Michel Hazanavicius, an animated director

In 2019, writer Jean-Claude Grumberg published The most valuable commodity. The story this tale tells is that of a couple of poor lumberjacks who collect, at the worst of the Second World War, a merchandise fell from a train. This merchandise is an infant that the father decides to abandon while the whole family is heading towards the Auschwitz camp. Michel Hazanavicius, who we discover as a designer, adapts this story into an animated film which is released in theaters on November 20, with the voices of Dominique Blanc, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Grégory Gadebois and Denis Podalydès.

For his carte blanche, it is logical that Michel Hazanavicius wanted to invite Jean-Claude Grumberg et Patrick Sobelmanthe producer of the film.
Of cinema, it will still be a question with Pascale Ferrandirector and founder of LaCinetek, the filmmakers' cinema library.
Then, we will move from one generation of filmmakers to another in the company of Martin Jauvatdirector of Greater Paris (2022) and who will sign the film in 2025 City fuckin the credits of which Michel Hazanavicius appears.

Free yourself from registers, rely on instinct: the Hazanavicius recipe

Michel Hazanavicius is one of those filmmakers capable of making with the same seriousness, with the same intensity, a great popular comedy and a war film, a gory comedy and today an animated film dealing with the Shoah. What makes him decide to make one film after another? For the director, understanding his own choices is not easy, everything depends on desire. A desire which sometimes depends on the reception of the previous film or sometimes on a text whose reading impacts the shots… In short, it is above all a matter of instinct and of the moment: “the films resemble who I was at the time I made them“, he summarizes.

From his first film in fact, My friends (1999), funny and uncomfortable at the same time, the director freed himself from registers and did not want to choose the ease of a genre. The fact remains that the film was not a great success. Seven years separate this first opus from its second, OSS 117. Cairo, nest of spieswhich was widely acclaimed. “The advantage when you start by failing is that you understand that you have to work more, or do something else. I decided to persist“, he confides.

An eclectic filmmaker, we now also discover him as a designer, since it is with an animated film that he returns to cinemas. What place does drawing occupy in his life? “It remains in the spheres of intimacy, I have never sought to commodify this practice. It balances me like meditation, I always have the equipment with me to.” This is therefore the first time that the director uses his art of the pencil in the context of cinema.

“The most precious of goods”: from book to screen, story of an adaptation

Jean-Claude Grumberg is the author of The most valuable commodity from which the film by Michel Hazanavicius is adapted. A tale set against the backdrop of the Second World War, which the writer knew up close. Born a few weeks before the start of the conflict, into an Ashkenazi Jewish family, he was less than 3 years old when he escaped deportation with his mother and brother. His father was arrested the first time, released, then arrested again, interned in Drancy then deported and murdered at Auschwitz. In 1943, his mother appealed to the Jewish Children's Relief Organization to have her two sons move into the free zone under false identities and hide. It will first be in Moissac, then in La Grave, in Isère. At the end of the war, his mother came to pick him up in Moissac, but they finally found themselves in Paris.
The life of Jean-Claude Grumberg is therefore marked by the Shoah. However, you have to wait for the part At Pierrot'swritten in one go after the loss of her four-month-old baby, so that the writer truly discovers that writing is a means of expression that allows her to explore individual and collective trauma. Since this piece, in fact, the writer has continued to deal with subjects that touch him most closely, including the pain of the Jewish people, which is echoed The most valuable commoditypublished by Editions du Seuil, in the La Librairie du XXIe siècle collection directed by Maurice Olender.

But how did this tale get from the page to the screen? It was Jean-Claude Grumberg himself who suggested to producer Patrick Sobelman to entrust the direction of the film to Michel Hazanavicius, who is a great designer and also a long-time friend of the writer. If this friendship may have played a role in the filmmaker's agreement, it was above all the text itself that convinced him. In his eyes, “the universe of the tale elevates the story to something universal“Above all, he found this story.”totally adaptable” at the cinema. The preparatory work to find the graphics of the characters was not, however, easy, he tells us. For the woodcutter for example, Michel Hazanavicius was inspired by Anna Magnani, an Italian actress who is in his eyes often more beautiful at the end of films than at the beginning.

Pascale Ferran, shared cinema

Pascale Ferran is a rare filmmaker. We've been waiting for almost ten years for the feature film that will succeed Bird peoplewhich is therefore his latest film to date. However, we will have to be patient, because the director tells us to face “deficit of desire“. Among other things, the adversity of the profession, which Michel Hazanavicius puts into perspective, but which Pascale Ferran for her part considers sometimes difficult to face. No doubt this encouraged him to continue throughout his career a great commitment to the entire operating system of French cinema We remember in particular his speech during the 2007 Césars, on the crisis situation that French auteur cinema was already going through at the time; intermittents of the show, but also on the financing system of French cinema So many difficulties which encouraged her to create the Club of 13 with actors from the world of cinema with not necessarily convergent interests Always in the collegiate. appointed in September 2023 President of the scenario support commission.

Pascale Ferran also has the desire and the idea of ​​sharing her taste for cinema in a different way. With Cédric Klapisch and the late Laurent Cantet, she imagined LaCinetek, a video-on-demand platform which brings together lists of favorite films from directors from around the world, of all generations. It operates like a film club, with the possibility of renting or purchasing films individually, or in the form of a subscription made up of regularly renewed film selections. For Pascale Ferran, LaCinetek was born from a utopia, from a “dream of filmmakers among themselves who say to themselves while smoking a cigarette on a piece of sidewalk that it is incredible that there is not a place where all the films in the world are accessible“. To respond to this need, shared by all the people who make films, love them or defend them, the project is born, then helped by a “planet conjunction“. Launched in November 2015 in France, it has been available in Germany and Austria since February 2019, and in Belgium and Luxembourg since 2020, and offers more than 2,000 films from the beginning of the history of cinema until 2010, limit time which has since evolved. However, LaCinetek retains “.something very artisanal“, estimates Pascale Ferran.

In the eyes of Michel Hazanavicius, a fan from the start, LaCinetek is “a small jewelry store“Contrary to the dusty heritage image that the platform may suffer from, there is something very joyful and playful about abandoning oneself there, he believes: “going there means treating yourself to shots of pleasure every time“.

From one generation of filmmaker to another

Michel Hazanavicius really liked it Greater Paris by Martin Jauvat, a “buddy movie” in the Parisian suburbs which impressed him for its very rich “vocabulary palette“. Impatient to see what happens next, Hazanavicius can be since he starred in his next film, Fuck in townin theaters in 2025. More precisely, it is the role of the father that Martin Jauvat entrusted to him, a choice whose symbolism is obvious. Directing his elder brother was also instinctive for Martin Jauvat!

More information on his news:

• The most valuable commoditydirected by Michel Hazanavicius, hits theaters on November 20. With the voices of Jean-Louis Trintignant, Dominique Blanc, Denis Podalydès, Grégory Gadebois.
• A new edition of Jean-Claude Grumberg's tale is released by Éditions du Threshold November 8, with illustrations by Michel Hazanavicius
• Michel Hazanavicius will publish a book of testimony and drawings, Notebooks from Ukraine: snapshots from the Ukrainian front, February 20, 2025 by Allary editions.