noir conceits only flirted with in the past (most notably in Tarr’s 1989 film Damnation). In short, The Man from London appears to inch Tarr toward an increased accessibility.

I spoke with Tarr on the telephone in December 2006, as he was preparing to return to Bastia, Corsica, for final shooting.

Fionn Meade: You are in the process of finishing The Man From London. How is the completion of the film going?

Béla Tarr: We will finish shooting soon. We shot the first period in 2005; that was nine days in Bastia. Then this year, in March, we shot for eight days in Hungary. We will finish the movie, with 23 total shooting days, in Bastia.

FM: The film has an unusual history; you had to overcome a lot of difficulties to make it.

BT: Yes. Our French co-producer, Humbert Balsan, committed suicide just before filming began, which was terrible. He was a real friend of mine, and you know that if somebody commits suicide, it’s always a kind of betrayal. Also, his company wasn’t able to fulfill the production work. The bank stopped the cash flow. We had to reorganize. Then a new co-producer, another Frenchman who produced Werckmeister Harmonies, came on board, and he’s doing the French production work.

FM: But the chances are good that it will show at Cannes in May?

BT: I want to be ready. I promised the producers, the investors, and my friend Humbert who died; he wanted

to show this movie in Cannes. I want to dedicate this movie to him and his memory. He was the first producer in my life who wasn’t a kind of enemy. The relationship between the director and the producer is always something of a fight, but I must say I never fought with him. I trusted him and he trusted me.

FM: The film is also unusual in that your frequent collaborator, the novelist László Krasznahorkai, did work on the script, but it is based on the novel L’Homme de Londres by Georges Simenon.

BT: This is a short story and a very long story as to how I found this project. It was after the 1994 Satan’s Tango screening at the New York Film Festival. I got a letter from an American producer who wanted to work with me; he had sent a script that I really didn’t like, and I refused immediately. But he had another idea, a short story by Heinrich Von Kleist, and I liked that very much, but it was an incredibly expensive project, so I proposed this Simenon story to him. I remembered only the atmosphere of the story from reading it nearly 25 years ago. It is a kind of film noir, really. I proposed it to him, and he bought the rights to the option. Afterward he left the production, but the story stayed.

FM: In most of Simenon’s stories, including The Man from London, something unusual happens to a normal person that sets them on a different path.

BT: What do you mean?

FM: Well, in this case, one of the main characters is a switchman at a seaside railway station who witnesses a

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