The Intriguing Tale Of Monsieur Mayonnaise
Words & Interview by David Jenkins
Illustration by Kat Himmel
To say that the Melbourne-born, LA based filmmaker Philippe Mora has many strings to his creative bow is something of an understatement.
He has been making movies since the mid-70s, breaking through with “Ozploitation” classic Mad Dog Morgan which stars a perma-soused Dennis Hopper, and then divides his time between low-budget genre movies (seek out his comic book classic, The Return of Captain Invincible (1983), and also his superior 1997 offering to the Troma exploitation production house: Pterodactyl Woman from Beverly Hills) and personal documentaries about his family and their relationship to the Holocaust. Monsieur Mayonnaise is a 2016 documentary profile of Mora as he traces the roots of his elusive father and discovers the reasons for a bizarre nickname he acquired while working in the French Resistance.
SANDWICH: Monsieur Mayonnaise is a documentary about you and your family, specifically your father. You do lots of drawing in the film and you create this giant comic book. Do you do that for all your movies?
PHILIPPE MORA: Sometimes. It really depends on what I’m doing. Not in the detail I did on Monsieur Mayonnaise. I’ve always been a painter and an artist, and I drifted into film as a kid. My theory is that comics were actually the closest artform to film, not theatre. Because comics have edits and angles, and that really intrigued me. So I’ve got a great collection of comics here.
Classic Marvel and DC, or more counterculture stuff?
Erm, more esoteric stuff. I’ve got lots of Classics Illustrated. I got very high marks in literature at high school—I think I came top of all Victoria—because of my Classics Illustrated collection. I loved Zap Comix, and the underground comic scene from the 1960s—Robert Crumb and all those guys from San Francisco, so I’ve got quite a collection of those. I worked for Oz Magazine in London, and there were comic strips of mine published in some of the late 60s editions. I worked with Martin Sharp on the London Oz edition called The Magic Theatre, and that was all collage. We were inspired by Max Ernst, and Dadaism.
Is that when you met producer Jeremy Thomas?
Yes. Jeremy and I were mates from way back. We still are. I invited Jeremy to help me on the documentary Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? from 1975. After that, I had written Mad Dog Morgan, and I asked Jeremy if he wanted to produce it. We went back to Australia and the rest, as they say, is history.
I love that movie. It feels like it’s due for a really nice deluxe re-release.
I have great affection for it. Of course I do, it was my first big film. I looked at it recently and I found that the really interesting thing for me—apart from Dennis Hopper’s performance in the lead—was the surrealistic sequence of the guy on fire coming up backwards out of the water.
I love that. An incredible example of a great practical special effect.
Yes, films they make now are just animation. Expensive animation. The inspiration for that sequence was Jean Cocteau—I was a big fan of Orphée, and in those films, all the effects are really clever. When Jean Marais puts his hand through a mirror, he was using mercury. I love in-camera effects. There’s nothing like them.
A lot of your non-genre films are concerned with your personal family history. Are you still discovering things about your family?
Yes, I’ve never stopped. I’m finding more and more. It’s like anything—the more you study, the more you find. One particularly interesting discovery, if I had to name one, is that my great aunt, whose name was Charlotte Morowski, was amazing because she was a woman studying philosophy at Breslau University in Germany in 1915. It was very unusual for a woman, let alone a Jewish woman, to be allowed into a university. And she wrote a thesis on Nietzsche, which is amazing, considering his effect on the Nazis. Anyway, we found all the documents on her, and you wonder how many brilliant people the Nazis killed. Not just Jews, but the brain power that they killed. We might have a colony on Mars already, or have a cure for a deadly virus, if they hadn’t killed all those scientists and doctors. I’m still trying to absorb all that, but I probably never will.
You tend to parlay your interests into your movies, and this fascination with the Nazis came to you quite early on.
You want to know what your parents don’t want you to know. My parents, like a lot of holocaust survivors, didn’t want to talk about it. That’s very common. I got more and more interested in it, and it was only later in my father’s life that he opened up about it, but I got a lot of information about Marcel Marceau, who worked in the resistance. When you make a movie or tell a story yourself, people say it’s just ego. There came a point where I thought that some of these subjects are personal and I don’t think it’s horrible to wear your heart on your sleeve. One shouldn’t be ashamed. Which is what I did in my short documentary Three Days in Auschwitz, where I put myself in the story.
How did your father acquire this nickname, Monsieur Mayonnaise?
There was an arm of the French Resistance called OSE focused on protecting children. This wasn’t specifically Jewish children, although it started with Jews. It started up in Berlin long before World War Two as an organisation helping Jewish orphans. The president of the organisation was no less than Albert Einstein.
Oh wow.
So the Germans invade France. And OSE became the de facto resistance because they had offices all over France and they had phones and phone numbers. But what’s fascinating to me and a lot of Holocaust scholars that I’ve spoken to fairly recently, like the museum in LA and the holocaust museum here, we I found letters from Einstein on behalf of OSE asking for money after the war started and saying they’re killing Jews and we need funds now. So I don’t think it’s well known, but Einstein was actively raising money for the resistance after the Nazis occupied France. It’s absolutely amazing.
Did your father have any contact with Einstein?
Well Einstein was directly funding my father. Oh, and my dad never never mentioned any of this of course. So Marcel Marceau and my dad were OSE, and Marceau knew my mother and father before they met each other. And he introduced my mother to George and they got married in those headquarters in France after the war. So they were always tied into the French resistance. And they’re both really modest about it. I mean, Marceau was the one who gave me all the details about Monsieur Mayonnaise. He had heard about this guy who smuggled children across the German border by hiding their papers in big sandwiches covered in mayonnaise. And the German guards wouldn’t check because they didn’t want to get their gloves dirty. He’s kind of famous within resistance circles. Monsieur Mayonnaise became his codename.
Do you know who coined the name?
No, no, I don’t. He was known as Monsieur Mayonnaise when Marceau met him. Marceau was very much a scholar of the Nazis. I mean, he knew so much about it, not just from his life experience but from studying after the war. He was the first Jewish artist to perform in Germany after the war. And the Germans couldn’t believe it. And it’s very moving when you consider that, as part of his mime act, he obviously didn’t talk. But you cannot continue hating. It doesn’t get you anywhere.
Considering the fact that mayonnaise is such a kind of important part of your personal family history, do you have a weird relationship with it as a food?
I enjoy it. I can’t make it. But I like it a lot. And then, you know, cook garlic in it and it’s aïoli. Maybe we should make a sequel to Monsieur Mayonnaise called Monsieur Aïoli? But food was very much part of my upbringing. I have French parents. Well, actually my father was German, but he became a Frenchman. He was always a foodie. He had this dark sense of humour too. He said, if it hadn’t been for Hitler, he probably wouldn’t have survived World War Two because he was eating in all the best restaurants. He was selling patents before the war, and was very successful. He said he was eating so much that he probably would have died.
