[..]

So I said to the potential producers that probably there would never be a film. We could do something with documents but without the participation of Richter it would be an insignificant movie. This was around April, May 1995. I was absolutely exhausted because in the previous four years I had finished a series of films on Fischer-Dieskau, on Menuhin, on Oistrack, and on this young French violinist, Gilles Apap. I felt exhausted by the tension of making these films, and I needed to recharge my batteries. I decided to cancel everything for a few months, just to live on my own and try to think about what I wanted to do. And so for a few months I took it easy. One thing which was difficult to cancel was a concert tour which I was meant to do in South America, but I cancelled that too—it was supposed to take place in early September. And afterwards I thought, my God, it's amazingly fortuitous that I should have cancelled that tour, because it was at that time, in early September 1995, that Richter called me. Or, rather, Milena called me and said that the Maestro wished to see me as he wanted me to do his biography. I said, what do you mean, do his biography? And she said, "I don't know, but he keeps repeating that many things are being written about him which are totally false, and that he'd like Bruno to do his biography." I said, "But what do you mean?" She couldn't tell me. I said, "Look, first of all, I am not a biographer. I'm not going to write, or to write a film, if indeed there is going to be a film." She said, "No no no, do his biography". I asked whether I could see him. She said no, that he doesn't want to see anybody. I said, "Milena, what am I supposed to do? We have to define things a little more clearly." And then it occurred to me that maybe I should write a few pages, in which I would set out some kind of framework. ...

[..]

In January 1997 I went to Singapore and Australia, and saw the new digital cameras. They were very, very small, absolutely tiny. Not quite broadcast quality, but digital nonetheless. And I bought one, thinking, who knows, it's so small, maybe we could link it to some professional system and do something. When I came back to France, I went to see them in Antibes right away. He seemed to be happy to see me. It was like a new phase, we went to restaurants, but he was still very weak. I went to see the production company I worked with on many of my films, and I said, let's try something. So I brought my cameraman, Raphael O'Byrne, to Antibes and introduced him as my assistant as he would have to remain hidden. And Richter liked him quite a bit, there was no problem, and he spent a few days there. We were looking at possible set-ups, to work out exactly where the camera should be placed. I wanted it to look absolutely neutral. There were, of course, many requirements in terms of light, but there was no way to bring in any kind of artificial light, anything at all. So we would have to shoot in the afternoons, relying on the natural light of the sun coming through the bay window. We started testing it in February. I got a few sentences out of him, and he didn't seem to notice anything at all. Then we planned a longer period of shooting where, having many days to play with, we could decide on a day-to-day basis whether he was in good enough shape for us to shoot, whether his mood and disposition were right or not. We decided to come in March, which is usually the time when my father comes to the flat, so my brothers and I sent him to Venice for a few days with his wife so that the Richters could stay. And we did that shooting period with my cameraman hidden in the kitchen. We had cabled the little camera via the balcony and the terrace to the kitchen. And there was no way to have an operator behind the camera, which was very problematic, because we had to frame, and I wanted to have close-ups as well as just wide-shots. So we actually bought two little cameras, one for close-ups and one for wide-shots. Whenever Richter made a move to the right or to the left, he would be out of frame. So I sat just in front of him, and whenever he leant to one side or the other, I would try to bring him back, it was a kind of unspoken mise-en-scčne.
Also, since I felt he was not really able or keen to talk, I thought maybe I'll just ask him to read some of his notes which I selected very carefully from the archival research which we had started two years before. So that they would be able to fit with some of the documents that we had found. I also thought that if I were to ask him to read specific things, this might raise some questions which he might answer more naturally than if there were the effort of unbroken conversation. This is how we worked for a period of ten days. He made me know that he knew that I was filming in a very funny way. But he wanted me to know that he knew. It was wonderfully touching. One day his assistant wanted to take his pullover to the cleaners. He said, "No, no, it's much prettier for Bruno like this". We did some shooting that day, and after the shooting, in his car, which he was driving, he asked me, "Did you manage to shoot today? Did you manage to film today?" I said, "Yes, Maestro." "And with this?", he pointed to his pullover. I said, "Yes, Maestro, it was very pretty". That was all. He wanted me to know.

[..]

Well, I was very interested in reading Proust in Russian, as I had read him in French, English and Italian but not in Russian. It had come out for the first time, because of perestroika. I wanted to use it as an end to my little text that I wanted to send to him. There is a sentence in that very strange and wonderful episode about La Berma, that great actress, modelled on Sarah Bernhardt. Proust says that from a masterpiece in which she acted she created another masterpiece, the masterpiece of her own performance. In other words, it was the whole question of what interpretation is about. Can the act of performing be an act of genius? And I just wrote it down from the Russian edition and asked whether Richter might agree with that idea.
The next morning I sent my text by fax. Within a few hours, I got a call from Milena saying that the Maestro wants to see me. Now. He wants to see me immediately. And that's the way the whole thing started.

[..]