The Sparks broth­ers on their Jacques Tati col­lab­o­ra­tion that nev­er was

One of the rea­sons that the mem­bers of Sparks enjoy such a strong fol­low­ing in the film com­mu­ni­ty, as the new doc The Sparks Broth­ers explains, is that they’ve always drawn from cin­e­mat­ic ref­er­ence points in their own work. It’s all too apro­pos that Ron and Rus­sell Mael would lend their tal­ents to Leos Carax for the new film Annette, but in the broth­ers’ inter­view with LWLies, they dis­cuss a lit­tle-known col­lab­o­ra­tion that nev­er quite came together.

Rus­sell recounts a peri­od in the ​’70s when their UK label Island Records had the can­ny idea to reach out to Jacques Tati about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a link-up with the Sparks boys, hav­ing observed that their ​“two lit­tle uni­vers­es” were ​“run­ning side by side in a cer­tain way”. At the time, Tati was work­ing on a nev­er-to-be-com­plet­ed film titled Con­fu­sion, about a rur­al and some­what incom­pe­tent French tele­vi­sion sta­tion try­ing to up their game to com­pete with the big dogs; Ron and Rus­sell were to play a pair of Amer­i­can con­sul­tants brought in to facil­i­tate the upgrade.

The Mael broth­ers recall meet­ing with Tati sev­er­al times dur­ing this peri­od, dur­ing which the film­mak­er detailed his frus­tra­tions secur­ing fund­ing for his idio­syn­crat­ic projects and left them with a once-in-a-life­time sou­venir. As Rus­sell recalls, “[In Swe­den,] they had a real bond with Tati, so they asked us to come and do a TV show togeth­er with him and there were no para­me­ters to it. He said, ​‘They must get a white horse for me!’ We don’t remem­ber tonnes about it… there’s been so much research done try­ing to find the archival footage but no one can find it, not in Swedish TV… We remem­ber the white horse and just him want­i­ng to inter­act with this horse, and then us doing our thing, what­ev­er that is.”

Humor­ous­ly, Ron recalls Tati as look­ing just like his char­ac­ter Mon­sieur Hulot (“the tan over­coat, and that kin­da gait”) and appre­ci­at­ing his propen­si­ty for tak­ing pub­lic trans­porta­tion as a way of observ­ing human­i­ty in an unguard­ed state. ​“We would go out to din­ner with him and he would kind of mim­ic – not in a cru­el way – the move­ments of the wait­ress and all,” Ron says.

He con­cludes, ​“We’re so dis­ap­point­ed that it didn’t work out, but we cher­ish the time that we were able to work with him.” We may now be tor­ment­ed by the thought of the Sparks-Tati joint that nev­er was, but for the mean time, Carax’s Annette should be more than a suf­fi­cient alternative.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them. But to keep going, and grow­ing, we need your sup­port. Become a mem­ber today.