The former director of the Angers national drama center was able to convince the organizers with his sense of excess and his popular successes in the theater, the opera and, most recently, with “Starmania”.
“A regular Coca-Cola please. With lots of sugar.” Barely seated at the table of a café in the 2nd arrondissement of Paris, Thomas Jolly orders his fuel for the day. “I need sugar”, he repeats, taking off his yellow scarf. At this freezing end of February, fatigue can be seen on the face of the 42-year-old director. For more than a year, he has abandoned the stages of France for the Parisian Seine, where the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games will take place. “I changed universe”, smiles this jack-of-all-trades in live entertainment. One more time.
After having triumphed in the main courtyard of the Avignon festival in 2018, locked spectators for 24 hours in front of Henry VI And Richard III in 2022, reinvented Romeo and Juliet at the Bastille Opera in 2023 and illuminated a new version of StarmaniaThomas Jolly has accepted a new challenge: to become the artistic director of the opening and closing ceremonies of the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games. The sugar and excitement suddenly take effect. “I believe that shows save the world”he blurted out when mentioning this pharaonic project, which should bring together 300,000 people on the quays and more than a billion in front of their screens.
“I said anything!”
Thomas Jolly’s new adventure begins in October 2021. The organizers of the 2024 Olympic Games have just announced their crazy idea: establishing the opening ceremony on the Seine. On this occasion, the newspaper The Team wants to give carte blanche to three artists “to give free rein to their imagination and draw as they wish the entry into the Seine of the Paris Games”. The name of Thomas Jolly is mentioned in the editorial. The journalist in charge of the file, Rachel Pretti, does not know him, but decides to call him.
Thomas Jolly then lived in Angers (Maine-et-Loire), where he directed the national drama center (CDN), and faced the hazards of Covid-19 which were plaguing the world of culture. “At first, I thought it was a joke”, recalls the director, not really a fan of the Olympics or sport. But his love of challenges takes over. For two hours he imagine the rap group PNL singing The Hymn to Lovethe singer Yseult singing the Marseillaise perched on an immense head of a king of France, Catherine Deneuve or Marion Cotillard as Olympe de Gouges… “I didn’t know anything about it, I said nonsense!” he laughs.
“To be honest, I find that the opening ceremonies have a format that is too long, poorly structured, boring… Even though there is potential for an artistic show!”
Thomas Jolly, directorat franceinfo
His enthusiasm and energy amaze the journalist. “I said to myself, very modestly: if I could, I would take it!”remembers Rachel Pretti, who devotes a double page to him, under the flamboyant title: “Let the Seine burst into flames”.
“We were looking for our Danny Boyle”
Thierry Reboul, executive director of Paris 2024, came across this article. He is at the origin of the idea of the ceremony on the Seine, but everything remains to be built. “Nothing that Thomas Jolly proposed was really feasible, he didn’t know the subject”, he smiles. The fact remains: the name of Thomas Jolly is now written somewhere in his head.
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For months, the “mr. creation” of the 2024 Olympics met dozens of French artistic personalities, filmmakers and choreographers. “We were looking for who our own Danny Boyle would be,” he recalls, in reference to the English director of Slumdog Millionaire And Trainspottingbehind the spectacular opening ceremony of the London Olympics in 2012. “A lot of people were asking us, but I wasn’t convinced. I couldn’t find exactly what I was looking for…”
In May 2022, Thierry Reboul decided to call Thomas Jolly. The latter does not hesitate for a second. “I’m not impressed by many people, nor by many things, he says with his usual phlegm. This is my chance and my cross in life.” The two men meet at the end of the afternoon in another Parisian café. “We had to leave around 2 a.m. in a state that doesn’t allow us to take the car”, understatement Thierry Reboul. In his mind, one thing is now certain: Thomas Jolly is the person he needs to build this extraordinary ceremony.
“I rush into Tony Estanguet’s office saying: ‘I found it!’”
Thierry Reboul, executive director of Paris 2024at franceinfo
The meetings keep coming for Thomas Jolly. First, with Tony Estanguet, the president of the Olympic organizing committee. “At that time I still hadn’t really worked on my subject, I hadn’t made a file or a letter, says the director. I am in a form of little happy unconsciousness.” Then comes the meeting with Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris. Everyone is seduced by the energy and passion of the director, who repeats his desire to transform the ceremony into a great French story. “What’s incredible is the nerve he has,” analyzes the director Jean-François Sivadier, who supervised him during his studies at the Ecole Supérieure d’Art Dramatique. “He loves a challenge!”
