Festival Lumière 2016
Tribute to Jim Harrison

PostED ON 11.07.2016

In 2010, at the Lumière festival, while presenting Touch of Evil, the climax of his carte blanche selection, writer Jim Harrison mentioned the monstrous appetite of Orson Welles. Welles had become so huge at the end of his life that it took several people to get him out of his limousine. Later, Jim Harrison recounted the gargantuan menu of a dinner with Orson, where the filmmaker had swallowed "half a pound of caviar with a bottle of vodka, salmon with sorrel, veal sweetbreads in pastry crust, a small leg of lamb (in its entirety), all accompanied by five wines, cheeses with port wine and desserts."

© Institut Lumière / Photo Ronchon

Jim Harrison passed away in March at age 78. After a decidedly "larger than life" existence, he enjoyed spending the summer in a rural house in Montana (in winter, he returned to Patagonia, Arizona); but he could jump on a plane and cross the Atlantic for lunch - with plenty to drink. He once boasted having downed 144 oysters in a row... His gastronomic feats can be found in Aventures d'un gourmand vagabond by Christian Bourgois, but arguably count a little less than the rest of his work of fiction and poetry, from Legends of the Fall (his first success in 1979, after several stories and poetry collections) to his most famous work, Dalva (most of his novels are available at 10/18 Editions). Jim Harrison was the great novelist of American nature, and man in the face of it, whose lyrical writing evokes less Hemingway, to whom he has sometimes been compared, than Faulkner.

In the 80s, Jim Harrison had spent time in Hollywood writing several scripts. It's not sure the worldly society life on the West Coast was quite his cup of whiskey, but he had kept his friends for life. Even after coming back from rattlesnakes and grizzly bears, Jack Nicholson, whom he met through Thomas McGuane, Warren Beatty or Sean Connery remained intimate friends. Harrison had undoubtedly worked on a heap of unfinished projects, but his contribution to the cinema was mostly limited to the adaptation of his own novels… Legends of the Fall (1994), directed by Ed Zwick, starring Brad Pitt, earned him a million dollars (but he confessed to blowing it all on alcohol and cocaine); the underrated Wolf (1994) by Mike Nichols, where Nicholson turns into a werewolf, is an ingenious combination of the actor with a "Harrisonian" theme par excellence.

The novelist had long hoped that John Huston would direct the adaptation of Revenge, but in the end it was Tony Scott, who took charge in 1990 - not quite the same thing. "Huston dropping the project was my biggest disappointment in Hollywood," he had told American magazine The Paris Review. "I loved writing screenplays, but going from one project to another is very tiring. Nobody forced me. The reason writers let themselves be overwhelmed by the Hollywood industry is simply the result of a basic human emotion: greed. There's nothing literary within - just the desire to make money. Why should I blame Warner for my own greed? Faulkner always presented himself as a martyr of Hollywood. Rubbish! His family had a great lifestyle; he provided for seventeen people- his brother's children, aunts, uncles, an alcoholic wife. Whether old Billy wanted to go to Los Angeles or not, all these people pressured him to make more money!" One can also think that Jim Harrison, that day, was in a very foul mood...