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    Marina Cicogna, Italy’s First Major Female Film Producer, Dies at 89

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    A countess from an influential Italian family, she charted her own course and produced films by the likes of Pasolini and Zeffirelli.Marina Cicogna, an Italian countess who became her country’s first major female film producer, guiding to the screen celebrated films by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Franco Zeffirelli and Elio Petri, died on Nov. 4 at her home in Rome. She was 89.Her death was announced by La Biennale di Venezia, the organizer of the Venice Film Festival. No cause was given.Rising to prominence in an era when the only female names on film posters were often those of actresses, Ms. Cicogna (pronounced chi-CONE-ya) became one of the most powerful women in European cinema, as both a producer and a distributor.She started from a lofty perch. Her maternal grandfather, Count Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata, was an industrialist and statesman who served various government roles, including as Italy’s minister of finance under Mussolini. He also founded the Venice Film Festival. In the mid-1960s, when Ms. Cicogna was in her early 30s, she and her brother Bino took control of her family’s production and distribution company, Euro International Films.Even so, she faced challenges: working with imperious male auteurs; earning the respect of the country’s left-leaning cultural leaders despite her titled upbringing; and openly dating women as well as men at a time when such topics were rarely discussed in public by figures of authority.Ms. Cicogna in 2009. She brought prominent films to the screen, including Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Medea” and “Teorema,” as well as Elio Petri’s “Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion,” which won the 1971 Academy Award for best foreign-language film.Nick Harvey/WireImage, via Getty ImagesNor was her path as a woman always easy. “At the time I didn’t think about it,” she said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter Roma this year. “But at the end of the day, yes, the intention to put you down was there, definitely.”Among the prominent films she produced or distributed were “Medea” (1969), Pasolini’s hypnotic reimagining of the Euripides tragedy, starring the opera singer Maria Callas; “Teorema” (1968), also directed by Pasolini, in which Terence Stamp plays an enigmatic stranger who seduces, one by one, members of a wealthy family in Milan; “Brother Sun Sister Moon” (1972), Zeffirelli’s lush retelling of the life of St. Francis of Assisi; and “Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion,” Petri’s Kafkaesque thriller, which won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film in 1971.Ms. Cicogna also had three films at the 1967 Venice Film Festival, including Luis Buñuel’s “Belle de Jour,” starring Catherine Deneuve as a Paris housewife who secretly works at a bordello, which won the festival’s highest prize, the Golden Lion. In addition, she put her stamp on the proceedings by throwing a lavish party that became festival lore.“I didn’t give a big ball, but rather said that everyone could dress as they wanted, as long as they were in white and yellow or white and gold,” Ms. Cicogna said in a 2013 interview with T, The New York Times’s style magazine. “I sent two small Learjets, one to Corsica to pick up Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and the other to Rome to pick up Jane Fonda and Roger Vadim.”Such obvious displays of wealth would go out of fashion following the leftist student uprisings in Europe in 1968. “You couldn’t have a big party without hurting people’s feelings,” she continued. “You couldn’t go around with a Rolls-Royce without being thrown eggs at.”Ms. Cicogna, center, with the actresses Gina Lollobrigida, left, and Jane Fonda at the lavish party the countess threw for the 1967 Venice Film Festival. The party became festival lore.Giorgio Lotti/Mondadori, via Getty ImagesCountess Marina Cicogna Mozzoni Volpi di Misurata was born on May 29, 1934, in Rome, the daughter of Count Cesare Cicogna Mozzoni, a banker, and Countess Annamaria Volpi di Misurata, who purchased Euro International Films, ultimately handing control over to her children.Growing up, Ms. Cicogna was a cinema lover who mingled among the children of David O. Selznick, the producer of “Gone With the Wind,” and other film heavyweights at the Venice festival.After an education in Italy, she enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., where she roomed with Barbara Warner, whose father was the Hollywood film mogul Jack Warner. During a school break, Ms. Warner invited her to California.