“Animation allows you to tell without showing”

King of diversion – American Class (1993) OSS 117. Cairo, nest of spies (2006), The Artist (2011), The Redoubtable (2017)Cut! (2022) –, Michel Hazanavicius rarely allows himself a “first degree” outing. It is no different with his new film, The Most Valuable of Goodswhich goes through the double mediation of a masterful text (the eponymous book by Jean-Claude Grumberg, published in 2019 at Seuil) and two hyperstructuring genres, the story and animated cinema, in order to evoke destiny of a Jewish girl saved by the Righteous during the Shoah. While during the summer he signed a resounding column on the post-October 7 Jewish condition, in The Worldthis film brings him no less, and perhaps never before, closer to himself.

What made you want to adapt Jean-Claude Grumberg's text?

It was the text that decided. I was almost passive. I received proofs of the book, firstly because Jean-Claude Grumberg is a very old friend of my parents. He has known me since I was born. And then there was straight away the proposal to make an animated film, once again at the initiative of Jean-Claude, who knew my drawings and who recommended me to producer Patrick Sobelman. Nothing would have happened, however, if I hadn't loved the text. The book shocked me. This side step that is the tale, this deep and delicate approach to a subject that I knew well having been immersed in it as a child, I had never seen it 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 to work with a specialized co-director. I tried twice but it didn't work. It seemed to me that the subject was really too delicate, that I had to take full responsibility for it. So I embarked on collective work with the animation team. It took time 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 claim to have their own universe, they go a bit 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 subject such as the Shoah. Because it allows you to tell without showing. Drawing does not reconstruct reality, it reinvents it. It was out of the question for me to call on actors to play this story. We can't show millions of human lives being torn away, that makes no sense.

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