There are only two places where James Velaise feels truly at home: on the Scottish islands and at his Aveyron farmhouse, La Romanie, which he’s owned for 25 years. He is about to purchase an additional 45 hectares of land which surrounds the farm – and will doubtless make him a contented man. ‘One needs to protect oneself from the Monsantos and various dubious regimes of this world, and become organic’
‘Doing something’ is in the Velaise gene, and not always in a predictable manner. Famous for living life in « reverse mode » (see livingobit.com), James recently acquired the domain name james.paris without the faintest idea of what the product might be. Chances are, serendipity will provide the answer, as it infallibly has done until now.
The son of Scottish-American heiress Isobel Mitchell and infamous Swiss film producer-playboy Robert Velaise (né Weil) - James Velaise’s childhood was not destined to be a conventional one. Born in 1961 at the uber chic Clinique du Belvédère, in Boulogne Billancourt, he quickly moved to London where the family settled in Chester Square, Belgravia. Like his father, James remained a Swiss citizen. ‘It’s the only passport in the world that doesn’t include your country of birth but a ‘lieu d’origine’. Given the numerous ‘lieux d’origines’ in the peripatetic Weil-Velaise family, it is probably just as well. ‘The Swiss are rather strange people. They regularly have votations populaires. Ten years ago a contentious ballot was whether or not the Swiss army should disband their carrier pigeon unit (they did)’.
Summers, far from Swiss carrier pigeons, were spent in Tuscany, where the family owned a house in fabled Forte dei Marmi; ‘I remember the telephone rarely worked. The postman would arrive on his bike and call out ‘Telegramma!’ The young generation today sadly has no idea what these were’.
Young James attended the French Lycée in South Kensington, together with his siblings, Jean-Louis and Lucie. While he was being taunted at school about his name - Weil-Velaise becoming ‘vieille valise’ (old suitcase), the unravelling of his parents’ marriage was becoming tabloid fodder. After their separation (‘I have few memories of them together’) mother and children moved, in 1969, to a house on Old Church Street off the King’s Road. Parties, rather than studies, became the order of the day ‘I was very lazy at school’ – especially as his mother, having now remarried, was spending her weekends in the country, leaving the 15 year-old James in charge along with his “Irish twin” elder brother Jean-Louis – resulting in predictable consequences.
As A levels loomed he was pulled out of the Lycée and sent to Davies Laing and Dick, a notorious crammer in Notting Hill (‘a total con job of a place’) where his finest hour was the cementing of a long-lasting friendship with art critic Adrian Dannatt. Days were spent playing truant at the local pub (‘standing up for an Iranian cross-dresser whose habit of entering the ladies’ room was not appreciated by the landlord’), evenings watching John Waters movies, which sparked in James a life-long interest in film, as well as a curiosity about the US: the two young men undertook a trip to New York in the summer of 1980 - the second trip for James, whose earlier visit, in 1974, had coincided with the unforgettable sight of Philippe Petit walking the tightrope between the nearly-completed Twin Towers. This time, the unforgettable was altogether different: ‘we stayed at the Marlton hotel, a junkie dive hellhole, which Adrian had found in a 1966 guidebook on how to live in New York on $5 a day; the bathroom was on the landing and you had to politely ask a veteran Rastafarian inmate for the bath plug.’
That refurbished hellhole has now become an eminently swish and fashionable 5 star establishment. Little did James know that he would later settle nearby, where he would live in slightly more upmarket fashion.
Backtrack to London however, where life was not quite as exciting. Another crammer followed, with rather average final results –‘not quite good enough to get into university’. Salford University, north of Manchester, expressed a momentary interest – then retracted. However, being of an optimistic disposition, James ploughed on undeterred and was finally accepted at the even lesser known The City University where he found himself studying land economics, a subject which, although it might have delighted some, did not delight him. He left and found himself a job as a stockbroker.
To his surprise, it turned out he was rather good at it - so good in fact, that in 1983, he was sent to New York as the boss of an English subsidiary of the Société Générale bank. He combined hard working days with bohemian nights at his legendary Lafayette Street loft and at the mythical Palladium nightclub.
By then James had long left New York, as he had decided that he wanted more from life than being a stockbroker. After a trip around the world, he moved to Paris and set up his French film company, Pretty Pictures which dealt in art-house films. It did well, and cemented his reputation as one of the few genuine gentlemen global distributors, one which reached its apex in 2012, when the first ever Saudi Arabian film Wadjda, whose rights he had acquired based on a simple idea scribbled on a paper nakpin, won considerable critical acclaim and financial satisfaction, including major prizes at the Biennale di Venezia. In 2006, he was invited to the Pyongyang International Film Festival (PIFF) in North Korea. ‘In the film business you ‘go’ to festivals. Few people know that Kim Jong-iI was a despot and cinephile, and I thought it would be amusing to be the first Westerner to distribute North Korean films. So I bought amongst others ’The Schoolgirl’s Diary.’ A touching teen-romp film d’auteur : the film generated lots of press and near financial ruin -‘I am now a national hero in Pyongyang, even though the raclette loving new Dear Leader has no interest in the Seventh Art. As I get older, I must continually take risks and say what’s truly on my mind. If you don’t stand up for what you believe in, what is the point?’.
In the 90’s James married his first wife Elizabeth, an avant-gardist Parisian galerist and today, he lives in a discreet 360° apartment in the bourgeois 7th arrondissement, which once housed Antoine de Saint Exupéry and a daughter of Dominican Republic dictator “El Jefe” Trujillo . The walls are covered in paintings from the CoBrA movement (including artists Corneille and Appel) and his cousin, the celebrated artist Jacqueline de Jong and founder of the Situationist Times. ‘I’m very close to her and am one of the largest collectors of her early work. I don’t buy art to speculate, but to live with and admire. Like a film, I couldn’t buy a film I didn’t like.’
Films no longer interest him. ‘I got bored.’ Not to say he’ll never revisit that terrain. But for now, there are other preoccupations, his raison d’être, his adored son Joe, born in 2010, to his second wife, Claire, an intellectual property power lawyer and a documentary he is making about his cousin Jacqueline. There is also another project, ‘something hush-hush’.
Whether it has anything to do with james.paris, only time will tell.
Portrait written by Alba Arikha