The collapsing spire of Viollet-le-Duc, the flames invading the structure and a firefighter who fears a "predicted disaster"... The first images of "Notre-Dame is burning", Jean-Jacques Annaud's film on the he cathedral fire which took place on the night of April 15 to 16, 2019, has just been revealed.
Spectacular, the trailer mixes archives and fictional scenes, like this feature film which will be released in theaters on March 16.
We see there, to an agonizing violin tune, the firefighters called to the scene of the fire in a Paris blocked by monster traffic jams, then to the onslaught of voracious flames.
This production promises to tell “the true story of the women and men who saved Notre-Dame”.
For his fourteenth film after "The War of Fire", "The Name of the Rose", "The Bear", "Seven Years in Tibet" or "Stalingrad", Jean-Jacques Annaud, 78, wanted to reconstruct this terrible night.
He toured between the studios of the Cité du Cinéma in Saint-Denis (Seine-Saint-Denis) and those of Bry-sur-Marne (Val-de-Marne), where he had an identical reconstruction, in stone , plaster, wood and tin, parts of the medieval church.
The director also filmed inside the cathedrals of Bourges (Cher) and Sens (Yonne) and used special effects to “connect” archive images and fictional sequences.
The filming of this blockbuster with a colossal budget of 30 million euros took place between March 9 and June 11, 2021.
A “Wagnerian drama”
Initially, the CEO of Pathé Jérôme Seydoux had proposed to Jean-Jacques Annaud to sign a documentary on the fire of Notre-Dame, but the filmmaker considered that the archive images were not sufficient to tell this "drama Wagnerian”.
He launched an appeal to collect the professional or amateur videos filmed the evening of the tragedy and he collected some 3,000 sequences taken by mobile phones or cameras.
But he also shot with the actors Samuel Labarthe, Jean-Paul Bordes, Chloé Jouannet, Jérémie Laheurte, Élodie Navarre or Vassili Schneider, advised on the set by a real firefighter.
"Notre-Dame is burning" will focus in particular on the cause of the fire, which is still unknown.
“To know my opinion, you will have to see the film!
” Jean-Jacques Annaud had slipped to us last May.
