This Cineaste Values His Own View Above All

Pierre Rissient, whom Variety once called “very possibly the least-known man of tremendous influence in the entire world of cinema,” was eating a garlicky lunch here the other day at a cafe he has loved for 35 years when the conversation turned to Clint Eastwood.

Rissient--unofficial scout for the Cannes International Film Festival, behind-the-scenes advisor to many filmmakers and unrepentant snob--is currently an executive at the European film company Pathe. But years ago, as a press attache who shepherded the likes of Altman, Forman, Scorsese and Coppola around France, this stocky, bald cineaste forged some unshakable opinions about which filmmakers matter. And Dirty Harry made the cut.

“Clint is not a silly movie star. I don’t think he is a perfect director all the time. But his body of work? Five, six or seven films are first-class,” said Rissient, 62, who declares that critics who disagree are just wrong.

“When people argue and tell me it’s a matter of personal taste, I say, ‘Yes, it’s a matter of good taste and bad taste.’ It’s not my fault if I am right. It’s maybe my curse to be right.”

This is Rissient: blunt and bombastic, loyal to his friends and armed with a fierce enthusiasm that comes from half a century of loving cinema. His resume is astounding. In the 1950s, he worked as an assistant director on the New Wave classic “Breathless” while also striving to rebuild the reputations of blacklisted directors such as Joseph Losey. In the 1960s, he was a protege of director Fritz Lang and shot screen tests of young actresses for Howard Hawks. More recently, he has nurtured the careers of filmmakers as diverse as Australia’s Jane Campion and China’s Chen Kaige.

Having attended every Cannes festival since 1964, he acknowledges that sometimes he feels like a dinosaur. A true curmudgeon, he refuses, for example, to don a tuxedo for screenings at the Palais, preferring his usual T-shirts and jeans. Used to conducting business in person, he only begrudgingly carries a cellular phone, but he cannot receive calls because he does not know the number.

“But my mind is young,” Rissient insists. Watch him navigate this festival--whether wooing a top Hollywood director for an upcoming project, berating agents to gain access to their clients, acting as a fixer to link European businessmen with the festival’s hottest stars or chatting up the people he calls “my crowd” (film festival directors and critics)--and it is difficult to doubt him.

“Pierre is a deeply religious person and his religion is film,” said writer-director James Toback (“Two Girls and a Guy,” “Fingers”), who describes Rissient as having “a champion’s sensibility.”

“He wants to husband films and filmmakers into the limelight, and once he decides someone is worth attention, he becomes a crusader,” said Toback. “But he is not willing to say this is a democratic arena in which your opinion is as valuable as his. He regards his values as sacrosanct and not negotiable. He knows he knows more about film than anyone else.”

Veteran director Robert Altman is said to describe Rissient as “painfully sincere.” Bryan Singer (who directed “The Usual Suspects” and “Apt Pupil”) agrees. He met Rissient after his first film, “Public Access,” won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance in 1993, and he says he will never forget it.

“I was referred to speak to him. Or, in other words, I was summoned,” he said, recalling that Rissient exhibited a “loving contempt” for his work. “He proceeded to be very blunt, saying he saw great potential in the film but criticizing certain aspects. He had no trouble being specific as to what those aspects were. No trouble at all.”

Outwardly, Singer reacted defensively. Inwardly, he knew Rissient was right. He has sought Rissient’s opinions ever since--often, like many filmmakers, while he is completing a film.

Rissient lives in Paris, but much of the time he is on the road. This year he came to Cannes directly from South Africa, where Pathe will shoot its first independent production in years, a film version of Athol Fugard’s play “Boesman and Lena” starring Danny Glover and Angela Bassett. Each year, Rissient makes five trips to Asia--where he is considered a pioneering advocate of Chinese, Korean, Sri Lankan, Filipino and Taiwanese film--one to Australia and as many as eight to the United States and Canada.

When he is in Los Angeles, he is often tightly scheduled, with back-to-back screenings and meetings with directors. Sometimes that has resulted in a culture clash.

