.

I am the opposite of a writer. To make a film you must do everything yourself. To make an adaptation you must find in the book what could be inside yourself, what corresponds with your own observations. For the subject I've now been working on for many months I took notes on pieces of paper and put them together and waited, as I always do, till I thought the time had come to write the script. But I'm less and less in a hurry. I let things come instead of going to them. When I start writing the script I try much harder than I used to to see and hear the things together. Sometimes I write three or four lines—perhaps ten—of dialogue, which comes into my head, just like that. Then with that I try to make a filmscript. The dialogue is made inside my head and this dialogue, when I have finished it, I take apart and try to rewrite it fifty times. I'm not a writer but I want it to be mine.

[...]

How did you arrive at the idea for the film (Au hasard Balthazar)?

Some years ago I had the idea for the film and I wanted to write it as soon as I'd finished shooting the film I was working on. The first morning, nothing came, and I had to stop. I tried many times to write it and I couldn't. I made a lot of notes and that's all. But one day I said, "I'll have to write it or the film will never be made." Then I wrote it down in two days. In the meantime I had the two big ideas for the construction: for the donkey, as for a man, if you see the time when he studies and then the time when he works, then death approaching, then the mystical time before dying, then the death, as for a human being. The other idea was to make him pass through all the vices of humanity. Then it was easier for me to write it down on paper.

Robert Bresson

from an interview in Transatlantic Review, Summer 1973 (read full)