Almost 20 years after La Guerre du feu , Jean-Jacques Annaud set fire to the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. The filmmaker explains that in addition to working on a series dedicated to Alice Guy, he is preparing a feature film on the disaster that struck the spirits last year.
The idea would come from Jérôme Seydoux, according to Le Point . The co-chair of Pathé, a long-time friend of the director, asked him to make a documentary. But it will ultimately be a film as he knows how to do it so well. Great resources and technology (Imax and Atmos) will be made available to make a spectacular film of what could not be filmed. Jean-Jacques Annaud speaks of it as a " tragic opera that ends well ".
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After a long period of documentation, the director explains that there is nothing to fix, the story is dramatic enough to leave it intact. Now make way for production and the various challenges that await them: giving this impression of fire danger through image but also through sound, which is essential. For this, Jean-Jacques Annaud is surrounded by a prestigious technical team with Jean-Marie Dreujou as director of photography. The two men have already worked together on five occasions including the films The Last Wolf and Two Brothers .
Jean-Jacques Annaud's wish is to work in hard sets. If Notre-Dame is still inaccessible, he hired Jean Rabasse, chief decorator appointed to the Césars for the film J'accuse, and set out to find cathedrals that could serve as the setting for the shooting.
The director has also released the name of his screenwriter. Thomas Bidegain, twice Caesarized for A Prophet and Rust and Bones , will hold the pen. “ Nothing is ever as dramatic as reality. The imperative is then to be as fair and precise as possible towards her, says the scriptwriter at Le Point . Thomas Bidegain also explains that he is inspired by the film Vol 93 by Paul Greengrass for the form of the film with dialogues mixing " the language of a canon and that of a firefighter ". The feature should not explore the consequences of this fire or the investigation that followed, "Titanic is not that we know a film on the iceberg ."
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Jean-Jacques Annaud will not hire stars to embody these ordinary heroes. A choice he already made for La Guerre du feu or Guillaumet, the wings of courage . There remains an unknown: when can the shooting take place? An initial schedule provided for it in June, but production was delayed by containment. One thing is certain, the project has the green light to become a great film.