The Mother and The Whore - Production

Production

In 1972 Eustache had begun to doubt his career in films and contemplated quitting the business. He told a reporter from Le Nouvel Observateur "If I knew what it was that I wanted, I wouldn't wake up in the morning to make films. I'd do nothing, I'd try to live without doing or producing anything." Soon afterwards he got a new idea for a film to make with his friends Jean-Pierre Léaud, Bernadette Lafont and Françoise Lebrun, who at that time was a literature student that he knew and had never acted before. He was loaned money from friend Barbet Schroeder to spend three months writing the script, which was over three-hundred pages. Although the film often seems to be highly improvised, every word of dialogue was written by Eustache.

The film was shot in only four months on a budget of 700,000 francs. Eustache called it a very hostile film, and it mostly consisted of dialogues and monologues about sex. Eushache says that the character Alexandre is "destroying, but he is looking for it all along. After his voyage into madness and depression, he ends up alone. That's when I stop the film." The film had no musical score and only used natural sounds and occasionally music played by the characters on phonographs, such as Mozart and Edith Piaf. Eustache described the film as a "narrative of certain seemingly innocous acts. It could be the narrative of entirely different acts, in other places. What happens, the places where the action unfolds, have no importance...My subject is the way in which important actions situate themselves in a continum of innocuous ones. It's the description of the normal course of events without the schematic abbreviation of cinematographic dramatization."