Brigitte Bardot called him "a negative being, for ever at odds with himself and the world around him". Another actor described him as "an interfering man who wanted every actor under his control". The man they are both describing is Henri-Georges Clouzot, one of France's greatest film directors, whose work plumbed the depths of misanthropy, paranoia and revenge so unremittingly that it was hard not to believe he was exploring his own psyche in public.
Clouzot was hated and feted in equal measure. One of his first masterpieces, the 1943 film Le Corbeau, is now hailed by critics, but on release it united the French left and the pro-Nazi Vichy regime in an unlikely alliance against Clouzot's vision of pettiness and self-loathing in a small French wartime town divided by a poison-pen letter scandal. It was brave story to tell in a France torn apart by war; Le Corbeau was pulled from cinemas, Clouzot was fired from the Nazi-owned Continental studios and, after the war, received a lifetime ban (rescinded in 1947) from the French film industry for working with the Nazis.
Today he is largely forgotten, or at best mistaken for the bumbling inspector in the Pink Panther franchise. But now the disgracefully neglected Clouzot is being brought to new audiences with a documentary about his doomed 1964 project concerning a jealous husband's mental collapse into paranoid fantasy. Called L'Enfer (Hell), the film became a real hell for the director and everyone on set.
One of L'Enfer's problems was that Clouzot had by then become notorious as a director with a taste for violence and betrayal – and not just in his films. During the filming of La Vérité (The Truth) in 1960, he wanted Brigitte Bardot to fall asleep and drool for one scene. As you do. So he gave her some pills saying they were painkillers. They turned out to be sleeping pills. Bardot had to have her stomach pumped. Her subsequent verbal attack on him was understandable. But she was not the only actress he made suffer. Suzy Delair, who starred in the 1947 film Quai des Orfèvres, disclosed that he slapped her on set. "So what?" Delair told one interviewer. "He slapped others as well … He was tough but I'm not about to complain."
In terms of violence to his female stars, Clouzot was a monstre sacré akin to his contemporary, Alfred Hitchcock, whom he admired and whose psychological thrillers of the 1950s and 60s bear close comparison with Clouzot's greatest films – The Wages of Fear (1953), starring Yves Montand, and Les Diaboliques (1955), with Véra Clouzot as a wronged wife who conspires with his mistress, Simone Signoret, to murder her husband. Four years after La Vérité, Clouzot set about making L'Enfer. It was about a man driven mad by the supposed infidelities of his beautiful wife.
Clouzot cast 26-year-old Romy Schneider, who, though Austrian, was then one of France's leading film stars. French cinema was a-tremble with expectation: could L'Enfer repeat the success of his earlier, great films? And what on-set tortures did Clouzot have in store for Schneider?
Moreover, French cinema had been revolutionised by the nouvelle vague since his last film, and the likes of Godard and Truffaut had arguably eclipsed Clouzot. Could he now show those young pups he was still the greatest French exponent of the seventh art? The director Costa-Gavras, who worked as production assistant on L'Enfer, said: "He was criticised by the nouvelle vague for planning out everything in the script. The big word of the epoch was 'improvise'. He had a nice line about that: 'I improvise on paper.'"
Clouzot was known as a forbiddingly meticulous metteur en scène, storyboarding his films so intensively that actors often felt thwarted. On L'Enfer, he sought to revolutionise cinema by meticulously creating a film using the experimental sounds of Pierre Boulez's Ircam in Paris, and the then-voguish images of kinetic art to express his hero's increasingly wild fantasy life. These lurid colour sequences would be juxtaposed with black-and-white footage shot on location.
But he never finished L'Enfer. After a few weeks of studio tests in Paris and 10 days on location, Clouzot abandoned it. Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea's new documentary anatomises that cinematic nightmare– and it makes painful viewing, though it is filled with tantalising images of what might have been.
