The director Jean-Jacques Annaud is the exceptional guest of Le Monde d’Elodie all this week. This lover of the Seventh Art and History looks back on these exceptional moments experienced before, during and after the shooting of his films. If some have defined Jean-Jacques Annaud as a “wild” director, we think of The Bear (1988) and at last wolf (2015) which highlighted his love of the animal world, others have nicknamed him the “roaring” director, particularly in view of his commitment and his desire to go a little further in each film, to take us somewhere else.
On the occasion of the release, on Wednesday July 20, on DVD, Blu ray and Blu ray 4K of his latest film Notre Dame is burninga blockbuster devoted to the fire of the cathedral, back on images, with him, on almost 50 years of career.
franceinfo: The director, producer and screenwriter that you are never seems to have lost your shining eyes. Does that mean that cinema is your life?
Jean Jacques Annaud : Yes, it’s my life. It amuses me enormously. All aspects of my job are incredibly fun. I obviously spend six months, a year researching the subjects. Afterwards, there is the excitement of the writing, the location scouting, the casting where you meet lots of people. The filming follows with all this troupe to direct and the post-production which is fascinating, the editing, the digital special effects. Every day I wake up feeling happy. I was very lucky because I got my first camera at eleven, my first camera at seven. When I was a little boy, I didn’t like going to play with my friends, I came home to do my little edits.
I’ve only been a director in my life, I don’t know how to do anything else, not even cooking.
Jean Jacques Annaudat franceinfo
You will follow the teaching of the Louis-Lumière school and come out major then that of the Institute of Advanced Cinematographic Studies (IDHEC) in the direction section. Was it important for you to already master things, to learn?
I have sometimes been criticized for being a good technician, as if someone were saying to a writer: “It’s grammar and syntax“, well that helps! That is to say, once you’ve mastered the technology, you can twirl. When I wrote the screenplay, immediately afterwards, I write the technical breakdown where I ask for the material I need. If I don’t know what it’s for, the material, I can’t write it. And if I don’t write it, no one will order it. And if no one order, we will have a banal film because there will not be the appropriate equipment.
I have the impression that to master all that, to have worked has, above all, allowed you to seek your independence.
As I was very young, I was offered children’s films, that is to say advertising films. I made 400. But what was very odd was that I didn’t want to make commercials. I said: no to everything. I had a thing, I said: no, I’m not free until November, but it didn’t work then, I said bluntly: no because your thing sucks. But then they answered me:Oh yes ! What else would you see?” So, I was just saying whatever was on my mind, “Ah well, that’s fine, do it“. Suddenly, I found myself with the hot potato, but having my freedom to make the film that I proposed. And I still made over 400 films, I did 300 of them in complete freedom.
You have aroused interest in others. Like that of François Truffaut who will really take an interest in you, who will like the way you work. It is he who will introduce you to Claude Berri and that will give birth to victory by singing (1976). It’s your first “baby” and it won’t be easy at first, but you haven’t given up. You had the intuition that it was a part of you and you are going to rework this film, rework the soundtrack too.
It’s a film that is very similar to me. As I was a very young student at La Fémis, the Ministry of Cooperation was looking for a filmmaker cooperant to start Cameroonian cinema. And me, they come to see me and they say to me: “Do you want to be a soldier or do you prefer to be in cooperation? You won’t have the uniform etc…” I say: yes, because it’s in three years, four years. Then that day comes. I thought I was going to hate it and decided to misbehave to get ejected. Imagine that the door of the plane opened. I fell in love with Africa. Every day, for a year, I said to myself but it’s unbelievable what I’m going through. I met people there who didn’t speak my language, and I understood them better than my classmates at La Fémis.
This film was also a lesson in humility because it showed you that, even if you had convictions at the start, the result was not necessarily the desired reception from the public. But you went looking for this welcome, you went looking for something else.
They said to me: ‘But you are annoying us with your film. Films that talk about Africa and blacks are not successful, who cares. And I said: no, what I want to do is that. And I fought for seven years to make ‘La Victoire en Chantant’.
Jean Jacques Annaudat franceinfo
I was so grateful to Africa that I said to myself: if I have the chance one day to make a feature film, I must make a feature film that is made in Africa, about Africa, of course. And I didn’t give up. I said to myself: I want to make this film which talks about this little story of the war between the Germans and the French through African intermediaries.
Result: an Oscar! How did you experience it?
Completely unexpected. First, it was Côte d’Ivoire that presented it, not France. I was told: “Don’t come there because people think you’re black and they’ll be disappointed to see that it’s a Frenchman who made this film presented by Côte d’Ivoire“. And then in fact, at the time there was no franceinfo and so I’m waiting for the first info at 6 a.m. And there, I hear on France Inter: “Disappointment for France. It’s not Cousins cousins which won the Oscar, but an obscure film from Ivory Coast“. I did “Yippee!” in my head !