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Roald Dahl

02 février 1979
03m 16s
Ref. 00094

Information

Summary :

Interview with Roald Dahl by a young Franco-American reader. The author discusses the characters of his novels, children, the adventures he writes?

Media type :
Vidéo
Broadcast date :
02 février 1979
Source :
France 3 (Collection: Des Livres Pour Nous )
Personnalité(s) :
Roald Dahl
Themes :
Places :

Context

Roald Dahl (1916-1990), a writer born in Wales to Norwegian parents, lived a childhood marked by painful events: he lost his older sister and his father when he was very young. He enlisted in the air force as a fighter pilot in World War II. Encouraged by writer C. S. Forester, he started writing in 1942.

He published The Gremlins in 1943, which greatly inspired Joe Dante for his film 40 years later. Originally, the film was to be produced by Disney. A few of Dahl's short stories, published in the Kiss Kiss and Bizarre, Bizarre (1960) collections, and characterised by a heavy cloud of suspense, were later adapted to film by Alfred Hitchcock.

However, it was with children's novels that he found the most success, most notably with his novels James and the Giant Peach (1961), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) and even The Witches (1983). These novels depicted a marvellous world, full of imaginary elements but never sugar-coated, so that young readers could draw concrete information from then and benefit from true reading pleasure.

Aurélia Caton

Transcription

(noises)
Suzy
I wanted to ask him if the characters that he described and whose stories he told in his books, if they were real characters that he slightly modified in his own way or if they were completely thought up. [English]
Roald Dahl
[English]
Suzy
Almost all of them were just straight out of his mind. And even if he likes kids, even if he thinks they're something wonderful, that they're not like... it's something completely different from adults. [English]
Roald Dahl
[English]
Suzy
He thinks that children are funnier and that they laugh at funny stories and that they're a bit funnier, you know. Now, in his books, if he wrote the adventures, if he did the same when he was a child, if he's the one who... who lived them and he wanted to talk about them, then he wrote about it in his books. [English]
Roald Dahl
[English]
Suzy
No, it was really made up and he thinks that it was just like that, and it wasn't at all like that when he was little.
Roald Dahl
[English]
Suzy
They are too extraordinary to be true, so you can't really... I mean, you can imagine it, but it can't really happen. [English]
Roald Dahl
[English] It was a great pleasure to go... [English]
Suzy
To have come to France.
Roald Dahl
To have come to France to speak with you. [English]
Suzy
On television.
Roald Dahl
On television. And sorry, please excuse me... For my mistakes... For my bad French, bad accent, bad French, yes.