King of fun – american class (1993) OSS 117. Cairo, nest of spies (2006), the artist (2011), The fearsome (2017)Cut! (2022) –, Michel Hazanavicius rarely allows himself a “first degree” exit. It’s no different with his new movie, The most valuable of assetsthat goes through the double mediation of a masterful text (the book of the same name by Jean-Claude Grumberg, published in 2019 in Seuil) and two hyperstructuring genres, the short story and the animated film, to evoke the fate of a Jewish girl saved by the Righteous during the Shoah. While during the summer he signed a resounding column on the Jewish condition after October 7, in the worldThis film brings him no less, and perhaps never before, closer to himself.
What prompted you to adapt Jean-Claude Grumberg’s text?
It was the text that decided. He was almost passive. I received proofs of the book, first of all because Jean-Claude Grumberg is an old friend of my parents. He’s known me since I was born. And then the proposal to make an animated film immediately arose, also at the initiative of Jean-Claude, who knew my drawings and recommended me to the producer Patrick Sobelman. However, nothing would have happened if I hadn’t loved the text. The book surprised me. This lateral step that is the story, this deep and delicate approach to a subject that I knew well from having been immersed in it as a child, I had never seen before.
However, animation is not your specialty…
It’s true. The initial idea was to start from the character designs that I had created and work with a specialized co-director. I tried twice but it didn’t work. It seemed to me that the topic was too delicate and that I should take full responsibility. Then I embarked on collective work with the animation team. It took me a while to define a method, but it ended up working.
What were your aesthetic guidelines for the animation itself?
I didn’t really have one. My own drawings do not pretend to have their own universe, they go a little in all directions. The most important thing for me was to have a clear awareness that animation was undoubtedly the most appropriate medium to address a topic like the Shoah. Because it allows you to tell it without showing it. Drawing does not reconstruct reality, it reinvents it. For me it was not possible to use actors to interpret this story. We cannot show that millions of human lives are being taken, that makes no sense.
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