“I never went back,” Ms. Cicogna told T. “I stayed for three months in California at the Warners’.”She later studied photography in the United States, brokering her platinum connections to shoot luminaries like Ezra Pound and Marilyn Monroe in candid moments.Her early forays into the film business included distributing a 1967 West German film, “Helga.” “It was the first time you saw a birth, a woman producing a child, on film,” she told T. “I decided we should publicize it. We put ambulances at the exit of the film, saying that people would faint when they saw that.”Ms. Cicogna in 1967 with the director Luis Buñuel, whose “Belle de Jour” won the Venice festival’s highest prize, the Golden Lion.Giorgio Lotti/Mondadori Portfolio, via Everett CollectionShe was at times linked romantically with the likes of Warren Beatty and Alain Delon, but she also spent decades in a relationship with Florinda Bolkan, a Brazilian model and actress.After they split, she began a long relationship with Benedetta Gardona, a woman more than two decades her junior, whom Ms. Cicogna legally adopted for financial reasons. Ms. Gardona remained her companion until Ms. Cicogna’s death. (Complete information on survivors was not immediately available).Ms. Cicogna looked back on her career highlights of the 1960s and ’70s in the 2021 documentary “Marina Cicogna: La Vita e Tutto il Resto” (“Life and Everything Else”), directed by Andrea Bettinetti, as well as her autobiography, “Ancora Spero: Una Storia di Vita e di Cinema” (“I Still Hope: A Story of Life and Cinema”), published this year.Still, in a 2017 video interview, she expressed regret that she had not remained in the film business. “If I had to look back, I should have never stopped producing, although Italian cinematography has not been the same since. It’s not so great,” she said, adding: “I am also a person who is very torn between the European rather lazy aesthetic way of life and the American more creative, more active way of life.”“I’ve been more European than active,” she said. “I haven’t done as much as I should have done. But I can’t say I’m sorry. That’s the way it was, and that’s it.” More

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      ‘Here We Are’ Review: The Last Sondheim, Cool and Impossibly Chic

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      This inventive, beguiling and not quite fully solved puzzle of a show is a worthy and loving farewell to the great musical dramatist.Stephen Sondheim had a genius for genre. Some of his best works were adapted from very niche sources like penny dreadfuls (“Sweeney Todd”), epistolary novels (“Passion”) and Roman comedies (“A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum”). Leaning hard into their specific styles, he mined their expressive potential in songs that could hardly be improved and never sounded alike.Still, for him and for others, surrealism was often a genre too far. Musical theater is surreal enough already. (Why did that taciturn man suddenly start singing? Who are those dancing women in lingerie?) Building a show on a willfully irrational source risks doubling down on the weirdness, leading to “Huh?” results like Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cats” and Sondheim’s own “Anyone Can Whistle.”So as we waited what seemed like decades for what would turn out to be his last musical, never quite knowing if he’d ditched it or not, the dribbles of information he and his collaborators let drop suggested that the new show — eventually titled “Here We Are” — might be misbegotten.Not only are the two Luis Buñuel films that Sondheim and the playwright David Ives took as their inspiration maximally surrealist, they are also surreal in different, seemingly incompatible ways. “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972) is a sunny romp about a group of friends who, seeking a meal, are mysteriously unable to find one. “The Exterminating Angel” (1962) is a much darker affair, about a dinner party no one can leave. Both movies ridicule aristocrats who are underfed yet over-sated: people for whom nothing is ever enough. But one is like the silky tartness of a lemon meringue pie and the other like chicken bones stuck in your throat.The best good news about “Here We Are,” the combo platter Buñuel musical that opened on Sunday at the Shed, nearly two years after Sondheim’s death in November 2021, is that it justifies the idea of merging these two works and succeeds in making a surrealist musical expressive. In Joe Mantello’s breathtakingly chic and shapely production, with a cast of can-you-top-this Broadway treasures, it is never less than a pleasure to watch as it confidently polishes and embraces its illogic. Musically, it’s fully if a little skimpily Sondheim, and entirely worthy of his catalog. That it is also a bit cold, only occasionally moving in the way that song would ideally allow, may speak to the reason he had so much trouble writing it.There are just a few songs in Act II, which, inspired by Luis Buñuel’s “The Exterminating Angel,” takes a darker turn.