The best time any director could have was working with Jean-Claude. There’s joy and excitement every morning as you go to meet him, and you’re certain that you’ll get a lot done, have fun, and leave him if not a better man, then at least a man feeling better, more energetic, all worries left behind. Where’s the problem? he would ask. There is no problem: just do it. Do not doubt; trust your imagination. If an idea, an image, or a line came into his mind, that meant it was good enough to put on paper. Do not question it, do not explain, do not give motivations. At most, test your idea by making a drawing of it. He was very good at that—a true cartoon artist. He was a gagman for Tati! And this technique of free association may be the secret to his fast and prolific writing. Écriture automatique—almost.

Shakespeare comes to mind. Jean-Claude was a theater man, a playwright. His collaboration with Peter Brook, The Mahabharata, is legendary. His ability to make science comprehensible was another of his astounding qualities. Let me just mention some of the topics of his books: quantum physics, the Dalai Lama, the Inquisition, Spanish and French history, Buddhism, geography, India, Mexico, Iran, money and the financial market. Nothing was too vast to embrace, nothing too contrary to maybe be useful.

His book Le vin bourru gave me the secret of his extraordinary productivity (he collaborated on more than a hundred films): like a farmer, who must sow his field when the season is right, without further ado and without waiting for “inspiration,” Jean-Claude wrote practically without erasing anything. He didn’t linger on a first draft “just to see what it looks like” and then improve it in a second or third draft. For him the first draft was almost final, and if it turned out that he was wrong, had made a mistake, or should have written differently, well, he’d do so in the next script, for the next movie. It’s a hell of a discipline, and it should be applied to one’s whole life. Most people live a little first “to see,” as if on trial, assuming that they have another life that they will live later, for real—as Jean-Claude once told me, wisdom he probably learned from Buñuel. When we know that erasure is not possible, that everything is definitive as soon as we do it, irrevocable as the seed is once the peasant has been entrusted to the earth, we are either paralyzed and do nothing more, for fear of making a mistake, or, like Jean-Claude, we draw great strength from it, going from job to job without ever going back, since what is done is done. This is what he did in the life he managed so well. And with the same slow and assured rhythm as his ancestors, Jean-Claude ploughed the fields of cinema for nearly seventy years. The harvest was generally good, sometimes even exceptional, and many masterpieces will survive him as long as cinema survives. And if it survives (not sure, he would say), it will be thanks to the films he wrote.