Gérard Depardieu — two visits to Tomatis
Public testimony — audio interview (archive)
Documentary testimony. Audio interview (3 min 41), most likely from the time he was preparing Peter Weir’s “Green Card” (released in 1990) — original date and broadcaster to be confirmed. Transcript established from the recording, lightly corrected.
In this interview, Gérard Depardieu recounts having consulted Alfred Tomatis at two moments in his life, twenty years apart.
The adolescent who could no longer speak
The first visit goes back to his adolescence — he says he was fifteen (the interviewer mentions seventeen). A young actor, he finds himself at an impasse:
“I was at the theatre, I had a blockage, I couldn’t speak. That is to say, I was listening too much, I could no longer emit. So he re-educated me with sounds. He adjusted the levels of the ear, he made it so that the aggression of hearing no longer prevented emission.”
He remembers it as foundational work: a developed memory, and above all “the rapid opening to the theatre” and to language — “what mattered most to me.”
Twenty years later: preparing a role in English
About to shoot an American film, Depardieu finds himself, he says, “in the same situation as twenty years before”: faced with English, he stammers. So he goes back to Tomatis, who has him work on American sonorities — following the principle dear to him, that of foetal listening:
“The foetus begins to hear the sounds of its mother’s voice at four months. He made me hear what the foetus hears.”
He describes gruelling listening sessions — “tapes that are very tiring, exhausting,” to the point of not sleeping for two nights after a two-hour session — but which he calls “an experience worth living, fascinating.” Tomatis worked at the time notably with The Little Prince by Saint-Exupéry and the music of Mozart.
His assessment is nuanced and precise: for lack of time, he followed only eight to ten days of work instead of the recommended three weeks. “The result is that I understand the questions much better than my own answers — so I manage with that.” And he points out that the goal was never to erase his accent: “I play a Frenchman, I don’t need to change the zebra’s stripes.”
Editor’s note: this testimony is reproduced for documentary purposes, as an attributed and dated archive piece. Its publication does not constitute a validation of the results described, in keeping with the site’s editorial line, which neither defends nor promotes the method.