Euronews Culture sits down with Thierry Frémaux to discuss the 130-year anniversary of the invention of cinema, his new film honouring the legacy of the Lumière brothers, and the threats cinema faces in its second centenary.
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00:00There is a lot of things about Lumière, about his own
00:29position in history, not totally an inventor, because we have Edison, we have
00:35Marais, we have Muybridge, we have a lot of people before him. So people used to say
00:40well, Lumière did not really really invent cinema and Lumière is not totally a
00:46director because we have George Méliès and a lot of people after him. What we
00:52say and what I think the movie shows is that Lumière was first totally an
00:57inventor. There is a lot of people before him, there is no more invention
01:02after him. Once he did that, it was done. And he is totally a director. I would say
01:10even an artist. The films show that he invented a lot of things. Let's say he
01:19was the first, so he asked himself the same question. Millions of filmmakers
01:26after him asked themselves what to do with a camera, what, how, what position,
01:33where, to do what, to tell what. And at the end of the journey, of his journey,
01:39yeah, he realized, directed and produced 2,000 movies. And yeah, 80% of
01:50what cinema will be in the future was already there.
01:57What Lumière did was the good idea. Put the people in the same room, put the image
02:16on the big screen and share the emotion of it. The desire of people at that time
02:22is still our desire. It's still why we want to go to cinema. Cinema won
02:28everywhere. The language of cinema, the language of images is everywhere on
02:34TikTok, on Instagram, on video, etc. But cinema, and now more than ever, and
02:43especially after COVID, or after the triumph of the platforms, cinema means
02:49films and going to cinemas. It's a conversation we have many, many times
02:55with Quentin Tarantino, who owns two theaters in Los Angeles. And he believes
03:01very strongly, not only movie theaters, but in 35mm print, which is even
03:07radicalism, very strong. But no, I think that we did here in Lyon, a lot of
03:15celebration. I was very young when I started. And it's maybe the first
03:20celebration this year, in 25, where we will insist in the second half of the
03:26year about the idea that Lumière invented the movie theaters. Years, years
03:34ago, and usually it was about Lumière as a director, the artist Lumière. Now it's
03:41also about that, because, again, cinema today means going to watch a film on
03:49cinemas.
03:50We have for many, many years, special effects, artificial special effects, not
04:12argentique special effects, not natural special effects. Maybe the last natural
04:18film is Apocalypse Now. The number of helicopters he has in the sky are the
04:23helicopters he had. And now you have a filmmaker saying, Francis Coppola,
04:28saying, well, let's talk to his special effects guy. Let's put more helicopters
04:32in the sky. So we know that. And for example, for those restorations, we
04:39didn't want to use artificial intelligence, even when the film is in a
04:43bad shape. The digital, the scan, the way, the computer, the way you can do by
04:50yourself some, some changes in order to correct the images and to get the film
04:58exactly at the same shape of what it was at a time. But intelligence,
05:04artificial, artificial intelligence is something different. And I'm personally,
05:10I'm, I'm not afraid at all, because, because we are in favor of human
05:17intelligence. I'm sure that, of course, we can use everything, but really for good
05:24reasons. But you're right that it's a big danger.
05:40It's so difficult to be optimistic when you're French, because, because in France,
05:49cinema goes well. But it's not from nothing and nowhere. We have a history.
05:56We have a history with magazine, with critics, with filmmakers, with festival.
06:04And what I like in France, you have two spectators watching a movie at the end of
06:09the movie, or they kiss themselves, or they fight themselves. And because we,
06:15I love disagreement. I love disagree and, and, and fighting. And then even Bertrand
06:22Tavennier used to say, I was wrong. I'm happy I was wrong.
06:40Our lives were changed by the existence of cinema. We want people's lives changed as
06:48well, because it was for the best. Again, a camera is what we say in the film.
06:55A camera, you take your responsibility. You are doing your own images.
07:00You are giving your own images to an audience. So you have to pay attention.
07:05You have to be very careful. Now with any camera on internet, nobody's careful.
07:12Nobody takes, takes time to think about. So you can see people with head cuts on internet.
07:22We can see violence. We can see a lot of things, not in cinema, even in the 20th century,
07:28which was not, by the way, a great century in terms of peace. Cinema contributed to be
07:37an instrument of peace.
07:58Don't, don't give me too many compliments because we are in March and it's exactly the
08:25same for me, for us, with my colleague of the selection committee. Are we going to do
08:31better than last year? So last year, one year ago, we were very worried because 23 was very
08:38good too. So we'll see. We'll see. We are, we are, we are working. And it's also about
08:45that as we are talking, as we are working, watching films, we know that a lot of filmmakers
08:51are editing, finishing, writing, working for the future. And talking about the future of cinema,
08:59what is very good to know, to feel is that cinema will be, is protected and will be saved
09:07by movie themselves, by, by artists. And when we have films, we have audience. This is also
09:16the project of Lumière.