for Martin Scorsese, his passion for cinema “could put you K.-O.”

“Bertrand was so passionate he could literally knock you out.” : the legendary American director Martin Scorsese paid tribute to his friend and French alter ego Bertrand Tavernier, who died Thursday, March 25, in a text addressed to Télérama. The French lover of cinema, and especially American, had rubbed shoulders with the New Yorker of Sicilian origin on the set ofAround midnight (1986), immersed in the world of jazz where Scorsese makes an appearance – a “wonderful memory” for him.

Bertrand Tavernier “was passionate about cinema: passionate about what he loved, passionate about what he hated, passionate about his new discoveries, passionate about figures unjustly forgotten in the history of cinema – Bertrand was the one who allowed us to rediscover the director Michael Powell -, passionate about the films he made himself“writes the director of Taxi Driver and Freed..

It was “a unique filmmaker, unlike any other“, he adds, considering that the reference dictionary that Tavernier devoted with Jean-Pierre Coursodon to American directors (50 years of American cinema) was a “major work (who) deserves to be translated into English“. “Bertrand was so passionate that he could literally knock you out. He sat, for hours and hours, arguing for or against a film, a filmmaker, a musician, a book or a political decision. After a while, overwhelmed, you just wondered: where does all this energy come from?“, he recalls.

Flagship director, scholar and committed, appreciated by the general public and admired beyond borders, Bertrand Tavernier died at 79, leaving films like The watchmaker of Saint-Paul (1974), Let the party begin (1975) or “Wipe” (1981).