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe first act, about an hour long and with perhaps seven numbers — though it’s hard to count because they weave in and out of the dialogue — introduces us to Ives’s American versions of Buñuel’s French gourmands from “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.” Leo Brink (Bobby Cannavale) is a crass tycoon and Marianne Brink (Rachel Bay Jones) a society decorator; their Saturday morning is interrupted when four of their circle arrive at the couple’s hyper-sleek apartment, insisting they’ve been invited for brunch.The interlopers include Paul Zimmer (Jeremy Shamos), a plastic surgeon celebrating his 1,000th nose job, and his wife, Claudia Bursik-Zimmer (Amber Gray), an agent, she brays, for “a major entertainment entity.” Along with them are Raffael Santello Di Santicci (Steven Pasquale), the horndog ambassador from a Mediterranean country called Moranda, and Fritz (Micaela Diamond), Marianne’s sour younger sister, a revolutionary with champagne tastes.Ives quickly and amusingly delineates the six with specific and almost universally obnoxious traits. Raffael, who butchers his English, and Claudia, quick to pull rank, have a weekly assignation behind Paul’s back; Paul and Leo run a drug cartel with Raffael’s ambassadorial assistance. Fritz is a pill. As they go on the road in search of a meal, accompanied by a Sondheim vamp that starts out marvelously jaunty and ends like water swirling down a drain, each reveals worse and worse traits, except for Marianne, who is too dim to be venal. When she asks her husband to “buy this perfect day” for her, it seems less acquisitive than sentimental.The changes of scenery as they visit various establishments featuring outré waiters (Tracie Bennett and Denis O’Hare) in ever more ludicrous wigs (by Robert Pickens and Katie Gell) are accomplished with swift grace on David Zinn’s shiny white box of a set, as neon marquees descend from the flies and then descend further to form tables or banquettes. (Zinn’s costumes are also telegraphic, including Leo’s velour sweatsuit and Claudia’s sky-high purple Fendis.) The theme-and-variations format is enchanting, allowing Sondheim, the great puzzler, to treat songs almost as anagrams. Eventually, along with three other characters they pick up — a colonel (Francois Battiste), a soldier (Jin Ha) and a bishop (David Hyde Pierce) — the crew lands, by now starving, at Raffael’s embassy, where they dine as Act I ends.Here the musical hinges into “The Exterminating Angel,” only instead of a completely different set of characters (Buñuel’s were Spanish, living under Franco), Ives, in a neat piece of joinery, continues with Leo and Marianne and the others. It is they who find it impossible to leave after dinner, and wind up, in Act II, sleeping, bickering and eventually fighting over food scraps as their metaphysical entrapment persists for days. Ives also complicates Buñuel’s antifascist, anti-bourgeois glee, in which plutocrats are exposed as pigs, by implicating the revolution as well; Fritz turns out to be less of a threat to her own way of life than she intended.Clever as all that is, the windup has problems, as is true for many new shows finding their final shape. To make the characters in “Here We Are” worthy of punishment in the second act has meant making them too obviously awful in the first. Their brutishness throughout also lets us off Buñuel’s hook: His movies are about people whose sophistication and disposable income we should recognize, but “Here We Are,” which sometimes feels like a butterfly box, is about people we don’t dare to.In the first act, inspired by Buñuel’s “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” the characters visit various establishments, each distinguished with swift grace by neon marquees that descend to form tables or banquettes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHad Sondheim written more songs for Act II — there are just a few, bunched at the beginning — that problem might have been eased. In any case, Mantello and Ives decided to reframe the dearth as an opportunity. Before his death, Sondheim apparently agreed with them that the lack of songs in fact made structural sense: Once trapped in a repeating nightmare of deprivation, these characters would have no reason to sing. But then why retain the ones he’d already written?Perhaps because the songs he did write are everything you could want them to be. There are fewer trick rhymes than usual, but laugh-out-loud jokes nonetheless. A rhapsodic love song for the soldier and a paean to superficiality for Marianne — “I want things to gleam./To be what they seem/And not what they are” — have the familiar Sondheimian depth and luster to crystallize complex insights.Though we sorely miss that in Act II, and especially at the attempted triple lutz of an ending (which is probably two lutzes too many), Ives, the author of “Venus in Fur” and innumerable clever comedies, has done much to compensate. Some of his dialogue scenes — including a riveting colloquy between the questing Marianne and the questioning bishop — have the shape, rhythm and sorrowful wit of a Sondheim song. (Jones and Pierce are standouts in the excellent cast.) Also lovingly filling in blanks are the musical supervisor, Alexander Gemignani, and Sondheim’s longtime orchestrator, Jonathan Tunick, who have