How did it come about? Thirty years after Clouzot's death in 1977, his widow, Inès de Gonzalez, found herself trapped in a broken lift with a young film-maker. During their enforced intimacy, Inès told Bromberg that she had 185 cans of film (about 13 hours) of the unfinished penultimate film. She entrusted the footage to Bromberg to make a film containing interviews with the crew and newly dramatised scenes based on Clouzot's script.
But we also have something extra: Claude Chabrol's 1994 film based on Clouzot's script, also called L'Enfer, starring Emmanuelle Béart as the flirtatious wife and François Cluzet as the paranoid husband. That is hardly enough, even if Chabrol inherited Clouzot's mantle as the French Hitchcock. His treatment of the story is never as bravura as Clouzot's promised to be. The test shots for Clouzot's L'Enfer that appear in the new documentary show that he envisaged using kinetic art in a way that parallels how Hitchcock had used Salvador Dalí's surrealist dream sequences almost 20 years earlier on Spellbound.
Maybe, though, it was in making these test shots that Clouzot's ambition went beyond his capacity to realise a film. Film-maker Bernard Stora, then an intern on the film, worked on the tests. "I walked into something totally insane," he recalls. "Clouzot had the best cameramen and the most seasoned technicians. It seemed clear from the beginning they didn't know what they were doing."
The producers, though, saw rushes of this stuff and loosened the purse strings: they saw genius where Stora saw insanity. Clouzot then had a virtually unlimited budget – but it only encouraged him to dream big and worry 24/7. Once on set, hell began in earnest. Clouzot started shooting at a lakeside hotel. But there was a difficulty. The lake, which figured in most scenes, was scheduled to be drained for a hydroelectric generating project. Clouzot had only 20 days to wrap the project. The shoot became as tense as a countdown Hollywood thriller.
L'Enfer's key protagonists - Schneider, Serge Reggiani (who played the fantasising husband) and Clouzot – are all dead. But what we learn from the documentary is that Clouzot upset his leading man much more than his leading lady. After 10 days on set, Reggiani walked off, claiming to be suffering from Maltese fever, and threatening legal action. "Serge said he wasn't there to be insulted by a schizophrenic maniac," says Lan Nguyen, a junior member of the crew.
Reggiani, according to other crew members, had been steeling himself against being bullied on set by the notorious Clouzot and so was already in a highly strained state. How had Clouzot upset Reggiani? He had insisted that, in order to demonstrate the husband's jealousy, Reggiani would have to run behind a camera car repeatedly, ostensibly following Schneider's car. Reggiani found himself running for 10 miles a day up vertiginous mountain roads – great footage, but the ordeal took its toll.
After Reggiani quit, Clouzot needed a replacement. Jean-Louis Trintignant (male foil in the 1956 Bardot vehicle And God Created Woman, and soon to be a star of European art cinema) was invited to the set and was wooed by Clouzot into taking the part – but decided against it.
Clouzot now decided it was too late to hire a replacement. Notoriously insomniac at the best of times, he rewrote the film through the nights and shot new footage during the days. The idea was that he would later edit his way around the problem of not having his leading man on set. He became increasingly stressed, alienated and paranoid. Perhaps – and this is just a thought – he should have taken the role himself?
And then one day, while he was filming Romy Schneider and Dany Carel having a lesbian tryst on a boat on the lake, he had a heart attack. He was taken to hospital and was compelled to abandon the film. "It happened at the right moment," says Stora. "Things weren't going well."
Clouzot would make only one more film before his death in 1977. In 1968's La Prisonnière, he used some of those weirdo kinetic art shots he had filmed for L'Enfer. It didn't revolutionise cinema, and was forgotten even in a France that cherishes its cinema. Clouzot had been consumed by the very hell he tried, and failed, to show on screen.
Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno is released next Friday
• This article was amended on Friday 30 October 2009. It originally said that Simone Signoret played the wronged wife in Les Diaboliques. This has been corrected.
