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Once Elvis Costello said that whenever he's writing a song he asks himself: is it as tough as Hank Williams? Meaning: is it as ruthlessly pared down, as direct, as unflinching in its gaze at aspects of life I might feel more comfortable ignoring? Young filmmakers might ask themselves: is it as tough as Bresson? –Martin Scorsese, in Robert Bresson (edited by James Quandt, Cinematheque Ontario, 1998.)

In October 2007 the work of the late French maestro Robert Bresson (1901-1999) played in retrospective at the National Film Theatre in London, the third such tribute the NFT has presented in the last twenty years. Bresson is a director endlessly worthy of such revisits, though his oeuvre amounts to a mere 13 features over a 50-year career. Bresson was always keen to work, but very often frustrated over funding, even within the highly subsidized French system.

Best-known of Bresson's productions are his three masterpieces of the Fifties–Diary of a Country Priest (1951), A Man Escaped (1956) and Pickpocket (1959), all perfectly-realised studies of the travails and confinements of solitary men. Add The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962) to this trio and you have what Paul Schrader identified as Bresson's 'prison cycle': each film concerns the struggle of the spirit against incarceration in literal or figurative cages. Incredibly, we may contend that Bresson's later films just got better, albeit darker. Au Hasard, Balthasar (1965), a parable about a maltreated donkey, presents a panoply of human vice. Mouchette (1967) and Une Femme Douce (1969) are utterly implacable accounts of suicide. Lancelot du Lac (1974) takes Camelot as the model of a universe bereft of honour. In Le Diable, Probablement (1977), anomic youths are appalled by the bleak wastes of consumer capitalism, the garbage-dump we have made of the planet. And L'Argent (1983) is an essay on the evil of money, our 'visible God'. This, Bresson's final film, he adapted from a short story by Tolstoy known in English as 'The False Note': said note, circulated as a schoolboy prank, leads to the imprisonment of an innocent man, who is set on an ineluctable path towards criminality.

Bresson's finical style developed over thirty years and was summarised in his widely-read volume of maxims, Notes on the Cinematographer. He renounced the use of professional actors and musical score, and he disdained pretty picture-making in favour of attention to plain images, edited with a unique rhythm, and augmented above all by descriptive sound. As Schrader once fretted in an otherwise adulatory review of Pickpocket for the L.A. Free Press, 'I'm afraid I haven't convinced you of Bresson's greatness, simply told you that he hates the things we enjoy most.' But in James Quandt's compendium on Bresson cited above, Bernardo Bertolucci is beautifully lucid on the topic of why this director both daunts and delights filmgoers: 'The name 'Bresson' has become a pure word, an entity, a kind of film manifesto for poetic rigour. Bressonian meant for me and my friends the ultimate, moral, unreachable, sublime, punishing cinematic tension. Punishing because his movies are strong sensual experiences with no relief–apart from the aesthetic relief, itself a devastating pleasure.'

What follows are extracts from an interview with Bresson by Michel Ciment about L'Argent, originally conducted for Ciment's Positif magazine. It was reprinted in Projections 9 (Faber and Faber, 1999), a special issue celebrating French cinema in association with Positif, edited by Ciment and translated by Pierre Hodgson.

MICHEL CIMENT: People always refer to asceticism in connection with your film-making. It's become a kind of clichÉ . But what strikes me is the vigour.

ROBERT BRESSON: Vigour comes from precision. Precision is vigorous. When I am working poorly, I am imprecise. Precision is another form of poetry.

MC: Vigour and speed. Your screenplay, directed by someone else, would have made a 135-minute film, not an 85-minute film.

RB: That is a question of composition. I use the word 'composition' as opposed to the word 'construction'. I listen to my films as I make them, the way a pianist listens to the sonata he is performing, and I make the picture conform to sound rather than the other way round. Transitions from one picture to another, from one scene to the next, are like shifts in a musical scale. Our eyesight occupies a large proportion of our brain, perhaps as much as two thirds. Yet our eyes are not so powerful a means of imagination–not so varied and profound–as our ears. And so, as imagination is a critical element in any creative process, how could one not give priority to the sound aspect?

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Once Elvis Costello said that whenever he's writing a song he asks himself: is it as tough as Hank Williams? Meaning: is it as ruthlessly pared down, as direct, as unflinching in its gaze at aspects of life I might feel more comfortable ignoring? Young filmmakers might ask themselves: is it as tough as Bresson? –Martin Scorsese, in Robert Bresson (edited by James Quandt, Cinematheque Ontario, 1998.)

In October 2007 the work of the late French maestro Robert Bresson (1901-1999) played in retrospective at the National Film Theatre in London, the third such tribute the NFT has presented in the last twenty years. Bresson is a director endlessly worthy of such revisits, though his oeuvre amounts to a mere 13 features over a 50-year career. Bresson was always keen to work, but very often frustrated over funding, even within the highly subsidized French system.

