See Serge Bromberg's Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno, the documentary that explores why the film was so ill-fated, and you'll either go out of your mind or possibly even leave the cinema. That's how frustrating and mind-wrecking the project was.

This piece of cinematic history come courtesy of Bromberg's unfathomable good luck. He found himself stuck in a broken-down lift with Ines Clouzot, the widow of Henri-Georges Clouzot, where she told him about 185 un-used cans of film from this lost 1964 epic.

Clouzot’s film was meant to follow the pyschological deterioration of a hyper-jealous husband (Serge Reggiani), and his beautiful new wife (Romy Schneider, the Gwyneth Paltrow of her day). The paranoia and obsession were to be delivered with new psychedelic filming technique which you see plenty of in this documentary.

185 cans of un-cut footage deliver evidence of the endless re-takes that pushed the cast and crew to the edge, including hours of strenuous running, water-skiing, psychedlic experiments and beautiful shots of Schneider.
 
It’s difficult to match the mental torture Clouzot put his crew through with the images we see. Nothing in Schneider’s face or the quality of the shots suggests that Clouzot would constantly wake up his three crews at 2am to run ideas by them, or force them to re-shoot already perfected scenes.
 
More background on Clouzot in this film would help viewers to understand why the original film fell apart. He had spent most of the '30s in a sanatorium, had three film projects aborted and was so extreme in his working methods that he kept Alfred Hitchcock on edge. Hitchcock who terrorised his cast and crew, famously put Psycho into production because he felt Clouzot's Les Diaboliques would knock him from the position of king of suspense.

The terror he put them through somehow got me, in the middle of the film, to thinking about Chopper. There's a brilliant line I wish I could remember accurately, about everyone, even the toughest, most experienced, hardened crims all being afraid of the psycho. Clouzot was that psycho and everyone, including Hitchcock was running scared from his skewed French genius. 

Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno will be released on November 4th in Europe.