Bertrand Tavernier: Apologise? No way

Bertrand Tavernier has aroused even more criticism than usual with a new film about French cinema under the Nazis. But, says Roger Clarke, the director seems to be enjoying the fight

Bertrand Tavernier is the most learned and sophisticated of French film directors, indeed the best director in France, according to his friend Martin Scorsese. But even the famously articulate Tavernier is having trouble defending his new film Laissez-passer, a movie which though formulated as "an act of friendship" has lost him friends and rallied all his shrillest critics against him.

His crime is simply to have made a three-hour film about the Second World War – specifically, the everyday business of French cinema in Paris under Nazi rule – which dares to introduce ambiguity into the potent subject of Vichy France and the French Resistance, gaily traversing whole expanses of art and treachery with its monumental cast of 139 speaking parts. There's another reason why that bible of French cinéastes, Cahiers du Cinema, is frothing at the mouth against its least grateful son: not only has Tavernier gone against the official Truffaut-delineated New Wave line abhorring the German-produced footling movies of the war years (so many of them were costume dramas to avoid censorship rules); he has even dared to a include a comic tribute to the English director Michael Powell, whom Cahiers with a classic Gallic shrug and many dismissive waves of the hand famously ignored for years. As Truffaut liked to chuckle over his Gitanes and eau-de-vie, the idea of cinema and the British are simply not compatible bedfellows.

Laissez-passer has a complicated genesis, which I'd better briefly explain. After working as an assistant-director for Jean-Pierre Melville in 1961, aged 20, and being scalded by the experience, Tavernier retreated into the world of PR for 10 years ("we worked more like film buffs than normal press agents") where he busily promoted films by Kazan, Losey, Ford and Walsh and wrote striking reviews too for Positif and, yes, even Cahiers du Cinema. However, in 1973, he was tempted back into the foundry of le septième art itself by directing a film with Philippe Noiret called The Watchmaker of St Paul, when he hired two retired wartime writers to write for him, one of whom was called Jean Aurenche. It is the same Jean Aurenche, and another screenwriter, Jean Devaivre, who form the basis for the story of Laissez-passer, which shows the struggle of French film-makers to help the Resistance, while at the same time working for a German film company directly answerable to that well-known film buff Goebbels. (The latter, of course, in diverting troops from the front line to act as extras in a pet movie project, proved himself the first man in history who would rather make a movie than win a war).

It's a superbly awkward and brave subject for a French film-maker. But all the same, the criticisms of Tavernier have been legion. Some claim that the film makes a case for the "collaborationist" Henri-Georges Clouzot and his film Le Corbeau and others condemn the insult of featuring a despised Vichy official, who is actually a secret Resistance operative. The water has been further muddied by a damaging falling out with Jean Devaivre himself, now 90. Devaivre – once so tearfully grateful to Tavernier for reviving his tarnished reputation – has in his dotage demanded a million euros in payment for the film and detailed many of his criticisms for the benefit of Tavernier's enemies, mostly on the level of misrepresenting the flat he lived in wartime Paris and not decorating it correctly. It should have been art deco. It should have had white walls. ("It would have looked like a set!" counters Tavernier). Devaivre says the only reason he didn't ask for money before was because he thought Tavernier was making a documentary about him.

"I say at the beginning of the film it is freely adapted, because I wanted to be free," contends Tavernier, with his usual expressive gestures, when I meet him in London to discuss the movie. "There are certain things you cannot fool with – the spirit of resistance, of both Aurenche and Devaivre – and their spirit of courage. Devaivre said to me that even when his wife was arrested by the Nazis, he was staunch, and never once doubted his role. And I said, well yes, but I am more interested by someone in doubt. It is closer to me. I really don't want to be a director who is right all the time but I wanted to represent the drama as I think it was: it was 1942 and people didn't know that Germany would be defeated for sure, and that doubt was there in their eyes. The acts of resistance were mostly fragmentary."

Tavernier, one senses, relishes a jolly good scrap. His recent history is full of them. His rather fleshy face and old-fashioned glasses may give him the air of a slightly superannuated Swedish journalist but his mind is as sharp as ever, and his belly still commendably empty. What's he been banging on about recently? There's a massive falling out of love with American films – "atrocious, they are wiping out world history". There's the business of his documentary about people on hunger strike over immigration and ID papers, which has been turned down by TV channels in France for being "too political". He's lately been quite vocal about Hollywood and the Academy for failing to apologise for the 1950s blacklist while giving special Oscars to McCarthyite stooges like Elia Kazan. On a US paper's criticism that you need a PhD in French film studies to understand Laissez-passer, he says to me: "It's a simple idea: how can you work for a German company without compromising yourself? It's very simple. I say to the American critic, just replace the German element with Senator McCarthy and everything will be clear!"

Then there are his recent well-publicised attacks on the French government for allowing the key film-producing company Canal+ to be wrecked by venture capitalists, and a separate feud with the Education Minister over his last feature It All Starts Today, detailing the parlous state of French schools in the inner cities. It's all good stuff, it just happens to have earned him lots of enemies.

The English cinematic genius Michael Powell remains a kind of friend and guardian angel, especially in Laissez-passer. "Powell is my master," he smiles genially. "I thought of Powell in some of the characters." He mentions the round-trip Devaivre once made to Blighty, dramatised in the film with a wonderfully surreal touch, flying in and out in a single day from under the noses of the Germans and liaising with an English officer in England. This officer is played by Tim Pigott-Smith, and Tavernier says he's modelled on Powell.

"Powell said he worked for the army from time to time and so I thought, why would an officer not be like Powell, Francophile and speaking French? I love the British humour of the period: Colonel Blimp. In a way, the Second World War was the moment when British cinema reached a moment of very high quality, under not dissimilar conditions to those in France."

The real truth of French cinema in the wartime years was that it set up French cinema for postwar success, with the Vichy government banning foreign competition, setting up the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques (IDHEC), creating a new secure financial footing for the industry and introducing box-office control. But Tavernier remains especially fascinated by the little-known character of the German producer Alfred Greven, who defied Goebbels' edicts and refused to arrest key personnel who were jews and communists. "He died in 1972 after working for some time on German TV, but no journalist, no historian, ever interviewed him, despite his having run French cinema for four years."

As we finish the interview I don't get the feeling that Tavernier is especially bothered by the turn of events round his movie, and the controversies it has aroused. He's made his homage to his friends (and to his father, a Lyons wartime magazine publisher targeted by Vichy), even if his friends don't appreciate it. He's raised an important subject in recent French history, the nourishing nature of its cinema during a period of acute shame (as the film itself describes it). If a film-maker can't take on such subjects without the grandees of French culture coming down on his head, then French culture is in a pretty bad way.

'Laissez-passer' is released on 8 November