If you want a book to be something that really gives, that is a kind of gift to humanity, you should work on it a long time. Not just write and push it to the publisher. To make a psychic work, you need time to reflect and rework. When you come to the end, you see the beginning differently. I find it fantastic that Jean Giono took twenty-three years to write The Man Who Planted Trees, and it ended up to be only seven pages of typewritten text. The elapse of time is crucial to the creation of all great art.
There are about twenty thousand drawings in the film The Man Who Planted Trees. They took me about five years of continuous work. Even the last film I did at Radio-Canada, The Mighty River, took me four years. I kept trying to make it closer to the message it should carry. It isn’t the first pencil stroke that is maybe the kind of line you need. It is always a search, without end. I threw a lot of drawings in the garbage. And I had to plan the camera angles and shooting. That is why time is important. You have to change many parts. You make a kind of psychic work with your book or your film. I think it is better to go at less speed but think more over, and take more out, in order to make the work useful and positive.
- Frederic Back, creator of the film The Man Who Planted Trees
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