Dimitri Rassam, 42, welcomes us into his Paris office. A sort of toy and souvenir box where we find mangas, a hat from the Three Musketeers, the pistol of the Count of Monte Cristo, from Playmobil. A photo of him as a child in the arms of his godfather Francis Ford Coppola. Everything is about cinema, childhood and coming of age. Today, he is one of the most ambitious producers in French cinema but he talks about it very simply. Interview.
Dimitri Rassam The Counts of Monte Cristo hits screens on June 28. A high quality production which, after the two parts of the Three Musketeers, reconnects with a French cinema that we no longer made. How was this pharaonic project born?
In 2019, I asked myself a simple question: why am I doing this job as a producer, what films do I want to bring to the screen? So I wrote down a list of my desires. I remembered the films that had marked me as a child,Indiana Jones has Once upon a time in America Passing by The bear. I have a love for frescoes that mix history and fiction. I thought first of Three Musketeers .
The success of the two films (D’Artagnan et Milady6 million entries in total) has authorized you to launch Monte Cristo ?
When we tackle a project of this magnitude and it becomes real, we say to ourselves that aiming even higher becomes possible. So I spoke about it very quickly to Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de La Patellière, screenwriters of Three Musketeers, and we realized that we had the same dream. And that it had to be made into just one film.
Having dreams is great! But they are expensive… How do we turn them into reality?
It’s all a question of balance… It’s quite hard to measure the real cost of films like these before you’ve made them. It therefore requires enormous preparation work with a high-quality artistic team. You also need a solid partner: in this case, it’s Pathé. Jérôme Seydoux had the same desire as me, with this common question, post-Covid: what makes you want to go to a cinema?
Knowing that there is not just one answer…
Of course not !…
