Bertrand Tavernier obituary

The film-maker Bertrand Tavernier, who has died aged 79, invested his movies with a scrupulous and humane curiosity, no matter what the theme, genre or setting. He was catholic in his enthusiasms, moving easily from period drama to policier, swashbuckler to science-fiction, wide-ranging documentary to intimate musical elegy. The Observer critic Philip French said in 2002 that the director “combines a powerful intellect with a strong social conscience and has a greater knowledge of, and feeling for, the history of cinema than any moviemaker alive”.

Tavernier enjoyed international success with A Sunday in the Country (1984), his portrait of an ageing artist and his family at the dawn of the 20th century; it won him the best director prize at the Cannes film festival. Round Midnight (1986) starred the saxophonist Dexter Gordon, who was Oscar-nominated for best actor, as a jazz musician who flees New York for Paris in the 1950s. Herbie Hancock, also seen on screen, won an Oscar for his score. Tavernier’s evocation of the smoky bebop milieu, and his faith in music to do much of the heavy lifting, resulted in one of the most generous and authentic films ever made about jazz.

Also among his finest work was Coup de Torchon (1981), which transposed Jim Thompson’s pulp novel Pop. 1280 to French West Africa in the 1930s, and starred Philippe Noiret and Isabelle Huppert. The crime writer Donald E Westlake considered it the best screen adaptation of Thompson’s writing.

Tavernier had already won favour with his debut, The Watchmaker of Saint-Paul (1974), which began a collaboration with Noiret that spanned two decades and nine films. To help him adapt the movie from Georges Simenon’s novel The Watchmaker of Everton, Tavernier hired two screenwriters, Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, who had been eviscerated by François Truffaut 20 years earlier in the infamous broadside against “le cinéma de papa” that had paved the way for the French New Wave.

As well as admiring the men’s work, Tavernier reasoned that they would be that bit hungrier to prove themselves in the wake of the drubbing from Truffaut. His instinct was correct: the film is one of the outstanding debuts of postwar French cinema. Noiret, with his sagging jowls and disappointed aspect, is achingly understated as the humble man whose son is accused of murder. Jean Rochefort plays the detective leading the murder investigation. They go for walks together, have lunch, even share a sleeping compartment on a train. One man may be hunting the other’s son, but that is no reason not to be civil.

During a protracted financing period, Tavernier was offered double his fee if he relocated the production to Paris from Lyon. He refused: “I wanted Lyon to be a character in the film. It’s secretive like the characters in a Simenon. It’s not a city which gives itself up easily.”

It is impossible now to imagine the story without that picturesque city’s mix of the sleepy and the enigmatic, any more than Tavernier’s science-fiction drama Death Watch (1980), starring Harvey Keitel and Romy Schneider, can be divorced from its imaginative use of locations in the Scottish Highlands and Glasgow, or the reportage-style drugs squad drama L.627 (1992) could be conceivable anywhere but in its urban rat-run of cramped interiors.

“If I’m proud of one thing in my films,” he said in 1984, “it’s that you can’t separate the characters from the specific worlds in which they live.”

Also crucial to The Watchmaker of Saint-Paul is a compassion that could be described as Tavernier-esque. Another director might have gone in for the kill on several occasions, such as when Noiret is listening to his son’s police interview tape, or when the two men spot one another across an airport bar after a long period of separation. But Tavernier holds the camera back, affording his characters their privacy and dignity.

Equally conscientious was Daddy Nostalgie (1990), released in the UK as These Foolish Things, in which Dirk Bogarde (in his final role) and Jane Birkin played a father and daughter repairing their relationship at the last possible moment. Tavernier’s films, often revolving around acts of solidarity or decency, were in themselves inherently decent.

He was born in Lyon, to Geneviève (nee Dumond) and René Tavernier. His father was a writer who founded Confluences, a journal of the French resistance. Stricken with tuberculosis as a child, Tavernier later said films “gave me a reason to live”. Though his parents tried to steer him towards law, he became intent on being a director. Following his education at Lycée Henry IV and the Sorbonne in Paris, he earned a pittance writing about film. One of his interview subjects, Claude Sautet, went with another director, Jean-Pierre Melville, to implore Tavernier’s parents to let him pursue a career in film. He called them “my two godfathers in cinema”.

Though he didn’t cut it as an assistant to the often tyrannical Melville, the director recommended instead a career as a press agent, which brought Tavernier into contact with people he admired, including John Ford and Jean-Luc Godard. Only the demands of Stanley Kubrick proved too much. In a cable notifying that director of his resignation from press duties on A Clockwork Orange (1971), he wrote: “As a film-maker you are a genius, but as an employer you are an imbecile.”

By this time, Tavernier had already made several shorts. In preparation for directing his first feature, he decided “to wait, to go on studying films, but to live and to be curious about life and politics”. Nearly a decade elapsed between those shorts and The Watchmaker of Saint-Paul. He continued his collaboration with Noiret and Aurenche on his next film, Let Joy Reign Supreme (1975). Bost rejoined the team for The Judge and the Assassin (1976), which completed a trilogy on the theme of justice.

Subsequent films included Life and Nothing But (1989), starring Noiret as an officer identifying dead and missing soldiers, and The Undeclared War (1992), a four-hour documentary about the Algerian conflict. His two late-period triumphs were Safe Conduct (2002), set in the French film industry during the occupation and featuring Aurenche as a character (played by Denis Podalydès), and the documentary My Journey Through French Cinema (2016), a personal survey of the directors who were dearest to him.

“I make films because I want to learn,” he said. “Not only about how to make films but also about life … When a director stops being curious, stops looking at things around him, that’s the end.” He brought to mind the school principal at the centre of It All Starts Today, his 1999 film about the injustices of the French public education system, who is heard telling parents: “You have no right to give up.” It was a motto by which Tavernier lived his life.

He is survived by his wife, Sarah, and by his children from his previous marriage: Nils, an actor and director, who appeared in several of his father’s films, and the novelist and screenwriter Tiffany, who co-wrote with Tavernier It All Starts Today and Holy Lola (2004), about a French couple adopting a Cambodian orphan. His first wife was the teacher and screenwriter Claudine, known as “Colo” (nee O’Hagan), who co-wrote several scripts with him including A Sunday in the Country. They were divorced in 1980.

• Bertrand René Maurice Tavernier, director, born 25 April 1941; died 25 March 2021