How did Same Old Song come about?
Alain Resnais: After Smoking and No Smoking, Bruno Pesery asked me to film an opera written for the big screen. It probably would have been easy to finance the project in English but I felt that my knowledge of the language was insufficient for such an undertaking. I therefore looked for an alternative. During the work on the adaptation of Intimate Exchanges, the series of plays by
Alan Ayckbourn that led to Smoking and No Smoking, I had become close friends with Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri. I admired the musicality of their dialogue and their performances on
stage and screen. I therefore asked them if they would be interested writing a screenplay. They replied that they would but, having not appeared in our two "twin films," they didn't want to
write for other actors than themselves. This suited me perfectly. We then spent three or four afterno…