arranged themes from the earlier part of the show as instrumental interludes to take up the slack in the later part.You can understand their care. Pending the discovery of some unpublished juvenilia or yet another iteration of the penultimate “Road Show,” this is the last Sondheim musical we will ever have. That alone makes the production historic, a pressure that happily does not show in the product, which is fleet and flashy. Natasha Katz’s lighting, Tom Gibbons’s sound and Sam Pinkleton’s droll choreography do a lot of the heavy lifting for Mantello’s agenda.More important, “Here We Are” is as experimental as Sondheim throughout his career wanted everything to be. To swim through its currents of echoes of earlier work — some “Anyone Can Whistle,” some “Passion,” some “Merrily We Roll Along” — is to understand the characters’ monstrous insatiability. We, too, will always want more, even when we’ve had what by any reasonable standards should already be more than enough.Here We AreThrough Jan. 21 at the Shed, Manhattan; theshed.org. Running time: 2 hours and 20 minutes. More

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      Final Sondheim Musical Will Be Staged in New York This Fall

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      His long-gestating final show, now titled “Here We Are,” is coming to the Shed; it is inspired by two Luis Buñuel films.Stephen Sondheim’s long-in-the-works Luis Buñuel musical, which he described as unfinished just days before his death, will be staged in New York this fall, giving audiences the chance to see the final show by one of the most important artists in musical theater history.The musical, now titled “Here We Are,” is inspired by two Buñuel films, “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” and “The Exterminating Angel.” Sondheim wrote the music and lyrics; the book is by the playwright David Ives (“Venus in Fur”), and Joe Mantello (“Wicked”) will direct.The show, scheduled to begin performances in September, will be a commercial Off Broadway venture, produced by Tom Kirdahy (“Hadestown”) in a 500-seat theater at the Shed, a multidisciplinary arts venue in Hudson Yards. The Shed, a nonprofit, is being described as a co-presenter.It is not entirely clear when Sondheim began working on the show, but he first discussed it publicly in 2014, and there were delays and setbacks in the years following. He talked about it occasionally during public appearances; for a time it was called “Buñuel,” and then “Square One”; it was backed at various points by the commercial producer Scott Rudin and by the nonprofit Public Theater. And there were workshops over the years, including one in 2016, and one in 2021 featuring Nathan Lane and Bernadette Peters; casting for the production at the Shed has not been announced, but there are no indications that Lane and Peters have remained with the project.In an interview days before his death in late 2021, Sondheim described it this way: “I don’t know if I should give the so-called plot away, but the first act is a group of people trying to find a place to have dinner, and they run into all kinds of strange and surreal things, and in the second act, they find a place to have dinner, but they can’t get out.”Sondheim described the show as incomplete, as did some of his collaborators in the days following his death. It is not clear what state it was in when he died, and what kind of work has been done to it since.Sondheim’s posthumous career has been booming. This season has featured Broadway revivals of “Into the Woods” (which opened last summer) and “Sweeney Todd” (which opens this month), as well as Off Broadway revivals of “Assassins” and “Merrily We Roll Along.” The “Merrily” revival is scheduled to transfer to Broadway in September, the same month that “Here We Are” is now expected to begin at the Shed. More

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      Still Charming at 50: Luis Buñuel’s Greatest Hit

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      “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeois” is a comedy of frustrations in which a sextet of super-civilized haute bourgeois repeatedly attempt and fail to sit down at dinner.Luis Buñuel is a filmmaker with few peers and a unique career trajectory. A hardcore Surrealist in 1920s Paris and a propagandist for Republican Spain during the Civil War, Buñuel found refuge in the Mexican film industry before making a triumphant, late-life return to France and the art cinema pantheon.