Of course you can use whatever you like from my film. And remember, there is no such thing as an author’s rights, only responsibilities!

Jean-Luc Godard

An imaginary letter to my friend Jean-Claude Biette, the French film critic and director who died suddenly last June, a few days before the heatwave began. Heaven could not wait.

Casemasce (Todi)
12 agosto 2003

Dear Jean-Claude,
It is summer here and I am grappling with a short statement for the Venice Film Festival catalogue. I know  that my introduction to The Dreamers must sound superficial and reductive and so I thought that I would send it to you, in the hope of obtaining a double miracle.
When you make a film, the rules, conventions, and even the logic of Time are suddenly and mysteriously suspended; everything works in the favour of cinema and new conventions, new laws and a new logic come into play. This idea has reassured me every time I made a film set in the past. For The Dreamers I imagined a physical encounter between three 20-year-olds from today, Eva Green, Louis Garrel and Michael Pitt and three 20-year-olds from 1968, Isabelle, Théo and Matthew. Unsurprisingly, I quickly realised that, like my three characters,   I too was coming to terms with 1968: the film camera had become a Time machine and imprisoned me.
I can sum up the discovery, or even the very essence, of this adventure for you in the following way: politics, shorn of ideology, which is now so disdained, seemed to me to have become nothing more than a professional practice, an empty vessel lacking any vision of the world, something far removed from me. But did we not already harbour similar fears in the 1960s? Were we not all enfants terribles? I will never forget the time that you came to my house in Rome, with your first joint clasped between your lips, reciting those verses of Francis Ponge, a poet also close to Godard’s heart – walking on your hands with your legs  in the air, a position that you then held for the duration of the evening, with all the grace and patience of an acrobat. Le Parti des choses… For the rest, as far as The Dreamers is concerned, my advice is simple: take note of the title.
With a great sense of nostalgia, your Bernardo

Bernardo Bertolucci