Guess who's not coming to dinner?

French auteur Bertrand Tavernier always wanted to make an American movie. Then he went to Hollywood - and came up against lawyers, producers and a lead actor who refused to eat. Geoffrey Macnab reports
Bertrand Tavernier
'I have the right to do what pleases me' - Bertrand Tavernier. Photograph: Sarah Lee

In almost every Bertrand Tavernier movie, there is a scene showing the main character eating. They are his trademark. Philippe Noiret, the doleful-faced French star of many Tavernier movies, was always happy to have a nibble. In Tavernier's 1974 debut, The Watchmaker of St Paul, Noiret is first seen attacking a salad. "I love onion because it gives you good breath," he says. "That's the benefit of being single. You can eat onions."

Sadly, no dinner scene will feature in Tavernier's new film, In the Electric Mist - for Tommy Lee Jones, its big star, is no trencherman. "I could not do the dinner scene because Tommy Lee Jones does not like to eat on the screen," Tavernier says, with evident regret. His working relationship with Jones, it seems, wasn't always smooth. "Tommy Lee Jones is one of the greatest actors I have seen or worked with. He is very intelligent and educated. When you say 'Action!', he is great." And before that moment? Tavernier pauses. "It varies." Another pause. "Let's say that I love Philippe Noiret."

The truth is that In the Electric Mist has not been a good experience for Tavernier all round. A biggish-budget US film with a major star, adapted from a novel by his beloved crimewriter James Lee Burke, the movie is about a detective hunting a serial killer in America's deep south. For a French auteur who has always idolised US cinema, it has been a chastening experience. Tavernier wanted to do the film, he says, because of his admiration for Burke. "He has a special voice among the film noir writers - if I had been able to transpose it to France, I would have." He was disappointed, to say the least, with what ensued.

Although he relished collaborating with actors such as John Goodman, Ned Beatty and Mary Steenburgen, he clearly disliked working with Jones, though he will not be drawn any further. He will say, though, that he "found everything more difficult than working in France". He was especially startled by the "domination" of lawyers. To compound things, he and the producers had serious differences over the edit, and he had to suffer the very Hollywood indignity of having it taken out of his hands. He tells me, though, the film is now in a version he is not unhappy with, and should be released this year.

Right now, however, Tavernier is remembering happier times. He is sitting in a cramped, shabby room in the Hotel Normandy in Paris. This was where he stayed while making 'Round Midnight, his 1986 film about a drink-soaked tenor sax player adrift in Paris. Tavernier knows (or knew) every significant figure in French film history. A critic and a publicist before he was a film-maker, his extraordinary range of acquaintances stretched from François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard to Howard Hawks and Sam Fuller.

In theory, Tavernier is here to talk about his own work: five of his best-known films have just been released on DVD in the UK for the first time. However, he is far keener to riff away about his many pet enthusiasms and bugbears. In the Electric Mist certainly isn't the first time Tavernier has adapted a US thriller. One of his best, Coup de Torchon (1981), was based on Jim Thompson's pulp novel Pop. 1280. With his usual mix of perversity and originality, Tavernier relocated the action from small-town America to a French colony in 1930s Senegal. "It was the first African film noir," he boasts. Noiret plays a slovenly, cuckolded police chief, who (true to Tavernier type) spends a lot of time stuffing his face. Scorned by everyone apart from a young girl, played by Isabelle Huppert, he eventually becomes a killer. "The main character reveals by his behaviour all the horror of the colonial system," Tavernier says.

He is a big fan of British film-making. In France, during the nouvelle vague era, such enthusiasms were considered heretical. British cinema (other than Hitchcock) was out of bounds. François Truffaut famously remarked that there was "a certain incompatibility between the terms 'cinema' and 'Britain'". But Tavernier went to great lengths to find British films in France. He speaks with pride of how he ventured into an adult cinema in Paris to see Michael Powell's masterpiece, Peeping Tom. The audience, who had "just come to see tits", were horrified by Powell's disturbing drama.

Following the deaths of Bergman and Antonioni last year, many proclaimed auteur cinema obsolete. "This is bullshit," Tavernier declares, ticking off names such as the Coens, Abbas Kiarostami, Paul Thomas Anderson, Nanni Moretti. The problem, he contends, is not in the film-making. It is in the attitudes toward that film-making. In particular, Tavernier regrets how insular the US has become.

It is striking how passionately he talks about cinema, as if he were still a young critic, championing the work of directors he loved. His passion for movies began early. He remembers seeing Gunga Din and Distant Drums; then, when he was 12 or 13, he realised that films actually had directors. "The first person who made it clear that you could write with images the same way you could write with words was John Ford. I saw Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon within a few weeks of each other."

During the 1960s, Tavernier and his colleague Pierre Rissient revolutionised the dubious trade of film publicity. "We were the first film publicists who were film buffs - we only accepted the films we liked," he recalls of the era when he helped bring directors like Ford, Abraham Polonsky, Sam Fuller and Jacques Tourneur to the attention of the French media. "We were behaving not as publicists but as film lovers."

In his directorial career, he has followed the same route. Look through his credits and what springs out is the variety. Tavernier remains a director almost impossible to classify. He has made period dramas, cop thrillers, family dramas, Georges Simenon adaptations and comedies. "I like to have the right to do what pleases me," he says. Certainly, the one trait his movies all share is that they were made with passion - and, his Tommy Lee Jones movie notwithstanding, dinner scenes.

In the Electric Mist will be released later this year. The Bertrand Tavernier Collection is out now on DVD.

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