Jean-Claude Carrière: Alone at last

It is always embarrassing to arrive, laden with luggage, to conduct an interview. It can create one of two impressions: either the interviewee is lucky to have been fitted into your hectic schedule; or (if it takes place in the latter's home) that you have major designs on the guest room. There was certainly more than a streak of irony in this situation when I landed, groaning under the weight of mes baggages, at the beautiful Paris residence – a former hunting lodge in the 19th arrondissement – of Jean-Claude Carrière, the prolific author, screenwriter, translator, playwright, dramaturg, intellectual and collaborator with a number of the greats of 20th-century theatre and film, including Peter Brook, Jacques Tati and Luis Buñuel.

It is always embarrassing to arrive, laden with luggage, to conduct an interview. It can create one of two impressions: either the interviewee is lucky to have been fitted into your hectic schedule; or (if it takes place in the latter's home) that you have major designs on the guest room. There was certainly more than a streak of irony in this situation when I landed, groaning under the weight of mes baggages, at the beautiful Paris residence – a former hunting lodge in the 19th arrondissement – of Jean-Claude Carrière, the prolific author, screenwriter, translator, playwright, dramaturg, intellectual and collaborator with a number of the greats of 20th-century theatre and film, including Peter Brook, Jacques Tati and Luis Buñuel.

We were meeting to talk about the British premiere of Carrière's 1970s play, L'Aide-Memoire (translated as The Little Black Book) a humorously haunting, psychologically and metaphysically tricksy two-hander that has opened at the Riverside Studios in the Coup de Theatre company's production, sponsored by the French Institute and starring Susannah Harker and Paul McGann. The setting is a bachelor apartment, occupied by a thirtysomething lawyer who keeps a little black book recording his sexual conquests. Out of the blue, his territory and sytematised way of life are invaded by a mysterious woman. She may not come weighed down with Louis Vuitton, but she's not unfreighted with emotional baggage and she fully intends to stay.

I tell Carrière that, at the start, the woman reminded me of a heroine from Thirties screwball comedy: she has the mad, almost autistic sense of entitlement of, say, Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby. "Yes, there's certainly a firm decision to remain there," says Carrière – and an initial tendency to act and think in straight lines. And would it be fair to say that the play is reminiscent, in a more teasing mode, of Last Tango in Paris – rather as though Bertolucci's movie had been rewritten by that incisive 18th-century analyst of the heart, Pierre Marivaux? "Yes, but it's sexier than Last Tango in Paris," counters Carrière, who has a nice way with twinkling irony. "You could say that it's like Last Tango in that it's a love story between a man, a woman and an apartment."

Carrière was just back from a four-day visit to India, accompanying the Prime Minister of France in an advisory capacity. He's an old India hand, having travelled there extensively during his 11-year collaboration with Peter Brook on the stage adaptation of the Sanskrit epic The Mahabharata. Before the latest India trip, he was in the US for a week. So during our conversation, the phone rings repeatedly. One call is from the novelist Umberto Eco, who has a chair at the University of Bologna where he and Carrière run a course investigating the points of overlap between media and art forms. These calls are strong competition for the interview, but Carrière, who is a very gracious and welcoming man, manages to treat neither me nor them as interruptions.

Never mind a little black book; one fancies that his telephone book would make fascinating reading. "I don't keep a little black book of the women I have known," says Carrière, who, at the age of 70, has just had a baby with his second wife. "The only book I have is in imitation of Buñuel [the surrealist master with whom Carrière collaborated on films ranging from Belle de Jour to That Obscure Object of Desire]. It's a 'Book of the Dead'. He would write down the names of dead friends. It is macabre and very Spanish, but it is also very helpful and very tonic. Buñuel would put a red star for the members of the Surrealist group and a sort of red circle for the people who committed suicide. For people I dearly loved, like my mother, I put just a tear. It's a nice way of having the dead follow you during your whole life."

To need a visual reminder of which of one's friends committed suicide suggests a galère of chums and colleagues at once large and rarefied. The phone calls give me the chance to drink in the loveliness (unostentatious, humane in dimensions) of Carrière's home. My eye is drawn in particular to an adorable, sugar-pink statuette of Ganesha, the elephant-headed Hindu god who features in The Mahabharata. It was an animal somewhat smaller than an elephant – a stray cat – that was the inspiration of The Little Black Book. "It was around 1967. I was here alone. My wife was in the South, expecting our daughter. I left a window open and a cat climbed in, totally indifferent to me, and took up residence, looking around to see if the place was good enough. I did everything possible to chase the cat away. The second day I began to relent. The third day I was out looking for food for it (all the shops were closed in Paris). When I came back, it had gone – forever."

The play is a cat's cradle (so to speak) of ambiguities. This did not stop the American producers (in New York, the one place where it flopped) from imposing a simplified pattern. "They made it the story of revenge. The couple had straightforwardly known one another in the past. He had left her and she had returned to take revenge on him. Which is absurd." But there was nothing he or the director, his friend Milos Forman, could do. "They cut one of the acts entirely. They said, 'You don't know anything about the American audience,' – as though the American audience is somehow essentially different." I confess to him that I dropped my unpaginated typescript of The Little Black Book and had (given the nature of the piece) the especially fiddly task of returning the pages to their original order. "I hope that my play is the same as yours," I joke. "Well, I had no idea, when I started it, how it was going to end," he laughs.

"In my life, I have really known three masters," Carrière says. "The first was Tati. He taught me how to start from reality, how to observe, how to look at people. Working with Tati was sitting at a café and hoping that the world that day had created a Jacques Tati film: the people in the street, that cab, the woman over there. Look, look. Then Buñuel was the opposite: the cult of the imagination, everything coming from the inside. With him, the idea was that we are all murderers; we have all raped our mothers and killed our fathers.

"And Peter Brook, who is the third master and the only one still alive, is the one who says, 'Our work is a constant work in progress, for tomorrow brings another day and another audience.'" True to his precepts, Brook has just directed a new French version of Hamlet (in a translation by Carrière) that evolved from the English-language staging that visited Britain two years ago.

After one telephonic interruption, Carrière resumes the conversation with a sigh. A third DVD version of Belle de Jour is about to be issued. "Every time, I have to do another interview," laments its co-author. I wonder whether he has found talking about The Little Black Book as much of a chore. This may be the belated British premiere, but the play is a staple in some countries. If he was bored by the obligation, I can only say that he disguised his feelings to a miraculous degree. But then this man is clearly still animated by wonder. Carrière, it seems, fulfils what he says is Peter Brook's prescription for a happy artistic life: "To be a child – with experience."

'The Little Black Book', to 15 March, Riverside Studios, London W6 (020-8237 1111)

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