It was the early sixties, and Brigitte Bardot, Jeanne Moreau, Catherine Deneuve, and Delphine Seyrig were the stars in our sky. When I first met Jean-Claude Carrière, about fifty-five years ago—he was thirty, I was twenty-three—we were working on the same picture, though not together: Louis Malle’s Viva Maria! We shot it in Mexico, and since he had already started working with Buñuel on Belle de jour, it was only natural that he put elements of anarchy and surrealism into Malle’s film. This wasn’t exactly a guarantee of commercial success, though that approach did lead to well-received films like