“The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeois” was Buñuel’s greatest commercial and critical success, capped with the 1972 Oscar for best foreign film. Given a new 4K digital restoration, it has been revived for a two-week run at Film Forum.Buñuel, who died in 1983, intended “The Discreet Charm” as his last film (it was not), and it recapitulates certain career-long concerns. The movie is typically described as a comedy of frustration in which a sextet of well-heeled, super-civilized haute bourgeois (five French people and the ambassador from an imaginary South American country) repeatedly attempt and fail to sit down at dinner. As such, it elaborates on the thwarted desires that fuel two earlier masterpieces of his: “L’age d’Or,” made with Salvador Dalí in 1930, and Buñuel’s penultimate Mexican production, “The Exterminating Angel” (1962).The movie is suavely irrational, predicated on interlocking dreams (and dreams within dreams), as well as assorted terrorists, gangsters and army officers, along with an extremely obliging bishop (Julien Bertheau). It is also an avant-garde sitcom. The men are ruling-class criminals — although the ambassador (Fernando Rey) is far craftier than his French buddies (Paul Frankeur and Jean-Pierre Cassel). The two older women (Delphine Seyrig and Stéphane Audran) are ferociously poised fashion police; the group’s youngest member (Bulle Ogier) is a bit of a wild card. Much of the humor relies on their inane observations and absurd sang-froid in a succession of increasingly awkward social situations. (Imagine a smart tearoom running out of tea!)A few scenes of torture notwithstanding, American critics swooned for “The Discreet Charm.” Andrew Sarris called it “clearly the film of the year.” Vincent Canby’s New York Times review hailed it as “the unique creation of a director who, at 72, has never been more fully in control of his talents, as a filmmaker, a moralist, social critic and humorist.” While it is hard to disagree with this assessment, it’s possible to prefer Buñuel’s less digestible works — particularly “Viridiana” (1961), which sneaked past Spain’s fascist censors, and the low-budget Mexican films that were, of necessity, directed against the grain.“The Discreet Charm” is not without its pleasures. Seyrig, Audran, and Ogier are magnificent farceurs. Buñuel might be shooting fish in a barrel, but French manners have seldom been so expertly ridiculed. A few of the movie’s pranks (an inconvenient death disrupts one dinner) still shock; others (Ogier parading around in Napoleon’s hat) remain laugh-out-loud funny. It’s fascinating to see Buñuel’s engagement with the Godard of “La Chinoise” and “Weekend” and even, in the casting of Rey, “The French Connection.”And yet, while “The Discreet Charm” is not exactly complacent, neither is it unreconciled. For all its unpatriotic and anticlerical jibes, the movie is too expansively genial to be truly discomfiting. The Oscar is the tip-off, even if Buñuel did suggest that his producer had bribed the Academy to get it.The Discreet Charm of the BourgeoisieThrough July 7 at Film Forum in Manhattan; filmforum.org. More

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      Sondheim Musical, in Development for Years, Looks Unlikely

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      The 91-year-old composer told the Public Theater last year that he was no longer working on a show based on the films of Luis Buñuel.One big lingering question for theater fans following the news that the prolific producer Scott Rudin will “step back” from his stage projects: What will happen to his shows in development, notably the Stephen Sondheim musical “Buñuel,” which at last report was slated to be produced Off Broadway at the Public Theater?Rudin, who is facing a reckoning over decades-long accusations of bullying, had been a commercial producer attached to the musical.But the Public now says: It isn’t happening.In the wake of reports about Rudin, the Public on April 22 put out a statement saying it had not worked with him in years. Responding to a follow-up question, Laura Rigby, a spokeswoman for the Public, said last week that Sondheim had informed the theater last year that he was no longer developing the musical. (The Public clarified that its cancellation had nothing to do with Rudin.)Sondheim, who turned 91 at the end of March, did not respond to emailed questions about the project’s status.The work, which was based on the films of the Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel, promised to be one of the last chances for theatergoers to see a new stage musical by musical theater’s most venerated composer. Sondheim had been developing it for the last decade or so with the playwright David Ives (“Venus in Fur”), who also did not respond to email requests for comment.Sondheim had previously said that the show would comprise two acts, the first based on the filmmaker’s “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972), and the second on “The Exterminating Angel” (1962).The musical, he said, was about “trying to find a place to have dinner.”He offered more detail during a 2014 appearance at The New Yorker Festival, explaining that the first act involved a group of people trying to find a place to dine, while the second focused on people who finally did just that — and were trapped afterward in hellish circumstances.The project would have been the composer’s first major musical in more than a decade. His last was “Road Show,” a 2008 collaboration with John Weidman about two brothers constantly looking to strike it rich, which was presented at the Public.