For French animation auteur Sylvain Chomet (The Triplets of Belleville, The Illusionist), storytelling has always lived in the space between silence and song. “Most of my work so far has been silent movies, I didn’t really do much with dialogue,” he says.
But for his latest project — A Magnificent Life, a fully animated biopic of pioneering French screenwriter and filmmaker Marcel Pagnol, which Sony Pictures Classics will release stateside — Chomet brings one of cinema’s great voices back to life.
Pagnol revolutionized film dialogue, bringing literary sophistication and realism to the screen at a time, in the early sound era, when producers feared the spoken word. He also brought regional realism, having his actors speak in the broad Marseilles dialect of his hometown, unheard of at the time. Pagnol transformed the style of European cinema by taking the camera outdoors, inspiring Italian neorealism and the Nouvelle Vague. His proposal to tax the profits on American films and use the money to fund local productions led to the creation of France’s film board, the CNC, and was the foundation of the country’s still vital and still competitive national industry.
Chomet spoke to The Hollywood Reporter ahead of the Cannes Film Festival special screening premiere of A Magnificent Life on Saturday, about Pagnol’s legacy, the challenge of dialogue and translation, and what the late master would think of Trump’s tariffs proposals.
When did you first discover Marcel Pagnol’s work?
When I was at school. I don’t remember the year, but I was quite young, 10 or 11 years old. At that time, we had La Gloire de mon père [My Father’s Glory] and Le Château de ma mère [My Mother’s Castle] as part of the regular school curriculum. That’s not the case anymore, which I think is a shame. I didn’t really like reading much, because my medium was drawing. I preferred watching films or reading comics. But I read a small book from Pagnol and I really, really loved it.
He’s writing is magical. The style is strong but really clear. He’s a bit like Mozart—it feels easy, simple, but it’s so clear. I really fell in love with this book, and it made me want to read more… Later on I discovered he was the guy who wrote and directed [1931 French comedy classic] Marius, and so I felt his presence.
Did his work directly inspire you as a filmmaker?
I’m not sure about that. I don’t think so, because most of my work was silent movies… I didn’t have many opportunities to make any talking movies. The Triplets of Belleville and The Illusionist were really silent. I liked his work, I liked his films, but it’s difficult to tell if they made me want to make films or inspired me. I think it became part of my DNA. It’s only when you go back to it later on, that you realize how great his style was, how amazing his stories were and how much it has shaped you.
How did the idea for a biopic come about?
It was basically when I met Nicolas Pagnol, the grandson of Marcel Pagnol. He was with a producer, Charlène Poirier, and his wife, Valérie. They wanted me to do a documentary on Marcel Pagnol, and I was interested because I’d never done a documentary. So I wrote a documentary based on the archive material.
But these people, I think, had a secret plan to make me do an animated film. They started asking me to do little bits of animation, to substitute for parts of the story that we didn’t have archive material for. I’d show them the little animated sequences and they said: “That’s what everyone wants.” S
So I threw everything away and made a biopic all in animation, using the archive material. Nicola had access to everything from his grandfather, and he had some texts, some poems, things never been published and not even seen by anybody, which I could use. The script is very much in Pagnol’s voice. And we used clips from his films together with the animation, which is something I’ve done before in my films. We have a clip of an unfinished film that was supposed to have been destroyed, but they found the fragment recently and we put it in. It’s never been seen before.
‘A Magnificent Life’
Sony Pictures Classics
Pagnol was an inventor and always on the cutting edge of technology. If he were alive today, would he be embracing AI?
He really loved technology. He was a bit of an engineer—very good with his hands, making little machines. But I’m not sure he would have liked working with a tool supposed to be more intelligent than he is. I think he would have been horrified by the idea of using AI to do voices. Dialogue and dialects were so important to him. And I think we should be horrified.
I’m doing animation, and the tools are different. I don’t use paper anymore, I work with a computer screen. But everything is still drawn, still painted, with these digital tools. The work I’m doing hasn’t changed much from what Walt Disney was doing in the 1950s. We use our hands to draw. I’ve been trying to use some AI for development, and I’m not really satisfied with it. I’d prefer to take out a pencil and paper and work my ideas out that way.
I don’t feel frightened by AI. I mean, if people believe to be creative, you need a superior being to help you, fine. But I don’t see what kind of joy you have in creation when you need to have a superior being to help you. I don’t see what kind of joy you have in creating that way. And that’s what creation should be: Joy.
You directed both French and English versions of the film. How did you handle the differences?
There were a few little tweaks. In the original, Pagnol is an English teacher. In English, he’s a Latin teacher, which he also was, because it works better than having an English teacher in an English-speaking film.
The main challenge was the accents. For the Parisians, we used Cockney, but were really scratching our heads to find the equivalent of the Marseille accent in English. We tried speaking English with a Marseille accent, but it sounded Italian. It was really bizarre. We needed a language that had the same sing-song sound to it as the Marseille accent does. The first thing I thought of was Welsh, because they have a real singing accent as well. And it works really well.
What impact do you think Pagnol had on cinema?
For dialogues, he really gave birth to a style. His use of realism inspired Italian neorealism and the Nouvelle Vague. He was one of the first to take the camera outside the studio. The opening of Fanny (1932), with Orane Demazis walking through the streets of Marseille, was shot from the trunk of a car with a hidden camera. That inspired the Nouvelle Vague to take their cameras outside.
Pagnol also helped shape film policy in France by introducing essentially a tariff on American films. What do you think he’d say to Trump’s idea of a tariff on non-American films?
Yes, it’s interesting. Pagnol did suggest this idea, to put a tariff on American cinema. He wasn’t any sort of nationalist, quite the opposite, but he knew how important, how powerful, cinema was, and he was scared of what it could do.
Remember, he had seen how the Nazis used cinema. The Nazis even tried to get him to join them to make a European cinema, which would have been a Nazi cinema. After the war, he realized France was in chaos and Hollywood was producing really strong, really life-changing films: Color movies, panoramic films. He knew that unless there was a way to ensure the French industry could carry on making French movies, American movies would invade and take over the cinema.
He didn’t want to censor American films, because we aren’t Russia. Instead, he decided to tax American movies, not when they come in, but on the profit they make, and use that money to subsidize French movies. He essentially created the CNC. We’re the only country that did that, and that’s probably the reason why there is still a very strong French cinema today.
What’s next for you, another dialogue-packed feature?
No! My next film will be completely silent again. I’m doing a sort of spin-off of The Triplets of Belleville, but this time without the bicycles. There’s a cat now. It’s more about the triplets—the big, tall ladies. There’ll be lots of music but no dialogue.
I’m going to start storyboarding very soon, within a month or so, and we’re going to use the same team as we did with Pagnol. I wrote the story at the same time as Triplets, 25 years ago now, so it’s fresh from my early mind. It’s completely bonkers. Back to the roots.
