Grandpa Makes Resistance is not a comedy: “It’s a realistic and comic adventure film”
In 1983, Christian Clavier, Jean-Marie Poiré and their friends presented Papy… in Première.
Grandpa resists celebrates its 40th anniversary this week. Jean-Marie Poiré’s comedy with a phenomenal cast (Christian Clavier, Jacques Villeret, Michel Galabru, Jacqueline Maillan, Gérard Jugnot, Martin Lamotte, Pauline Lafont, Thierry Lhermitte, etc.) brought together more than 4 million spectators in cinemas in 1983 . A comedy, really? At the time, part of the team posed on the cover of First and detailed the creation of the film, described as “realistic and comic adventure film” by its authors Christian Clavier, Martin Lamotte and Jean-Marie Poiré.
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The trio explained to Marc Esposito and Martine Moriconi that they had the idea for the project a few years earlier, but that the action scenes would have cost so much that they initially preferred to keep only a few passages to adapt them for the theater . Before the film, there was the play, which was a hit in 1982 and intrigued producer Christian Fechner, who liked their concept so much that he agreed to invest in its adaptation. “The play is actually just an episode of the film, the one set in the cellar, which must now last 7 to 8 minutes”explained the director. “Everything that we couldn’t show because we were in the theater, we made the audience imagine it, Lamotte then confirmed. In the film, we were finally able to show the adventure, the action.”
Christian Clavier and his friends then surrounded themselves with talented technicians (Robert Alazraki –Santa Claus is trash, The Glory of my Father– in the photo, Willy Holt –Is Paris burning?, Goodbye children– to the sets, for example), which were responsible for reconstituting the atmosphere of the 1940s in a spectacular way. They also called on their star friends for more or less important roles, but all striking. “It was Fechner who, one day, said to us: ‘But if you want to find the side of Is Paris Burning? or The Longest Day, even the very small roles must be played by known actors .”
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On Form, Grandpa resists therefore did not lack ambition. Nor in substance, as Poiré modestly explained: “Papy… is much more a film about the vision of the resistance that we have today than a film about the resistance. We are from a generation which only knows the war of 1940 through a slew of bad films which, all of them, were only imitations of two or three masterpieces of the genre. We preferred to make a masterpiece by imitating these bad films!”
Lamotte and Clavier, for their part, insisted on the qualities of their characters, which “have ambitions of courage in the face of the Germans (even if) they do not live up to their ambitions. (…) The Bourdelles are resistance fighters. Simply, because we are in a comic film, they are clumsy resistance fighters. Which ultimately makes them perhaps more human, and more real, than in a certain number of other films about the resistance! The director’s last words? “We didn’t make a comedy film to make another comedy film, but because we find that comedy films and comedies are more intelligent than dramas.” Grandpa… would therefore be a comedy, ultimately.
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