“Buñuel” had a mini workshop at the Public in November 2016, with a cast that included Michael Cerveris, Heidi Blickenstaff and Sierra Boggess, with a hoped-for opening date of late 2017. The New York Post reported at the time that Joe Mantello, who directed “Wicked” and the 2004 Broadway revival of Sondheim’s “Assassins,” was set to direct.Cerveris said in an email last week that the first act was essentially complete at the time of the workshop, and the second was “sketched out, but still awaiting much of the music.” He said a later music workshop was planned, but it was canceled so Sondheim could use the time to continue writing.Then, he said, the trail essentially went cold. He said he was sorry to hear of what looks to be the show’s demise.“It was an appropriately surreal, unnerving and often hilarious piece,” he said. “And Steve was, as ever, experimenting with some fascinating, complex musical structures which David’s sensibilities seemed to suit really well, I thought.”Sondheim is the winner of a Pulitzer Prize (in 1985, for “Sunday in the Park With George”) and eight Tony Awards (including one for lifetime achievement), more than any other composer. A film remake of “West Side Story,” for which he wrote the lyrics, is due out at the end of the year. And whenever New York theaters fully reopen, the Classic Stage Company plans to revive “Assassins.”Cerveris said that, despite hearing nothing of “Buñuel” for several years, he had still been hoping for another Sondheim show.“The marriage with Buñuel felt pretty right for the times, and the world has only gotten darker and weirder since then,” he said. “I’d have loved to see it come to be. But then, I will always want more Sondheim in the world.” More

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      Jean-Claude Carrière, 89, Dies; Prolific Writer of Screenplays and More

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyJean-Claude Carrière, 89, Dies; Prolific Writer of Screenplays and MoreHe was a favorite of Luis Buñuel and other top filmmakers. He also had a fruitful collaboration with the stage director Peter Brook.Jean-Claude Carrière in 1999. He had more than 150 film and television writing credits and also wrote books and plays.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFeb. 11, 2021Jean-Claude Carrière, an author, playwright and screenwriter who collaborated with the director Luis Buñuel on a string of important films and went on to work on scores of other movies, among them Philip Kaufman’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” (1988), died on Monday at his home in Paris. He was 89.The death was confirmed by his daughter Kiara Carrière. No cause was given.Mr. Carrière had barely started in the movie business when he met Buñuel, the Spanish-born director, in 1963 (although he had already won a short-subject Oscar for a 1962 comedy he made with Pierre Étaix, “Happy Anniversary”).“At the time, he was looking for a young French screenwriter who knew the French countryside well,” Mr. Carrière recalled in a 1983 interview with the writer Jason Weiss.“I was a beginner,” he said. “I had gone to Cannes, and he was seeing various screenwriters there. I had lunch with him, we got along well, and three weeks later he chose me and I left for Madrid. Since then I haven’t stopped.”His first project with Buñuel was “Diary of a Chambermaid” (1964), for which the two adapted the Octave Mirbeau novel of the same name. Mr. Carrière continued to work with Buñuel for the rest of the director’s career, including on his last feature, “That Obscure Object of Desire,” in 1977. (Buñuel died in 1983.)Fernando Rey and Carole Bouquet in a scene from the 1977 film “That Obscure Object of Desire,” the last of Mr. Carrière’s many collaborations with Luis Buñuel.“Quite often the screenwriter has to guess what exactly the film is that the director wants to make,” Mr. Carrière told Interview magazine in 2015. “Sometimes the director doesn’t even know himself. You have to help him find the right thing. That was the case with Buñuel. At the beginning, he was looking around in many different directions, and finally when we went the right way, we felt it.”Mr. Carrière also collaborated with other top filmmakers, including Jacques Deray (on the 1969 movie “The Swimming Pool” and more) and Louis Malle (on the 1967 film “The Thief of Paris” and others). In the 1970s one of his greatest successes was as a writer of Volker Schlondorff’s “The Tin Drum” (1979), which was adapted from the Günter Grass novel about a boy who, in the midst of the gathering chaos that led to World War II, decides not to grow up; it won the Oscar for best foreign-language film.In the 1980s he wrote or co-wrote the screenplays for Daniel Vigne’s “The Return of Martin Guerre” (1982), Andrzej Wajda’s “Danton” (1983), Milos Forman’s “Valmont” (1989) and numerous other movies. Among the most recent of his more than 150 film and television credits were “The Artist and the Model,” a 2012 drama directed by Fernando Trueba, and “At Eternity’s Gate,” a 2018 film about Vincent van Gogh