Twenty minutes to convince
Things get tough during the summer of 2022. Thomas Jolly must present his project to the International Olympic Committee. No more outdoor cafes. Around fifty IOC members were waiting for him at 9 a.m. on August 22, around a large meeting table. Parliamentary committee atmosphere, with microphone and translation box. The head of the IOC, Thomas Bach, made the trip. Thomas Jolly has twenty minutes to convince.
“Again, I wasn’t really impressed, explains the director. HAS At the time, I was directing the national drama center in Angers, I had tours underway, rehearsals for Starmania. My life was not at all written to do anything else.” However, she will be upset a few minutes later, in the form of an SMS from Tony Estanguet, received at 10:27 a.m.: “Welcome. Congratulations, this adventure is going to be crazy. Glad to share it with you. See you soon. Tony Estanguet.”
A few days later, Thomas Jolly met Emmanuel Macron to endorse the decision of the Olympic Committee. “You cannot be chosen without having the knighthood of the entire French Mexican army”, squeaks Armand de Rendinger, international consultant for sport and the Olympics. It will be a formality for the director, who also convinces the President of the Republic by questioning him about his vision of France, its history, its story.
“There, it’s the steamroller”
On September 21, 2022, the name of Thomas Jolly was officially revealed as artistic director of the ceremonies. “There, it’s the steamroller”, recalls the director. In a few months, he must complete or abandon projects initiated for years. “I gave birth to Starmania after three years of gestation”, breathes the forty-year-old.
And what to do with his place at the head of the national drama center of Angers? Initially, Thomas Jolly thought he could find an arrangement to retain management, after an eighteen-month interim period dedicated to the Olympics. The Minister of Culture at the time, Rima Abdul-Malak, supported him in this approach, he assures. But some of the CDN teams don’t see it that way. The internal conflict is escalating, with some pointing the finger at the state of the institution’s finances, while others criticize its too many external projects.
“At the second of StarmaniaI start the show, I go into my dressing room and I write my resignation letter”, says Thomas Jolly. The episode left its mark. “This period was very difficult, sometimes violent”he admits, before sending a tackle: “The institution is incapable of dealing with an exceptional situation.”
An inverted Eiffel Tower?
The start of 2023 opens a new chapter. “I resigned, I moved… I did a kind of reset [remise à zéro]“, explains Thomas Jolly. The actor must now fill this blank page with the story of his ceremony. He surrounds himself with a historian, a novelist, a theater man and a screenwriter. The small team gets to know each other during a trip on the Seine on a riverboat. The weather is freezing, but the decor is magnificent. The group of authors then locks themselves into a script room (a room dedicated to creation), at the headquarters of the organizing committee for the Olympic Games (Cojo), in Saint-Denis, in Seine-Saint-Denis.
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From now on, secrecy is required. Their grand narrative is kept in a digital vault. There is no question of leaking any information on the content of the ceremony. Thomas Jolly’s project then goes through the mill of a major feasibility study. The double blade of security and budget rejects 70% of its craziest ideas, like this inverted Eiffel Tower which will ultimately be abandoned.
“In the fall, there’s lots and lots of bad news. At one point, I got a little confused.”
Thomas Jolly, directorat franceinfo
Doubts are also emerging publicly, while the gauge of the number of spectators authorized on the platforms is constantly reduced for security reasons. “Without wanting to play Cassandra, we put ourselves in an irreversible situation by announcing a spectacular ceremony on the Seinenotes Jean-François Sivadier. Three quarters of the countries hope that Thomas Jolly breaks his face.”
Thunderclap
But the director is used to constraints. In 2018, in the main courtyard of Avignon, he had to abandon his decor because of the wind. “It was too dangerous for the spectators. No one saw the real setting of the play, but that doesn’t matter”, he puts things into perspective. The former director of the festival, Olivier Py, also remembers this time when the director broke his foot, but still continued to direct the rehearsals. “He is one of those men for whom spectacle is above all else,” assures the now director of the Châtelet theater.
“He can be in total sacrifice. Personal, physical suffering, doubt… All that is secondary.”
Olivier Py, director of the Châtelet theaterat franceinfo
From theater to opera and musicals, Thomas Jolly has acquired a certain agility to transform constraints into stimulation. “I find myself in a real creative experience, exactly like at the Bastille opera for Romeo and Juliet, where I didn’t know the set. Exactly as with Starmaniaalthough I had never done a musical”he assures.
The ceremony is now practically frozen. Since the start of 2024, Thomas Jolly has received models, videos, images… “It’s stimulating,” he rejoices. The first rehearsals and castings have also begun, before ramping up in the spring. Thomas Jolly even seems to have acquired a taste for constraints. He knows that some of them cannot be dodged. “A big storm in the middle of a painting could be great in terms of light”he thinks out loud.