For Malle, Another Change of Pace : After the intensely personal ‘Au Revoir les Enfants,’ the mellowing director turns to happier childhood memories with ‘May Fools’

“I think everything comes from childhood and that one’s vision is formed very early on,” says French filmmaker Louis Malle, whose 1987 film, “Au Revoir les Enfants,” commemorated the most traumatic episode of his own childhood. Based on his memory of a snowy January morning in 1944 when he watched in horror as one of his schoolmates--a Jew in hiding--was dragged from class by the Nazis, “Au Revoir les Enfants” shaped up to be the best-loved film of Malle’s career.

“I got more letters about that film than I got for the rest of my work put together,” recalls the 58-year-old director during an interview at the offices of Orion Pictures, which will release his new film, “May Fools,” on Wednesday. “Putting that story on film was completely overwhelming for me, and after I completed it I lost my concentration for a long time. After that intense experience, I was looking to do something less personal and in a very light tone for my next film, but as it turns out, ‘May Fools’ is very close to my own life.”

Using the French student uprising of 1968 as a backdrop, “May Fools” chronicles the greedy antics of an upper-class family as they gather at their country estate to settle the will of its recently deceased owner. The story is told through the observations of Milou (played by Michel Piccoli), an eccentric old man who has spent his life on the estate, and is the only one who understands its worth and mourns its passing.

“This film is about the happy side of my own childhood,” says Malle, a charming man of great modesty and candor. “The events of May ’68 weren’t the seed of the idea for the film--I started with an idea slightly borrowed from ‘The Cherry Orchard.’ I wanted to do a portrait of a family and a country estate in ruins that represents a privileged way of life that’s about to end.

“This is something I understand very well,” continues Malle, who was born into an extremely wealthy family and is heir to an old French sugar fortune. “After the war, my family spent summers in the Loire Valley, which is a very beautiful part of France. I remember those summers as a time when nature was still an integrated part of life, and as a sensual time of abundant food and beautiful things. The wine harvest, catching crayfish at night--it was very magical.

“That world is lost now and only exists in a reconstituted state today. People mimic that country way of living but it’s gotten a little precious. People spend two weeks in the country and play at that lifestyle now, but no one lives that way year-round anymore. It’s gone--in fact, it was already gone in ’68. Wild animals are disappearing, the rivers are barren, and the world is becoming an immense suburbia.

“I really identify with the central character, Milou,” he adds. “This is a man who’s lived the same life his father and grandfather lived, a life with roots in the 19th Century, and suddenly he finds himself in a world he no longer recognizes because there’s been an acceleration of history. I really love this character for the fact that he’s defenseless against the world that’s shaping up in front of him. He’s going to be one of the casualties and I find that quite moving.”

“May Fools” also takes a wry look at the shifting currents of the French intelligentsia in its allusions to the student protests of ’68.

“France went through a long, strange period that was dominated by communism and the ideology of the extreme left,” says Malle. “It was all over the French university system and half of the teachers were Marxists. Maybe it was because I was exposed to fascism at a very young age, but I could see the totalitarian side of communism long before my French contemporaries.

“All my life I’ve dreaded any ideology that excludes others, and have questioned the sweeping pronouncements of the French intellectual community, and history has proven my skepticism well founded in many cases. Several of France’s great moral figures have proven to be disappointments. We can now see that Sartre has been lying to himself and to others for years, and has endorsed some of the worst causes. A generation of French intellectuals considered Stalin a demi-god and history has revealed him to be a monster. Marx is dead, next week Freud will be dead--suddenly all that we lived on is gone.

“Of course, a few of the great minds of this century still stand. I have great respect for Camus because his philosophy has always been very much his own view and he’s never been swept away by ideologies. I admire Beckett as well. His work is pessimistic but I don’t mind that because it’s intensely human, and Beckett is very close to his characters. I hate it when writers or filmmakers have contempt for their characters. Beckett’s characters are rather pathetic, but he loved them. That was a big part of his brilliance.”

Born in 1932 in Thumeries, France, the fifth child of sugar heiress Francoise Beghin Malle and Pierre Malle, Malle would have led a routine aristocratic childhood had it not been for the intrusion of World War II.

“The war played a huge role in shaping my understanding of life,” he recalls. “I was very young at the time, but I remember the war vividly, and in a way it was really good for me. I was born into an upper-class family, and even though my mother was very religious and didn’t believe money was important, we were still very privileged. We were protected, almost in a bad sense, from the rest of the world, and the war brought the real world back to us with a vengeance.”

Following studies in political science at the Sorbonne, Malle completed three years of film studies at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinematographiques--much to the dismay of his family.

“They were quite upset when I announced my decision to be a filmmaker,” he recalls, “and I think the fact that they objected made it even more appealing to me. I felt very guilty about being born into wealth, and when I was a student I tried to pretend I had nothing to do with my family. I discovered with horror that people quickly found out where I came from because my mother’s name is well known in France--it’s on every sugar packet. My classmates couldn’t care less, of course--I was the one making all the fuss. Now that I’m grown up enough to admit it, I must say that not having to make a living, desperately, was an enormous advantage for me. It gave me the chance and in a way the responsibility to do things. I had no excuse.”

