Between him and Los Angeles, it’s a real love story: director Jean-Jacques Annaud returned to AFP on Tuesday on his American tropism, before the United States premiere of his film Notre Dame is burning, at the opening of the Hollywood French Film Festival next month. At 78, the director remains the Frenchman with the most affinity for Hollywood’s taste for the spectacular.
“I would never have made the films I made without the friendship and full support of the major American studios”confided the filmmaker, author of blockbusters like Seven years in Tibet, Stalingrad Where The Name of the Rose.
Whether Notre Dame is burning, which traces the fire that failed to completely destroy the Parisian cathedral in 2019, is a French production, the feature film oscillates between breathtaking thriller and disaster film. A style likely to please the public of the American French Film Festival (TAFFF, formerly Colcoa), who will discover it well after its release in France in March.
From the first smoke until the complete extinction of the fire fifteen hours later, at the cost of a fierce fight by the firefighters, the threat of flames on the Gothic jewel of the city of light constituted “an incredible drama, worthy of a Hollywood screenwriter”said Jean-Jacques Annaud.
“I’m close to Notre Dame right now, and far from Los Angeles”continued this cantor of epic cinema, reached by telephone from Paris. “But part of my heart remains in LA.”
Sean Connery, Brad Pitt, Jude Law… Some of Hollywood’s greatest actors have passed in front of Jean-Jacques Annaud’s camera. In the United States, the director has always had the means to match his ambitions.
“In America, I noticed that we invest to try to release the best film possible, the most spectacular, the most attractive. Whereas in France, the rule is to try to produce less expensively, to cheat sort of. Cheaper is easier to do.”
Jean Jacques Annauddirector
Despite his French roots, the filmmaker was only slightly inspired by the New Wave, a movement born in France at the end of the 1950s and which left a lasting mark on the history of the seventh art. The accent on the dialogues, instilled by the films of the time, remains for him secondary. The director appreciates the American way of filming, centered on movement and visual prowess.
“Cinema is the art of telling visually thrilling stories. Otherwise it’s something else, it’s television radio”added Jean-Jacques Annaud. “If we have the privilege of being on the big screen, it’s to fill it, not to put people on it who talk like on TV shows.”
“In France, expensive films are seen as unfair”continued the director. “We criticize films shot in the studio, we criticize the fact of building sets, we criticize special effects.” Despite this, French cinema “fortunately produces a few gems every year” in his own vein, he conceded.
For Notre Dame is burningJean-Jacques Annaud notably shot in the cathedrals of Sens and Bourges, in addition to impressive scenes of fire reconstructed in the studio.
The director also mixes the scenes played by actors with elements of reality. Between fiction and documentary images, the spectator relives the burning of the roof of the 12th century cathedral and the fall of its spire, under the horrified gaze of millions of people.
“All over the world, this cathedral was much more than a symbol of Paris or France, or even of Catholicism or Christianity”judged the artist. “It was kind of a metaphor, about the fear of Western culture collapsing.”
The American French Film Festival takes place from October 10 to 16 in Los Angeles. For this 26th edition, the program includes the film Hawaii by Maimouna Doucouré, whose first feature film cutebroadcast by Netflix, had created controversy with its hypersexualized teenage protagonists.
The public will also discover two other feature films, The worst and Full Times, proposed by France to be nominated for the next Oscars.
The festival will close with the film The Night of 12 by Dominik Moll, and the screening of the mini-series Irma Vep by Olivier Assayas, produced by HBO.