(From left to right) Jean-Claude Carri?re, director Jonathan Glazer, actresses Lauren Bacall and Nicole Kidman, and actor Danny Huston during a photocall for Birth, at the American Film Festival of Deauville, 2004

It is strange how screenplay writers are regarded as backstage boys in India, allowing actors and directors to hog the limelight. That is probably why when Jean-Claude Carri?re took the stage at the Book Fair for the Asoke Kumar Sarkar Memorial Lecture, there was an apology of an audience in the auditorium. It was only when the announcer started rattling out names of his associates ? Luis Bu?uel, Louis Malle, Jean-Luc Godard, Peter Brook? ? that Calcutta woke up to the stature of the tall, bearded, 73-year-old Frenchman whose works have been crowned with all major awards in the world, from the Oscar to the Golden Palm at Cannes to the Golden Lion at Venice.

At the hotel the morning after a profound lecture on his experience of adapting The Mahabharata for stage, Carri?re was ready to walk down memory lane, back 42 years when he first met the 63-year-old Bu?uel at age 32, with just one film and one documentary on his bio-data. ?I knew I was meeting a monument. He was looking for a French screenplay writer. We had lunch. And in a few weeks, I got a call saying I was selected!? Thus started an association which lasted 19 years. Bu?uel, he recalled, was a strong man and tough to work with. ?He was a boxer in his youth. He fought two or three times and lost once. So I wouldn?t rate him highly,? Carri?re grinned.

But the next moment he was all reverence while pointing out how the meeting of Garcia Lorca, Salvador Dali and Bu?uel in their youth was the ?number one important event in Spanish culture in the last century?.

If Carri?re made his on-screen debut in The Diary of a Chambermaid in 1964, it was at Bu?uel?s insistence. ?A screenplay writer has to act during the discussion of a scene. He thought I was a good actor, but I?d do only for a priest?s role. I was in Belle du Jour too, but the censors cut me off,? he sighed in serio-comic sadness.

Talk of associations reminded him of another giant ? Gerard Depardieu. ?We did three great films together ? Le retour de Martin Guerre, Cyrano de Bergerac and Danton.? But it was for Un peu de soleil dans l?eau froide that they met. ?It was a small role. I had forgotten about it. He was just starting out then.? In Carri?re?s view, Depardieu was always extremely gifted. ?He could find things that writers and actors could not. Once he said that on getting a script, he felt like tearing the paper and getting into it. He has such immense possibilities. I tell him that he can even play a woman.?

For Cyrano?, Carri?re and director Jean-Paul Rappeneau got Depardieu to read aloud all the roles on a recorder. ?The contrast between the monumental man and his fragile voice created just the impact we needed to bring out the vulnerable dimension in the character who seems to be perfect.?

Gerard Depardieu and (below left) Luis Bu?uel (right in picture) with a friend

Carri?re is clear that when he does a script, it is a collaboration with the director. But what happens when it is an existing work of fiction that he is working on, like G?nter Grass? The Tin Drum or Milan Kundera?s The Unbearable Lightness of Being? ?If the author is alive, all the better. But both G?nter and Milan know that cinema requires a different language. So they left it to me. Both made additions after seeing the script. G?nter added local expressions from Danzig, his birthplace, where the story is set. The other script was a complicated process. Milan had written in French. The film was in English, a language unfamiliar to him. In 19th century Europe, every country had its own English. The character of Daniel Day Lewis was to speak English with a light Czech accent. Juliette Binoche was to speak with a French accent, while the other character (Leon Olin) had a Swedish accent. Yet, Milan got so excited on seeing the draft that he started writing me letters. The film has lines from him which are not there in the novel.?

Having written for both stage and screen, Carri?re, the first foreign-language writer to win the Writers Guild of America award, feels that the language of cinema has to be learnt. The screenplay writer, he explained, is already an editor when he is writing. ?There is a secret link between shots. The following image is seen through the eyes of the character. This is important for neither books nor plays.? Such is the importance of sequence that when during the making of Birth, some links were found missing in the editing room, a reshoot was decided on. ?Thankfully, the producer agreed and Nicole Kidman, the star, gave us a week of free time. Sometimes, some ideas come to you when the film is in the theatres. Then, of course, it is too late,? he smiled. Also it is only on screen that one can whisper.

Yet, given a choice, he would opt for the stage. ?It is the oldest way of expression and brings you closest to the audience.? During his trip to Delhi the day before, he had received an offer from Bharat Kapoor for a shorter version of his Mahabharata. ?I was asked to narrate the whole story in an hour. I managed in an hour and five minutes.?

Back in Calcutta, he found the city still prone to pollution problems. ?Otherwise, India looks more prosperous today.? During his 1981-82 trip, he had met Satyajit Ray several times. ?He had said he wanted to make a film out of Mahabharata but to raise the money for that he would have to make it in English using American actors. And he could not bear to see Kirk Douglas do Arjuna. Perhaps today, he would have said Brad Pitt,? Carri?re winked and turned towards lunch.