While still a film student, Malle landed the job of assistant to marine explorer Jacques Cousteau, and made his first mark professionally in 1957 as co-director of Cousteau’s critically acclaimed documentary, “The Silent World.” After directing two short films and working as Robert Bresson’s assistant on the 1956 film “A Man Escaped,” Malle made his first feature film in 1957, “Elevator to the Gallows,” a psychological thriller starring Jeanne Moreau. Malle’s next film, “The Lovers,” also with Moreau, was a succes de scandale that vaulted him to the front ranks of French cinema.

“I was just 25 when ‘The Lovers’ came out and suddenly I was the hot new director,” he recalls. “It scared me to death and I went into hiding for months because I felt I was an impostor and the picture didn’t deserve the praise it was getting. Nonetheless, I was the hot shot, and I hated it. My next film, ‘Zazie,’ was a commercial flop, and in a stupid, vicious way, I enjoyed that.

“Now I know better about such things,” he adds with a rueful laugh. “With the way this business works, if you have a success you better enjoy it. I’ve had my share of flops, so I’m always grateful for a kind word now. It’s a hard thing to devote a few years of your life to a film then watch it disappear after three weeks as though it never existed. If I had a success like ‘The Lovers’ today I’d be thrilled.”

Following “The Lovers,” Malle directed a string of critically acclaimed films that included “Lacombe, Lucien,” “Murmur of the Heart” and “The Fire Within,” a harrowing account of the last 48 hours in the life of a suicidal, alcoholic playboy. In 1978, Malle moved to the New York to film his debut U.S. feature, “Pretty Baby,” set in a brothel in the Storyville district of New Orleans at the turn of the century. Though it was “Pretty Baby” that brought him here, Malle had long been infatuated with America, and he put down permanent roots here in 1980 when he married actress Candice Bergen.

“Growing up in Europe, my fantasy of this country was shaped by Hollywood movies and jazz records,” explains Malle, who presently splits his time between Paris, New York and Los Angeles, where Bergen’s TV series “Murphy Brown” shoots. “I was just 22 when I first came here in 1955, and it was a remarkable place then. It’s changed quite a bit over the past 35 years, but I still enjoy New York. I’ve lived mainly there for the past 10 years, and though it’s a crazy place, it’s exciting and I have great friends there.”

After moving to the United States, Malle released two well-received films in 1981--”Atlantic City” and “My Dinner With Andre”--and then ran into a bad spell. His 1984 film “Crackers” (the only movie he’s made completely within the Hollywood system) was a disappointment in every respect, and the following year he released “Alamo Bay,” which received mixed reviews.

Though Malle says he takes “full responsibility for the problems with those films,” they nonetheless led him to return to France for his next two movies--”Au Revoir Les Enfants” and “May Fools.”

“It was great making ‘May Fools,’ ” he says. “It was like being in a company for three months, and everyone involved remembers it as a special experience. It was spring and we were in a part of the country with few hotels, so everyone lived in rented houses. I could’ve made the film in a Paris studio because much of the story takes place indoors, but I don’t think the mood would be as authentic had I done it that way. It was important that the actors feel the mood of the house, and understand the way of life the film is about.”

Reflecting on how he sees his work evolving, Malle says “unfortunately, I think the same themes surface repeatedly in my films. I have the reputation of being a director who’s always going in a different direction, but I don’t see myself that way at all.”

Asked if he doesn’t agree that the mellow, world-weary wisdom that permeates “May Fools” is in marked contrast to the searingly intense emotions that propelled his early films, he says that “Yes, when I was younger I was angrier, maybe because of the guilt I felt about the family money. Whatever the reason, I had a deep anger about the Establishment, and though I still get angry when I read the paper, I seem to have mellowed, probably because I’ve experienced happiness. I have a very happy marriage and having children has made me more into positive feelings. This is boring I know, but having children enlarged me tremendously, both as a human being and a filmmaker, and it’s been the most enriching experience of my life.” (Malle has two children from a previous liaison, and a 4-year-old daughter with Bergen.)

Asked what the greatest obstacle he’s overcome in life has been, he jokingly responds “being French and being short,” then adds after a moment of thought, “because of my education and weird background, I developed a self-hatred and it took me a long time to accept myself. I longed to be physically and intellectually different, but I finally came to understand that there was a certain amount of arrogance in that self-hatred. As to how I got over the problem, people helped me learn to accept myself. And, with Candice, I surrendered completely for the first time in my life and finally dropped my guns. I felt so comfortable with her and thought, ‘Well, if she loves me I must not be so bad.’

“Self-hatred is partly what drove me to become a filmmaker,” he adds. “When I was young I wanted to be somebody else, and being a filmmaker is a way of leading other people’s lives. Now that I have a life of my own that I like, I’m much less driven to escape into other worlds--I hate to admit that, but it’s true. I sometimes have to force myself to get back to work, whereas at the beginning of my career I was obsessed with work and it seemed there was nothing else in my life. Now there is much else, and I’m finally able to enjoy the time between films.

“But I’m still terribly curious and love imagining how I would behave if I were someone else. One of my great pleasures in life is just to be in a crowd, to observe people and see behaviors, the little details in the way people dress and move their hands. These things are endlessly fascinating to me. I can’t imagine a filmmaker feeling otherwise.”