Claude Miller has always been part of cinema’s world, whether as a film lover, as Robert Bresson’s, Jean-Luc Godard’s or Jaques Demy’s assistant, as François Truffaut’s production manager and, finally, as a director.
Garde à vue (1981), the film that witnessed the meeting of two great figureheads of French cinema - Michel Serrault et Lino Ventura –, remains his greatest public success. He is also known as the director of L’Effrontée, the truthful reflection of a whole generation of teenage girls, and for La Classe de neige, awarded the Special Prize of the jury at the 1998 Cannes festival.
Claude Miller is amongst those filmmakers who learnt their art by watching other directors’ movies. Constituted to counter the constraints of the established system, the Nouvelle Vague received a lot of media attention. This was not the case for the directors of Miller’s generation.
Through these interviews, several crucial decades of the French cinema are thus revisited, that have often failed to attract the attention of the historians and theorists of the cinema in spite of their significance. These discussions also allow us to immerse ourselves in the unique universe of a creator whose obsession with the ambiguity of human nature has generated a varied and corpus of important works including La Meilleure Façon de marcher, Mortelle randonnée, La Petite Voleuse , Le Sourire and the forthcoming Un secret (with Patrick Bruel, Cécile de France, Julie Depardieu et Ludivine Sagnier).
Miller is interviewed by Claire Vassé, former critique for Positif who also produced and presented « Le Cinéma l’après-midi » on France Culture. In 2006, she published Corps amoureux, a series of conversations with Catherine Breillat (Denoël). Her first novel, Bientôt la bête sera morte, was published in 2006 (Le Seuil).