Best-known of Bresson's productions are his three masterpieces of the Fifties–Diary of a Country Priest (1951), A Man Escaped (1956) and Pickpocket (1959), all perfectly-realised studies of the travails and confinements of solitary men. Add The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962) to this trio and you have what Paul Schrader identified as Bresson's 'prison cycle': each film concerns the struggle of the spirit against incarceration in literal or figurative cages. Incredibly, we may contend that Bresson's later films just got better, albeit darker. Au Hasard, Balthasar (1965), a parable about a maltreated donkey, presents a panoply of human vice. Mouchette (1967) and Une Femme Douce (1969) are utterly implacable accounts of suicide. Lancelot du Lac (1974) takes Camelot as the model of a universe bereft of honour. In Le Diable, Probablement (1977), anomic youths are appalled by the bleak wastes of consumer capitalism, the garbage-dump we have made of the planet. And L'Argent (1983) is an essay on the evil of money, our 'visible God'. This, Bresson's final film, he adapted from a short story by Tolstoy known in English as 'The False Note': said note, circulated as a schoolboy prank, leads to the imprisonment of an innocent man, who is set on an ineluctable path towards criminality.

Bresson's finical style developed over thirty years and was summarised in his widely-read volume of maxims, Notes on the Cinematographer. He renounced the use of professional actors and musical score, and he disdained pretty picture-making in favour of attention to plain images, edited with a unique rhythm, and augmented above all by descriptive sound. As Schrader once fretted in an otherwise adulatory review of Pickpocket for the L.A. Free Press, 'I'm afraid I haven't convinced you of Bresson's greatness, simply told you that he hates the things we enjoy most.' But in James Quandt's compendium on Bresson cited above, Bernardo Bertolucci is beautifully lucid on the topic of why this director both daunts and delights filmgoers: 'The name 'Bresson' has become a pure word, an entity, a kind of film manifesto for poetic rigour. Bressonian meant for me and my friends the ultimate, moral, unreachable, sublime, punishing cinematic tension. Punishing because his movies are strong sensual experiences with no relief–apart from the aesthetic relief, itself a devastating pleasure.'

What follows are extracts from an interview with Bresson by Michel Ciment about L'Argent, originally conducted for Ciment's Positif magazine. It was reprinted in Projections 9 (Faber and Faber, 1999), a special issue celebrating French cinema in association with Positif, edited by Ciment and translated by Pierre Hodgson.

MICHEL CIMENT: People always refer to asceticism in connection with your film-making. It's become a kind of clichÉ . But what strikes me is the vigour.

ROBERT BRESSON: Vigour comes from precision. Precision is vigorous. When I am working poorly, I am imprecise. Precision is another form of poetry.

MC: Vigour and speed. Your screenplay, directed by someone else, would have made a 135-minute film, not an 85-minute film.

RB: That is a question of composition. I use the word 'composition' as opposed to the word 'construction'. I listen to my films as I make them, the way a pianist listens to the sonata he is performing, and I make the picture conform to sound rather than the other way round. Transitions from one picture to another, from one scene to the next, are like shifts in a musical scale. Our eyesight occupies a large proportion of our brain, perhaps as much as two thirds. Yet our eyes are not so powerful a means of imagination–not so varied and profound–as our ears. And so, as imagination is a critical element in any creative process, how could one not give priority to the sound aspect?

When I came to make my first full-length feature, Les Anges du Péché (1943), right at the start of shooting I was appalled. I had actresses playing nuns, and I said, 'If that's the way it is, I'm quitting, the movie is over.' Their delivery and gestures were all wrong. Every night, the producer sent me a telegram asking me to ensure they acted. Every night, there were tears and lamentation. They were delightful ladies and they did their best to comply with what I wanted. And even then, it was my ear, rather than my eye, which hated what they were doing. The intonation, the modulations were harder to alter than their way of moving.

Equally, I was very slow to notice that mysteriously invisible orchestral scores were contrary to the essence of film. I was slow to realize that sound defines space on film. A voice treated like a sound effect seems to give the screen an extra dimension. People who experimented with 3-D cinema were barking up the wrong tree. The third dimension is sound. It gives the screen depth, it makes characters seem tangible. It makes it appear that one might walk amongst them.

"People who experimented with 3-D cinema were barking up the wrong tree. The third dimension is sound."

MC: Is your interest in sound the reason why there is so little depth of field in your films?

RB: Maybe–but also because I use only one lens. I like to stand the camera at the same distance as the eye in real life; which is why, in my films, the background is sometimes out of focus–which is unimportant, because, once again, it is the sound which gives a sense of distance and perspective.

MC: You no longer choose your 'models' [non-professional cast members] for their moral resemblance to your characters.

RB: So long as there is nothing in their physical appearance, in their voice or their way of expressing themselves, the decision is quickly taken. People are so full of contradictions, of oddities, the kind Dostoyevsky almost turned into a system. I enjoy working with strangers, they surprise me.

I have noticed that some directors choose non-professional actors and then get them to act. But you saw that in L'Argent no one acts. That's why it seems so fast. What they say is not what matters...

I am never disappointed by my models. They always give me something new, that I would not have been able to think up and which suits my purpose. In any case, I believe in accidents, happy accidents...

MC: In your Notes on the Cinematographer, you write in big letters 'ORDER AND DISORDER AT A RESPECTFUL DISTANCE', which relates to your method in that you prepare everything very meticulously, and then leave room for accident.

