“Notre Dame is burning“, the film by Jean-Jacques Annaud takes us back three years. On April 15, 2019, the whole world is in shock. The cathedral of Paris is burning. The director of the event film, “Notre Dame is burning“, which comes out this Wednesday at the cinema, was the exceptional guest of France Bleu Paris, this Wednesday morning at 8:15 am.
Jean-Jacques Annaud wanted to be as realistic as possible, to stick as closely as possible to the reality of this fire. He also warns the viewer at the beginning of the film: “Everything that may seem implausible is actually true“. He tells how he made his film and what he wanted to show.
“Often reality is much more incredible than fiction”
“When I started digging through the documentation, I thought it was bullshit, that it couldn’t be so preposterous“, says Jean-Jacques Annaud. He discovers that there is a “incredible number of malfunctions, pitfalls, events that would multiply to end in complete chaos“.
Reading the documentation, he wonders which Hollywood screenwriter would dare to say such things.
To show this event, Jean-Jacques Annaud explains that he simply respected the chronology which is itself “spectacular“.
That day nothing goes as it should
The director discovers that that day the emergency services are notified 40 minutes after the start of the fire “we wonder why and we explain it in the film“, he says, the Parisian traffic jams prevent the firefighters from arriving on the spot, the only person who can save the treasures of the cathedral is in Versailles for an exhibition and when she wants to return in disaster, she misses her train.
“There is an accumulation which is sometimes comical in this film which shows that during this time, there are 1300 tree trunks, which constitute the framework of the cathedral, which are going up in smoke“.
Shooting in the middle of the flames
Fire is essential, it plays a colossal part. To stick to reality, Jean-Jacques Annaud has reconstructed the sections of the cathedral on fire in real size so as to be able to really set fire to a setting that resembles the cathedral of Paris to the nearest centimeter.
The director had a 50-meter-long set built which reproduces what is called the corridor of the north transept where the first firefighters arrived, completely surrounded by flames. “These are real flames. The decor was totally in line with reality and we set it on fire“, says the director.
The actors were trained with the firefighters. “Ithe young actors who play firefighters had to be trained for weeks. They went to the real fire with their fellow firefighters“, says the director.
Scenery to show what no one has ever seen
“Ihere are scenes where you see what no one has seen since it was never filmed. It is the collapse of the vault. When the spire falls on the cathedral, it makes a huge hole in the vault and there are 75 cubic meters of beams and flaming stones that tumble down in the middle of the nave”.
For this scene, Jean-Jacques Annaud redid a large set in a studio in Saint-Denis and “we really threw 75 cubic meters on the ground reconstituted identically“, he says.
“There is a big implementation that makes us there”
Jean-Jacques Annaud explains that there is no image taken inside the cathedral during the fire. “The fire was filmed from afar but we didn’t see what was going on inside and that’s what I show with the incredible chaotic, bizarre, incredible succession“.
“That is what is interesting“, he concludes, “because it’s a film that is both a suspense, we know the end and yet, it’s a suspense, because we wonder how they’re going to get there, and we even wonder, if we’re in the movie, if they’re going to make it“.