Concerning with "Confusion" we get that Jacques Tati toyed with the idea of Mr Hulot being killed, by accident, in the opening reel - a prop gun at a TV station is replaced with a real one - as an opening gag. Jacques Tati wanted to describe in "Confusion" the same world as in "Playtime", a futuristic city where activity is centered around pictures and communication, advertising and television. Monsieur Hulot is gone, and a young man is starting his job at "La Com" working on ads and TV programs to modify them, enhance their message.
Ron Mael : "We were to be in Tati's film Confusion, a story of two American TV studio employees brought to a rural French TV company to help them out with some American technical expertise and input into how TV really is done. Unfortunately due to Tati's declining health and ultimate death, the film didn't get met."
The movie was a visionary project : Jacques Tati's goal was not to make us laugh like in his early works, but to make us think about our obsessions with (moving) pictures, office work, television, communication and political messages. This could have been his greatest movie, but already, in the script form it was an amazingly creative and fascinating project. It is a shame that the film never got made. Sparks miss Jacques Tati's vision. The project mainly failed because of Jacques Tati's bankruptcy and Sparks instead appeared in performance in the 1977 blockbuster motion picture "Rollercoaster". - read more...
"Confusion" project was definitely aborted when Jacques Tati died from a pulmonary embolism, on 5th November 1982 in Paris... However the script of "Confusion" does exist and Sparks' "Big Beat" album features the song "Confusion" (...Confusion, la tati...) which was inspired by the Jacques Tati's project. Russell Mael : "The biggest disappointment of our career ? Not making the film with Jacques Tati..."
