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The General Delegate of the Cannes Film Festival Thierry Frémaux was interviewed by Brut during the 14th edition of the Festival Lumière. An opportunity to remember his friendship with Bertrand Tavernier, who died in 2021.
“My life wouldn’t have been the same if that morning I hadn’t come with my little tape recorder to record Bertrand Tavernier.“For Thierry Frémaux, general manager of the Festival Lumière and general delegate of the Cannes Film Festival, it’s clear: Bertrand Tavernier has changed his life. He had a deep friendship with the filmmaker. Thierry Frémaux even wrote a book in tribute to their relationship: If we had known that we loved him so much, we would have loved him more. At the microphone of Brut., he remembers his meeting with the filmmaker, during the last Festival Lumière which was held from October 15 to 23, 2022.
He had first met the filmmaker to interview him. “I had no stress because it’s not my nature but I was aware of the solemn nature of it. When you are a film buff in the provinces, you consider, and always moreover, that filmmakers are kind of heroes. These are people who organize a whole community in order to succeed in making a film. And in this community, there are not only artists, there are technicians, there are producers. (…) Even I, I direct the Lumière Institute or the Cannes Film Festival, but if my life had been to transport copies of films for the warehouses of cinematheques or to tear up tickets at the entrance, when we still tore up the tickets would have been fine with me. I would have said to myself: I work in the cinema.”
“We were in 1982, he was coming out of ‘Coup de Torchon’, he was a media character, we didn’t say that at the time, I don’t think. In any case, he was someone who constantly made interventions, who was a big mouth of French cinema. And then there, we never left each other. Our friendship was from the outset an immanent friendship, never theorized” he recalls.