Brook par Brook, portrait intime
Simon Brook
2001 - 72 min - Digital vidéo - Couleur - France, Belgique

Portrait of a man in private, at home; portrait of a man at work... Because he hides nothing from his son, Simon, a young director of films and documentaries, the great British stage director Peter Brook, now 776, reveals for the first time something of his personal world as artist, father, and son.
But Simon Brook never settles for the strictly biographical, he seeks to capture the essence of the paternal quest: a quest for life, for truth, far beyond a "mere" quest for theatre.
In English or French, the director tells how the vision of a primitive statue in a Zen garden, or a journey to Iran or Africa, determined his path, helped nurture his conception of the stage space (the emptiest, the least definite, the most open) for the actor's performance (the freest possible). Though he has never allowed himself to be filmed in rehearsals, we see him working on an improvisation with some of his oldest collaborators. The more Peter Brooks ages, the greater is his taste for adventure, for experimentation. This experimentation, he always insists, must always precede analysis, so that the theatre always remains familiar and distant, commonplace and unexpected.