Still riding the New Wave

Alain Robbe-Grillet never could tell a simple story. And, as Robin Buss discovered in Paris, even when discussing his new film, he's still giving little away

"I live in the age of Alain Robbe-Grillet," says the narrator of John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman, explaining why, though his story is set in the 19th century, he cannot adopt the conventions of the Victorian novel. In 1969, when the book was published, Robbe-Grillet was the "Pope" of the Nouveau Roman and the scriptwriter of Alain Resnais's notoriously mystifying movie, Last Year at Marienbad. Robbe-Grillet's own film, Trans-Europe Express, had recently been banned from British screens. Fowles could reasonably assume that his readers would have heard of him. Do we still live in the age of Robbe-Grillet?

Now 74, he is in London this week for the opening of his latest film, Un bruit qui rend fou (The Blue Villa), at the Institut Francais - the culmination of a retrospective of his work for the cinema. Given this opportunity to assess his achievement, one could argue that, if anything has changed, it is not Robbe-Grillet's importance. He holds an unchallenged position as one of the leading practitioners of the New Novel which questioned many basic assumptions of 19th-century fiction: notably, the convention of an omniscient narrator who creates a parallel universe in which character is fixed and events move chronologically along the path towards a satisfying conclusion.

The narrator in the Victorian novel, Fowles wrote, "may not know all, but he tries to pretend he does". The narrators in Robbe-Grillet's novels, on the other hand, are seldom to be relied upon and often contrive to know less than the reader.

After the New Novel came the New Wave. At a time when everyone in France seemed to be having a go at making movies, some of the New Novelists joined in; after all, they had long looked to popular art as a source of inspiration. So, in 1959, the director Alain Resnais turned to Marguerite Duras for the script of his first feature, Hiroshima, mon amour, and to Robbe-Grillet in 1961 for Last Year at Marienbad. But Robbe-Grillet was to be exceptional in achieving equal stature in both literature and film. As a writer and as a director, he is the creator of a distinctive and personal body of work. Though The Blue Villa is his first film for 12 years, it is unmistakably his, and, in fact, similar in theme and atmosphere to L'Immortelle, the first film he directed.

Even a writer who, in deference to theory, refuses to play God with his creations, may enjoy having complete control over his work and be temperamentally unsuited to the collaborative effort required to make a film; this could explain why a successful career in the two fields is rare. Making The Blue Villa, Robbe-Grillet took on a young co-director, Dmitri de Clercq, who was his student on a film studies course at New York University. De Clercq started on the film as assistant, but made such a large contribution that Robbe-Grillet insisted on giving him the co-director's credit. I met them at Robbe-Grillet's flat in Paris, and asked the writer if he found it easy working with others.

"Then you tell me something," he replied. "Would you find it easy to make a film all by yourself? Film is so much a matter of teamwork that I'm surprised you bother to ask." Of course, he knew that this wasn't my question, his answer implying that there was no possibility of his not making films; in any case, "I'm not a professional writer, either. I'm an agronomist." Robbe-Grillet trained in the 1940s and worked as a research biologist in the tropics before writing his first novel. As far as collaboration was concerned, he admitted that he had found it frustrating at the start, when he was making L'Immortelle, especially as the crew were experienced professionals, who knew much more about the technical side than he did and believed in doing things by the book - the book which, like other directors at the time, Robbe-Grillet was interested in rewriting. The cameraman insisted on artificial lighting "to compensate". At one point, when the main character is looking into the street from a darkened room, you can see his shadow on the inside of the Venetian blind. The very distinguished lady in charge of continuity on Marienbad kept asking Robbe-Grillet to tell her if a scene was situated "this year, or last": she needed to know, she said, to decide the style of the dresses, and refused to accept that the film revolved around such uncertainties - whether an event was taking place in present reality, or in a character's memory or imagination.

After that, as far as possible, Robbe-Grillet picked his own crews and entrusted them with a creative role. "I decided that people who were working with me themselves had to invent." He gave up using a detailed shooting script and began to involve everyone in the process: "any technician who's interested in the film can make suggestions". The making of The Blue Villa, which was financed by Dmitri's father, is a story of happy accidents: the Greek location, chosen when it became clear that Cambodia would be too expensive; the preservation of elements from the original Asian setting, such as the game of mah-jong and the Vietnamese boat, which help to give the story its timeless, mythical feel; the horror film elements, which Dmitri contributed; and the use of direct, rather than post-synchronised sound.

Writing and cinema, he says, are things that you learn how to do by working with the raw materials; and he is clearly just as interested in the codes of cinema as he is in those of literature. This fascination with narrative conventions is one of the most obvious links between the two sides of his work. The Blue Villa is set on a Greek island and is haunted by the return of a mysterious stranger, who is explicitly compared to the Flying Dutchman; and, as in Robbe-Grillet's other fictions, there are recurrent elements that help to structure the narrative. The events are recounted through a variety of narrators, but we are warned early in the film not to rely too much on any of them: "Let's not forget that it was night time," says a voice-over, while the screen shows broad daylight.

There is an element of gratuitous fun in all this - as in Robbe-Grillet's extraordinarily virulent hostility, even to some who admire his earlier work. "In the days when I was literary editor with Editions de Minuit and writing the cover copy for novels," he says, in a digression about critics, "I used to summarise the plot in the blurb, adding some utterly absurd things, but they used unfailingly to reappear in the reviews. Cinema critics are even worse."

He sits back on the large sofa, in the Paris flat that he uses when he is not at home in Normandy or travelling abroad. The floor is piled with books in the blue and white covers of Editions de Minuit, the walls are sparsely decorated with prints and drawings. Outside in the hall is a painting by Magritte. It is hung above a table on which there is a woman's high-heeled shoe - you then notice it is one of the props from the painting. Robbe-Grillet inhabits an area of French culture that has never been entirely naturalised in England, containing elements of surrealism, the eroticism of De Sade and Georges Bataille, and the playfulness of Raymond Queneau.

Predictably, perhaps, he finds British culture insular. "There is no love lost between France and England," he remarks, "and you can feel it particularly among ordinary people. Not so much among intellectuals. It's incredible the stuff that is fed to the English who read the tabloid press; a contempt for France, that doesn't have its equivalent here." However, there is a general decline, on both sides, of interest in literature: "In the days when people found me shocking, they wrote huge articles to explain that I was an unreadable idiot. But at least they wrote them. That was the time when people took notice of the literary pages of Le Monde. Nowadays, the tendency is to make `airport literature' respectable. You find an open display of anti-intellectualism, illiteracy and stupidity. It may not last for ever. Anyway, I'm not complaining, because I had the good fortune to write novels and make films at a time when people were aware of that sort of thing. And I still arouse some media interest: people will watch a documentary about me, even if they won't read my books."

At one point, I mentioned John Fowles's observation that he lived in "the age of Robbe-Grillet". The guru smiled. "Of course," he said, "you must allow for the fact that Fowles meant it partly as a joke."

Robbe-Grillet introduces `The Blue Villa' at the Institut Francais, Queensbury Pl, SW7, tomorrow, 7.30pm. `Last Year at Marienbad' is showing on Saturday, 7.30pm