The lm Arithmétique, which I made the year before [1952] based on an idea of Queneau, was originally going to be, more or less, a feature length lm. It was part of a series of ten lms, L’Encyclopedie l- mée, of which two were made by Grémil- lon during the same period: Astrologie and Alchimie. Arithmétique is a lm that was very dear to me because I loved Raymond Queneau, whom I often saw with Boris [Vian]. There was a tight bond between them. In fact, Queneau was one of the few who realized that Vian was a great writer (…). It was in a schoolroom, but from the window you could see a set made in the style of a German lm by Murnau. We built it ourselves and then lmed Queneau for two days in this set. Then a problem arose. The producers thought the scene was too long; they did not understand that it was a trial run imbued with cold humor, and they thought it would have been boring. They did not want to produce the lm. They nally accepted with a number of compromises, but with Léonide Azar as editor we had to cut a lot of things, which I regret. Azar was considered the editor of the century because of how he tempered, corrected and balanced the majority of the greatest commercial lms. But he too did not understand Queneau’s sense of humor, which was too ahead of his time, and whose books, moreover, were not very well-known. Pierre Kast, in Pierre Boiron, Pierre Kast, Lherminier, Paris 1985