De Gaulle: the big preview of the event film

The super production, the first part of which, The Battle of Gaulle: The Iron Age, will be presented at the Cannes Film Festival, is revealed in the new issue of Première.

Six years of work. Two films. One of the biggest budgets in French cinema. A selection in Cannes. With The Battle of Gaulle: The Iron Age, Antonin Baudry tackles a figure that cinema has never dared to get too close to: not the icon, but the man. In the new First (available on newsstands and on our online store), the filmmaker of Wolf Song tells how he wanted to crack the monument to find a living, romantic and unpredictable energy.

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Its starting point is a simple conviction:

“Icons are useless. They even bother me. And they offer nothing to the spectators.”

It’s all there. Refuse the statue, refuse the mausoleum and the heritage film. Instead Baudry presented a moving de Gaulle, sometimes comical, sometimes tragic, but always unbalanced. His General is a Don Quixote in uniform rather than a Republican bust.

This is what makes The Battle of Gaulle singular: it is a film impossible to classify. Too funny to be just a drama, too adventurous to be locked into the biopic, and too free to be just a blockbuster. In this long interview, Baudry also returns to his choices of staging and his references – sometimes unexpected; he cites Tsui Hark rather than French prestige films. And in the same vein, he talks about his casting against the obvious with Simon Abkarian in the title role.

But ultimately, another sentence perhaps sums up his gesture even better:

“The only reason to make a film about de Gaulle today is to want to address young people, children, teenagers.”

In other words: Baudry wanted to talk about the past only to burn it in the present.

Echoing this, Simon Abkarian recounts the creation of the character: the voice, the posture, the precision, the search for a presence more than an imitation.

A great preview. A great interview. And a film that promises to shake things up, in theaters on June 3.

All this is in the new First on newsstands today.