Jean-Jacques Annaud occupies a unique position. A rare French director with international stature and reputation. Luc Besson possibly being the other example. So, it is quite enjoyable to dive into his dense autobiography, “A Life for the Cinema”, published in 2018, when he was seventy-five years old. After thirteen films in four decades, Annaud is clearly eager to show his undiminished and contagious appetite for moviemaking. “I never got tired of my job,” he writes. “I was nine when I chose it and I still think it is one of the most beautiful and gratifying. This is why I wanted to sum up my souvenirs and recount how I experienced them. A mix of enthusiasms, exigency, demands, chances, serendipity, madness and shortcuts…”

All of these components compose the fabric of his quite colorful life story told with no filter.

Growing up in a Parisian suburb, he describes himself as “a solitary child, calm and curious, at times obsessive when passionate about something.” At fifteen, he was fascinated with his cousin’s Pathé 9.5mm camera. An interest that motivated him to join the famed Ecole de Vaugirard, a photography and cinema school founded by Louis Lumière and Léon Gaumont in 1926. He then graduated from the prestigious IDHEC (Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques), soon got jobs directing commercials and was quickly in demand.

By the early seventies, he had become a star director in the genre, like his British counterparts, Alan Parker, Adrian Lyne and Ridley Scott. But he very soon felt limited by the constraints of the short format and longed to try his hand at feature-length movies. “I was twenty-seven, very successful, and on the verge of a burnout. I needed to stop.” So, he dug in his memories of his military service in Cameroon, the French-speaking West African country. He came up with the satirical story of a bunch of Gallic colonists facing the Germans in 1915 after learning, with much delay that they were at war. Black and White in Color was released in 1976, to very mixed reviews and mediocre box-office. But a year later, to Annaud’s surprise, it won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. He tells the funny anecdote of his producer Arthur Cohn who told him: “Don’t show up in Los Angeles. Since the film is representing the Ivory Coast, people think you are Black, and they would be disappointed to find out you are White!” To this day, Annaud has never seen the golden statuette, but he received a letter from Jean Renoir praising the movie. 

Hollywood took notice and offers started to come. After a second opus, Hothead, set in the soccer world of rural France, he was ready for a much bigger scale.

His next project, Quest for Fire, was most ambitious and risky and he needed a big studio to finance it. A prehistoric fantasy adventure story about cavemen and their eponymous search it would require to invent a new language, courtesy of Anthony Burgess, to find many elephants that would be disguised as mammoths with huge fake polystyrene tusks and imitation woolly skins made of horsehair! … If that wasn’t challenging enough, Annaud faced an unexpected hurdle. “Development hell, something I had never heard of before.” Quite a roller-coaster indeed.

First set-up at Columbia, the movie ended up at Twentieth Century Fox where Sherry Lansing had just been named head of the studio and had a last-minute change of heart. At the time Annaud was sharing an office with Werner Herzog who, suddenly irate at hearing that the film would not be greenlit, went barging in Lansing’s office screaming at her: “You bitch, if you don’t make Jean-Jacques’ movie, I will commit hara-kiri right there on your beautiful white carpet and bleed to death on your sofa.” It worked and she agreed, but with a much-reduced budget. Released in December 1981, the film was a huge success, putting Annaud in a new league. 

From then on, he was keen on selecting projects with high potential universal appeal.

Each one represented a different type of challenge that, on paper, often seemed insurmountable logistically. But that never deterred him. On the contrary, that kind of stimulation kept him going. “Great works of art can only exist in the shadow of great dreams,” Annaud reckons, while wondering also “at what time does one start to put oneself in danger? If I try to analyze my motivations, I find a convergence of passions.”

On those terms, he convinced Umberto Eco he was the right director to adapt his best-seller The Name of the Rose. That Sean Connery would be right to portray a Franciscan Friar in the medieval thriller, instead of some of the actors he had previously considered, Michael Caine, Robert De Niro, Donald Sutherland, Jack Nicholson or Paul Newman. He was utterly impressed by his discipline and compares his impeccable technique to Swiss watchmaking. Annaud and Connery got along famously but that wasn’t the case with F. Murray Abraham, who played the Inquisitor. “With him, I really discovered what it felt like to hate an actor.” After all those years, Annaud is still fuming at his arrogance and rudeness not only towards him but his co-stars and the crew as his constant bragging about being an Oscar and Golden Globe winner!

“The main thing is to build their confidence,” he explains about working with actors. “It is often complicated as they are all different and one does not direct in the same way Sean Connery, Brad Pitt or Jane March. They have different views of their profession, of their lives as actors, but the common denominator is their fragility. It can be masked by a lengthy career, prestige and successes, but it is there.”

He describes enjoying the lengthy and extensive research done for each film, the reasons for constantly trying to make eclectic choices, not following trends, exploring new subjects, never repeating himself. An impressive versatility demonstrated in Seven Years in Tibet, Enemy at the Gates, Day of the Falcon, and of course with the three films where animals were the main protagonists. He provides extensive details on his lengthy searches of those assorted menageries, casting sessions to find the right four-legged performers and how to handle them in front of the camera. Rarely easy, often dangerous but always fascinating. Grizzly and rambunctious cubs for The Bear, cute and majestic tigers for Two Brothers and a menacing-enough pack of wolves for the Chinese set Wolf Totem.

He justifies the importance of choosing rarely seen locales as backdrops of his stories. Here he is, taking along the reader in his peregrinations scouting exotic locations all over the world: the mountains of Ladakh, the Tyrolean alps, the Qatari desert, the Andes, Angkor Wat, the plains of Inner Mongolia, the Magadi lake in Kenya, Thailand and Vietnam…

After The Lover, adapted from French literary giant Marguerite Duras’ acclaimed memoir, was released in January 1992, Annaud found himself once again criticized in France. Labeled a traitor to his own country for “being a French author making movies in the English language. I had enough and, since Hollywood had been courting me for years, I decided to relent.”

So, he moved to Los Angeles. “I had offers to adapt Jack London’s The Seawolf, and a project on the Shackelton expedition in Antarctica and I worked with John Milius on a screenplay of Mistress of the Seas, about an Irish female pirate in the 18^th century.”  None materialized. Instead, Annaud found himself intrigued by a new technology, Imax 3D. His 1995 forty-minute-long Wings of Courage was the first film shot in that format.

Lucid on his lengthy career, he is refreshingly candid on how to handle some of the flops (most notably the 2007 His Majesty Minor) and bad reviews. “For a long time, I was labeled Mr. Success, but I only knew too well it was not meant as a compliment. I have developed Teflon skin. I have such pleasure being able to do the movies I want, with the means I ask for, with total liberty, that I don’t feel entitled to ask that all the releases be well received and euphoric. That is the price to pay for so much joy. He concludes that “looking back, even if I see flaws in my films, I don’t disavow any of them.”

Annaud recently wrapped Notre-Dame on Fire, another challenging project showcasing the heroic 400 firefighters who saved the Parisian cathedral from total destruction, due to be released in April 2022, three years after the event took place.