In 1998, for example, Rissient was scheduled to see “Bulworth.” Greeted at the screening room by Warren Beatty, the film’s co-writer, director and star, Rissient explained that he had limited time before another appointment. Apparently, Beatty didn’t believe him, because the movie star kept talking about the film instead of showing it. Finally, Rissient was out of time. He left without seeing the film.

“It was very friendly,” Rissient says of his awkward departure, which he denies played any role in the fact that “Bulworth” was not at Cannes that year. “He could have sent it to Cannes” for consideration.

Undeniably, though, an endorsement from Rissient is immensely valuable because he has the ear of festival director Gilles Jacob, a close friend.

Controversy Over His Festival Role

That Rissient has been employed by a film production company while also weighing in on the merits of festival entries has prompted some criticism. In his previous job, when he worked for the French company CIBY 2000, for example, he still sat on the official Cannes selection committee. After four CIBY films won the Palme d’Or, the festival’s top prize, there was an outcry.

“Some people out of ignorance and envy started to say it’s not ethical that Pierre is on both sides. I knew inside myself, and people who know me knew, that while I have a temper and can be a pain in the ass, no one would say I have been corrupted,” he said, still smarting a bit over the flap that ended his official role two years ago. “But I stay close to Gilles. If I see a picture in Asia or Los Angeles, or I am brought by Australia and Canada to see their new films, I say, ‘This is the best one.’ ”

Rissient is picky. This year, of the 50 or so films Rissient saw from Canada and Australia, he put in a good word for only four. And he is not always successful: Bill Bennett’s “In a Savage Land,” for example, which Rissient says he recommended to Jacob, was not accepted. But for the most part, said Phoenix Pictures chief Mike Medavoy, Rissient is perceived to “know what will work in Cannes and what won’t.”

He is impatient with cinematic ignorance.

“If he doesn’t think your opinion is worth listening to, he will shrug his shoulders and think you are unenlightened,” said critic David Thomson, author of the respected “A Biographical Dictionary of Film,” who says Rissient--though a tremendous “spreader of the word” about Far Eastern and Iranian film, for example--can often be pompous. “He believes he is speaking as the voice of objective reason.”

Rissient can also be a bully. People are still talking about last year’s Telluride Film Festival, where Rissient dressed down a producer who’d had preliminary discussions about a project with a director friend of Rissient, but then had the audacity to hire someone else.

“I did not yell,” said Rissient, who believes to this day that his outburst was justified. “But when I get angry, I can be strong.”

That has seemingly always been true. French director Bertrand Tavernier, who worked closely with Rissient doing PR in the 1970s, recalls that Rissient had a permanent falling out with Losey after the director said he hoped to cast Brigitte Bardot as a virgin in the film “The Trout.”

“Rissient was outraged,” Tavernier said, and wrote Losey a harsh letter, “but he was right” that Bardot was wrong for the part. “Losey owed Pierre a lot--Pierre had been the first to praise him after the blacklist. But 14 years later, they still didn’t speak.”

While Rissient adheres rigidly to certain long-held beliefs, he somehow still manages to remain curious about what is new and experimental. For example, he helped get Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs” to Cannes and calls him the most interesting American director working today. And he is constantly searching for obscure talents, past and present.

“What is striking is he will be as interested in seeing a silent film of the ‘20s as to see a [new] North Korean film even without subtitles,” said Tavernier. Indeed, the film Rissient proclaims to be the best in Cannes this year is “From Saturday to Sunday,” a 1930 love story by a neglected Czech director named Gustav Machaty.

“If people think I have seen more films than others, it is because I keep challenging the official history of cinema,” Rissient said. “I think my motivation is to repair the injustice that some filmmakers should have been known and are not.

“What I believe, and I hope I am not wrong, is in taking the pulse of creativity of someone,” he added. “I cannot say what makes a great filmmaker, or a great poet. But I hope I can recognize it when I see it.”