RB: Shake the tree, as Charlie Chaplin used to say. Not too much, in my opinion. You need a bit of disorder, because it is real…

MC: All your films are about a collision between predestination and free-will, between chance and necessity.

RB: Which is how we are. Three times out of four, chance governs us. And our will is absorbed by predestination...

MC: You've never used a writer, except for your first two films which were written by Giraudoux and Cocteau, no less!

RB: I owe them a great deal. Afterwards, I was in a position to be sole craftsman. But at first, I had to find help. Giraudoux worked with me and I was overawed, like a schoolboy. I'd say, 'It ought to be something like this', and he would obey–he worked terribly fast. I'd laboriously written three quarters of the dialogue for Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1946) when I asked Cocteau for help. Then Cocteau solved all my problems in an hour and a half, scribbling on the corner of a tablecloth in his apartment.

MC: You emphasize what differentiates your film-making and theatre. But you, who are a painter and were born to paint, do not believe that there is any kind of competition between cinema and fine art.

RB: I love theatre. But I do not believe that cinema ought to be photographing theatre, nor is it a synthesis of all the other arts. I like to quote Stendhal, who said, 'The other arts taught me the art of writing.' That's what I tell young people. One must acquire an eye and an ear.

MC: Your pictures have a strong plastic quality but they never put one in mind of painting. Are you not concerned that cinema might be contaminated by painting?

RB: No. If I ever think of painting, it is as a means of escape. I mean escaping picture postcards. That is not the reason I forego my painterly eye when composing pictures for films. You will have noticed that in L'Argent there are a series of close-ups whose only function is to add sensation. When the father, a piano-player, drops a glass, his daughter is in the kitchen. Her dustpan and sponge are ready. I do not then enter the room, but cut immediately to a close shot which I like very much, the wet floor with the sound of the sponge. That is music, rhythm, sensation. I am going to show a man entering a room, like in the theatre, or in most films. Only a door handle turning. You will have noticed, too, that the protagonist is not immediately described. First his legs are seen, then his back, then a three-quarter profile, then suddenly, walking alone, he reveals himself...

When I started out, with Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, I was after something different, a kind of coherence, that's all. Nowadays, I show a basketful of potatoes as an old lady picks them, not her face. There's no need, because immediately after we see her doing something much more significant, when she stands up and is about to leave.

MC: You say you are a jolly pessimist, but your recent films are more sombre than Pickpocket or A Man Escaped, which culminated in a kind of jubilation.

RB: I am sorry that in L'Argent I was unable to linger on Yvon's redemption, on the idea of redemption, but the rhythm of the film, at that stage, would not stand for it. Perhaps I do see the world more sombrely than I used to, unintentionally. There is something to that.

MC: You rarely commission film music, preferring classical composers like Mozart, Lully, Monteverdi, Schubert or Bach.

RB: That is of no importance now that I have completely done away with atmospheric music in my films. It took me a long time to see how nefarious it was, particularly if it is glorious music. Immediately, it makes the images seem flat; whereas a sound effect will give them depth.

MC: Which of your films are you most satisfied with?

RB: I don't know. I never see them again, or almost never. I got joy from all of them, while they were being made. Some, like Pickpocket, were made fast and easily. I like the way it moves, and the way one scene moves into the next. Au Hasard, Balthazar has got some providential moments in it, as well as some flaws. It takes a series of unplanned, mad coincidences to make the impossible come right. In Quatre Nuits d'un Rêveur, I like the theme: 'Love is illusion, so let's get on with it!' That's hardly pessimistic. But no film is perfect.

MC: Can you picture your film before you make it?

RB: Yes, and I carry on picturing it and hearing it all the time I am shooting it, as it comes to life. I do not aim for purity, nor to reproduce the ascetic quality of the screenplay. That is not the point. The trouble is that one cannot conceive of things in disorder. One cannot see a single leaf on a tree. In order to gain an impression of something, one must let one's spirit strip away all that prevents one from grasping it. If an image is over-burdened, it will not follow on smoothly from the previous image. There must be a notion of simplicity.

MC: Which stage do you like best? Writing? Shooting? Or cutting?

RB: The hardest is writing on paper. You sit there between four walls, filled with doubt... Now, I've changed my method. I write as I walk down the street, or swimming in the sea. Then I take notes. During a shoot the trouble is that you have to move fast. The crew is astonished that sometimes I may have to stop for ten or fifteen minutes to have a think. Years ago, in Italy, where oddly I never managed to make a film, there were some directors, I remember, who would say–and no one thought this was odd–'I am not inspired today, I'm off.' Wonderful. But if I pace up and down, if I change angles, everyone seems surprised. All because cinema lives off pre-production. Everything is settled in advance. Everyone knows what angle has got to be shot, in what corner of the studio, because it usually is in a studio. And the result is a mish-mash of realism and the lack of it. The magic is in the cutting-room, when suddenly images and sounds align. Life comes to life. From start to finish, films are a series of births and resurrections. What lies dead on paper is reborn during the shoot, and dead images are reborn in the cutting-room. That is our reward...