directed by Julian Schnabel.In 2014 Mr. Carrière received an honorary Oscar for his body of work. The citation said that his “elegantly crafted screenplays elevate the art of screenwriting to the level of literature.”The prolific Mr. Carrière also wrote books and plays, often collaborating with the stage director Peter Brook. His interests knew no bounds.With Mr. Brook he created “The Mahabharata,” a nine-hour stage version of the Sanskrit epic, which was staged at the Avignon Theater Festival in France in 1985 and then made into a film. He once wrote a book with the Dalai Lama (“The Power of Buddhism,” 1996). He wrote a novel called “Please, Mr. Einstein” that, as Dennis Overbye wrote in a 2006 review in The New York Times, “touches down lightly and charmingly on some of the thorniest philosophical consequences of Einstein’s genius and, by extension, the scientific preoccupations of the 20th century — the nature of reality, the fate of causality, the comprehensibility of nature, the limits of the mind.”His was deliberately ever curious.“People say I am very dispersed,” he told The Guardian in 1994. “But I say that to pass from one subject to another, from one country to another, is what keeps me alive, keeps me alert.”A scene from Buñuel’s “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972), one of three films for which Mr. Carrière was nominated for a writing Oscar.Credit…Rialto Pictures/StudiocanalJean-Claude Carrière was born on Sept. 17, 1931, in Colombières-sur-Orb in southern France, into a family of vintners. As World War II was ending in 1945, his father, who had a heart condition that was making it difficult for him to work the land, took a job at a cousin’s cafe near Paris. There Jean-Claude had access to better schools and could indulge more fully in the passion for writing that had, as he put it, “imposed itself on me” since he was a young boy.In his mid-20s he published a novel, “Le Lézard.” It caught the attention of the comic actor and director Jacques Tati, who provided Mr. Carrière with a sort of backward entry into his career: Mr. Tati hired him to write novels based on some of his movies. He also introduced him to the process of making and editing a film.He and Mr. Étaix jointly wrote and directed “Happy Anniversary,” a comic short about a couple trying to celebrate their anniversary. Mr. Carrière was surprised by the Oscar.“I came to the office and the producer was jumping out of joy: ‘We have the Oscar! We have the Oscar!,’” he told Interview. “I asked, ‘But what is the Oscar?’ I didn’t know.”His family background benefited him in his fateful meeting with Buñuel the next year.“The first question he asked me when we sat down together at the table — and it’s not a light or frivolous question; the way he looked at me I sensed that it was a deep and important question — was, ‘Do you drink wine?’” he told Mr. Weiss.“A negative response would have definitely disqualified me,” he continued. “So I said, ‘Not only do I drink wine, but I produce it. I’m from a family of vintners.’”Their bond thus sealed, Buñuel and Mr. Carrière went on to collaborate not only on “Diary of a Chambermaid” but also on “Belle de Jour” (1967), “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972) and other films.In 1971 Mr. Carrière was among the writers on Mr. Forman’s “Taking Off,” a comedy about parents searching for a runaway daughter that received good notices. The same was not true of the next Carrière-Forman partnership, a Broadway production of Mr. Carrière’s two-character play “The Little Black Book,” with Mr. Forman directing. When it opened in April 1972, Clive Barnes, reviewing in The Times, called it “a foolish little play without either wit or humanity.” It closed after seven performances.Mr. Carrière in 2001. He received an honorary Oscar in 2014 for his “elegantly crafted screenplays,” which the citation said “elevate the art of screenwriting to the level of literature.”Credit…Jean-Pierre Muller/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHis only other Broadway effort was better received. It was “La Tragedie de Carmen,” which he, Marius Constant and Mr. Brook adapted from the Bizet opera, with Mr. Brook directing. It opened in November 1983 and ran for 187 performances.Mr. Carrière was nominated for writing Oscars for “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” “That Obscure Object of Desire” and “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”Information on survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Brook once explained what made Mr. Carrière such an in-demand writer, whether the job was creating original material, adapting a novel or opera, or reining in an epic poem.“Like a great actor, or a great cameraman, he adapts himself to different people he works with,” Mr. Brook told The Times in 1988. “He’s open to all shifts caused by the material changing, and yet he brings to it a very powerful and consistent point of view.”Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting from Paris.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More