Glen Pitre Looks Back on a Louisiana Cinema Landmark

In Cajun culture, there’s a whole pantheon of folklore. There are supernatural creatures like werewolves, and then there are the fools and the tricksters. I grew up in a tradition where every story began with “This really happened!” There’s always the sense of it being nonfiction, no matter how wild the story gets. I was on tour with a previous film, and because we didn’t have a lot of prints, we went theater to theater. Someone in the audience told me he had an idea for a movie. When you’re a filmmaker you hear this a lot, but often the idea never rises to the level of a story. The man told me about his great-grandfather, who was Cajun and had gotten into trouble with the vigilantes and put in jail. He was a musician and a healer, and after he was released from prison he moved in with the widow of one of the vigilantes. That’s all this man knew, but that was enough to get me going. I started thinking about questions this raised for me: How did the great-grandfather get out of jail? What kind of trouble did he get into? What was the deal with the widow?

The newspapers had been calling my early movies “gumbo westerns,” so I thought this would be a chance to make a real western, with horses and cattle. As a kid I’d get up at six in the morning on Saturdays to watch Roy Rogers on TV. So that was one of the seeds that grew into this script. But there weren’t many other influences, partly because I was used to just figuring out what I could get my hands on and making what I could out of that. That’s how I make supper—by figuring out what I can do with what’s in the fridge. It’s different from saying: this is what I want and let me figure out how to pay for it. That had never been an option, and it wasn’t an option on Belizaire either.

He’d been brought in for another project at Sundance, and I met him there. At the time he was considered one of those hot, good-looking leading men, and he was known more for his looks than for his acting chops. As most serious actors would, he found that situation a little frustrating. He read the script and liked the role, and by the time I left Sundance at the end of that month we’d pretty much decided he was our guy. But we almost lost him a few times; in the eleventh hour he insisted that we rewrite the ending of the film. He’d given the script to his college drama coach, who told him the ending was weak. Sets were already being built, and costumes were being made. We were two weeks away from starting shooting. So Sundance flew Armand from New York to Los Angeles, and they flew me out from New Orleans, along with the screenwriter Waldo Salt. We were in a suite together spitballing ideas for a new ending, and every hour or so I’d run out to go interview another actor, in case we weren’t able to settle this. We didn’t have much after that weekend, but on the red-eye flight home, I somehow came up with the hanging scene that ends the film. I called my production designer to make sure he could build a gallows for three people, and he said, I guess so! It was a stronger, better ending, but the pressure turned my hair gray!

I was conscious about wanting all those elements there, and the balance. What I know now that I didn’t know then is considerable, and if I had to do it over, I would be much more aware of the need to get variations on takes. I’ve learned since then that what you see on set is not necessarily how it reads when you see it on a screen. And even what you see on-screen is not what you’re going to see when it’s preceded or followed by something else. So, with some of the shifts in tone, I have to say that we just got lucky. How do you make something funny or sad? Really, that kind of stuff is easy. The tricky thing is making something funny, sad, and suspenseful at the same time. And in the pressure cooker of production, you’re dealing with a lot of personalities. People’s faces and names are on the screen, and this is their next paycheck. That wasn’t an issue on the earlier films.

We were heroes! The movie blew the doors off the theaters in Louisiana. And it felt like it was us telling our own story. The year before there was a film called Southern Comfort that featured Cajun characters, but they might as well have been hillbillies—they were faceless monsters, and I know a lot of people were offended by it. There had also been The Big Easy, which just wasn’t very authentic. So Belizaire was the antidote. I think people could see that this was someone trying to get it right.