The watercolour-style animation was created by French outfit 3.0 Studio. Hazanavicius feels that couching the story in fable-like terms was the ideal way to convey it to children. “I think it was a very good way to talk to kids, to tell the truth, but not to traumatise them, and not to tell them the world is an awful place,” he says.
“For it can be awful, but we also have the choice to be good people; and that is the message of this film. When we talk about the Holocaust, this is not what we usually do. We say human nature can be very [steeped in] darkness.” Hazanavicius, 57, was cautious about approaching Grumberg’s work for personal reasons. “He was my parents’ best friend, so I always knew him. He’s like an uncle for me. And I always avoided work on that topic because I thought it was not really my story.” Nor does Hazanavicius “usually go to see movies about [the] Holocaust” for fear that he’s being instructed on how to react. “I know exactly what I’m supposed to feel, what I’m supposed to think, what I’m supposed to know. I know the emotional path, and it doesn’t make me feel free with the story.”
When we meet Paris in late January, it is a couple of days after the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Perhaps, I suggest, this is why the past year has been replete with movies tackling the Shoah in different ways, from Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest to Treasure, starring Stephen Fry and Lena Dunham as a father and daughter who visit to Auschwitz. “I think it says a lot about human nature,” shrugs Hazanavicius when I ask why film-makers are drawn to the mass murder of Europe’s Jews as subject matter.
Photo: Ex Nihilo[Missing Credit]
He suggests we have been in what he calls “the Claude Lanzmann era”, referring to his fellow French director who, in 1985, released the epic documentary Shoah, which presented interviews with survivors, witnesses and perpetrators during visits to Holocaust sites across Europe. Back then “it was the time of the survivors’ words”, says Hazanavicius. “They could testify, and they could tell the story in very direct way. Now survivors are dying one after the other. So film-makers are finding new ways to talk about those events.”
Born in Paris in 1967 to a Jewish family with roots in Lithuania, Hazanavicius remembers hearing survivors tell their stories, particularly in response to Holocaust deniers, during his childhood. “All this was in the air,” he says. “So as a kid, I created myself an imaginary view of Auschwitz and what hell it can be.” Visiting the real Auschwitz much later was “very intense”, he adds, but different to his own thoughts, some of which leaked into the more nightmarish elements of his film.
While Grumberg’s story is fictional, and is told as a tale, it is a fiction “made to tell a truth” he says. So why did he choose animation to tell it?
Because, he says, reality always intrudes when you shoot live action. “I know these people [the actors] are not on their way to the death camps… I know they are pretending.” He also knew it would be impossible to show emaciated adults weighing next to nothing. “How can you do this with an actor?” Although Hazanavicius has experience in making children’s fare – in 2020 he directed a whimsical tale The Lost Prince with French mega-star Omar Sy – animation was new to him.
“At first, I tried to co-direct the movie with someone specialised in animation, but I couldn’t do it because I draw. I’ve drawn since I was ten. So I wanted to draw it myself. I drew all the characters of the movie and then I wanted to direct the animation. I mean, I wanted to do it by myself. It’s a new job for me. It’s very different. But the goals are the same: to create emotion with images and sound.”
This more sombre side of Hazanavicius’s output feels far removed from the films that made him famous – OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies (on which he met his wife, the French-Argentinian actress Bérénice Bejo) and its sequel OSS 117: Lost In Rio. These were affectionate espionage parodies. Both also starred Jean Dujardin, who joined Bejo in reuniting with Hazanavicius for The Artist, a charmer that stunned the movie industry, claiming five Oscars, including Best Picture. Even Covid didn’t stop him: in 2022, he went for all-out splatter with the zombie tale Final Cut, a remake of the Japanese film One Cut of the Dead.
Yet, throughout this career of crowd-pleasers there has also always been a persistent need to confront mankind’s atrocities. Early on, he co-wrote and produced the 2004 documentary Rwanda: History of a Genocide, taking several trips to the African country. This affected him profoundly. Then, following The Artist, resisting all temptations to make a Hollywood comedy, he directed The Search, a story about an NGO in war-torn Chechnya. Starring Annette Bening, it was a remake of Fred Zinnemann’s 1948 tale of a young Auschwitz survivor and his mother looking for each other in post-war Europe. When the film went to Cannes, critics tore The Search apart, with trade magazine Variety calling it “a gruelling, lumbering, two-and-a-half-hour humanitarian tract that all but collapses under the weight of its own moral indignation”.
But Hazanavicius remains unrepentant about taking on that story. “That is an example of war, with between 200,00 and 300,000 people dying,” he says. “The international community did nothing. There was no information. They lost the war and history is written against them because of that and because the Russian propaganda is very, very strong.”
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he’s also made several trips to the front lines, at the request of several Ukrainian friends.
We have the choice to be good people and that is the message of the film. When we talk about the Holocaust, this is not what we usually do
Spearheading UNITED24’s Rebuild Ukraine programme, launched by President Zelensky and his wife Olena, he organised a charity auction, raising £105,000 to help reconstruct the hospital in Izium, Kharkiv Oblast.
His journey to the war-torn country also inspired Notebooks from Ukraine, a book of drawings and observations “about Ukrainian defenders” that was published in February. As his editorial note adds: “At the time of publication, I don’t know who among them is still alive. But I do know what we owe them.”
So what’s next in this diverse career? A sequel to The Artist, perhaps? “No, but I might do another… not a sequel, but maybe another silent movie, because I love that format,” he replies. Does he have an idea? “I have many, many. Too many ideas! I have to choose.
“I mean, it’s the most important part of the entire process, the choice of what you’re going to do. You’re going to be very close to your choice for maybe two years, maybe more, and then you will carry it for the rest of your life.
“You’re still talking to me about OSS 117, a choice that I made 20 years ago. You have to be very careful with your choices.”
The Most Precious of Cargoes is in cinemas from April 4
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Michel Hazanavicius Photo: Ex Nihilo[Missing Credit]
