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Pierre Cottrell was one of the most important figures linking the Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) and the New American Cinema. As a producer and active associate producer, Cottrell worked with some of the most creative filmmakers of the past fifty years. His role was often hard to define because he was involved in so many aspects of filmmaking, often uncredited.
Cottrell met Éric Rohmer when he was 15 at Cahiers du Cinéma. Four years later, in 1964, just back from the United States, he joined Barbet Schroeder and Rohmer, who were launching Films du Losange. While on a short trainee program in New York at Alcoa Aluminum Company in 1963, Cottrell had the privilege to get to know the fearsome Otto Preminger. The Viennese film director enjoyed dissecting his work with that rare species: a French cinephile. When Cottrell was arrested with Jonas Mekas on the charge of pornography by the New York police for having screened Jean Genet's film, Song of Love (1950), Preminger asked his niece Eve Preminger to take on the case.
Later on, in 1967, Cottrell was working with Films du Losange when Roger Corman asked him to organize the shooting of two films in Istanbul and Monte Carlo: The Wild Racers (1968) and Target: Harry (1969) (What's in it for Harry?). 1969 found him linked to the New Hollywood through his friend Jack Nicholson who was getting to stardom with his part in Easy Rider (1969). Right before the screening "hors competition" at the Cannes Film Festival of the film, Bert Schneider (founder of BBS with pals Rafelson and Blauner), not happy with the French subtitles provided by the Paris office of Columbia's, asked Cottrell to rewrite the French subtitles - since his return to France, Cottrell had been subtitling films with Bernard Eisenschitz, his buddy from the lycée Henri-IV. It might be of interest to know that the partnership was started by Pierre Rissient, then programming the MacMahon movie theater, who showed Joseph Losey's films in Paris. From 1969 to 1972, Cottrell concentrated on Films du Losange, producing three of Rohmer's most important films: My Night at Maud's (1969), Claire's Knee (1970), and Love in the Afternoon (1972), with the last two distributed in the USA by Columbia.
Back in 1966, Cottrell had helped Nicholson find French distribution for two Corman pictures he had produced, both directed by Monte Hellman, The Shooting (1966) and Ride in the Whirlwind (1966). After the huge box-office success of Easy Rider, Nicholson and Rafelson provided some money - half the budget of $120,000 - that Cottrell put into Jean Eustache's The Mother and the Whore (1973) in 1972. The film won two prizes at Cannes in 1973, but its length of 3 hours and 40 minutes prevented box-office success. Much was expected from Eustache's third film, My Little Loves (1974), a title from Rimbaud's poem. But the film was murdered: reviews came out two weeks after its release because Eustache had refused access to the press screening to a reviewer of dubious taste who had trashed The Mother and the Whore. The hack's colleagues, who had ignored him until then, decided to support him. So much for film critics backing independent "art films".
In 1975, as associate producer on Wim Wenders' The American Friend (1977), Cottrell brought Dennis Hopper to the production. Later, in 1981, he originated Lightning Over Water (1980), shot in New York by Wenders and the dying Nicholas Ray. Along with Hawks, Walsh and Lang, Ray figured in the pantheon of Cottrell's favorite directors. In 1982, he brought Wenders (who was on standby in San Francisco during the editing of Hammett) to Portugal, where The State of Things (1982) was shot. It was filmed back to back with Raúl Ruiz's The Territory (1981), another film he was involved with.
Cottrell continued to shuttle back and forth between Europe and the US until Roger Corman turned to him in 1978 for his production of Peter Bogdanovich's Saint Jack (1979) in Singapore. By then Cottrell had been supplying Corman with some of France's top cameramen, including Néstor Almendros, Pierre-William Glenn and Daniel Lacambre. Throughout the last three decades of his life, Cottrell worked as one of the world's most prestigious subtitlers. His credits include works by David Lynch, Spike Lee, Pedro Almodovar, Ridley Scott and many others. He always sought to eke out the right balance between a perfect translation of often jargon-laden dialogue into the patois of another language. He juggled meaning, nuance, mood, length and position to achieve what would appear seamless on screen, leaving viewers with the impression that they had not been reading at all. His dedication to finding the exact meaning and sense of every word produced truly magical results.
