile and resourceful screenwriter friend named Lloyd Fonvielle, who is no longer with us. We came up with something we were both excited by, with impressive speed, only to have Mary Sweeney explain to us, simply, that David had changed course. He was interested in telling stories that were about now, set in the present and only the present. He never made another period piece. A few years down the road, Alex Proyas somehow got ahold of the Fantômas script and seemed primed to make a grab for it. But nothing came of that either.
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It’s definitely neat to have seen the writer of Nadja only be possibly said to be an enabler of her mental condition through not wanting to call her some crazy lady at first glance in the face of her eccentric behaviors but through trying to peek into her inner world. he felt fascinated by her “powers” and then, once it turned out she had to be admitted to an asylum and those abilities were truly not real, he not only disapproved of the conditions in such a place but also wondered about craziness as a concept. I haven’t looked at surrounding other people’s analysis of the book yet, I just liked that part because even amidst other biases sneaking in in two scenes I can recall, well there were some really great viewpoint on mental health, a surprising antipsych sentiment and humanising patients written on the other side of the balance I would say. It can quite stand out for that as well. He’s very endeared by Nadja and her unusual behavior, and his compassion went deeper than that when it came to mental health. It’s cute that her drawings were included raw. I didn’t search up stuff in the book yet, but it’s sweet she even had “predicted” he were to write a book about her and he did it for real if Yes. awesome
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rewatching wwdits and I still think laszlo matching his hair to nadja’s is the most romantic thing ever
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me: *trying to take a picture of Nadja being cute*
Laszlo: hey. HEY. there must be some mistake here- HEYYYYY. hey you must be mistaken actually because i Laszlo am- hey- i Laszlo am right here and you are looking over there?? where i am not. fix this
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oh wait! Laszlo was around 5 months old when i got him in May of 2022, and Nadja was 7 months when i got her that July! so happy Updating The Ferrets’ Ages To 4 Years Old In My Tumblr Bio Day to my beloved goobers!
look how much they’ve changed 😭
