Jean-Jacques Annaud and the price of filming the impossible

Jean-Jacques Annaud

Photo: Photo Claude TRUONG-NGOC / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 1, 1943 Juvisy-sur-Orge, France
Occupation	Film director
Known for	Enemy at the Gates, The Name of the Rose, Seven Years in Tibet
Awards	Academy Award · 4 César · David di Donatello · Charlemagne Medal

Most directors spend their careers avoiding the shot that cannot be controlled. Jean-Jacques Annaud built his around it. He asked actors playing prehistoric hunters to carry a film without a word of any modern language, let an orphaned bear cub hold the screen almost without dialogue, and had wolves raised from pups so they could hunt in front of his cameras on the Mongolian steppe. Asked by franceinfo this spring about that habit, he answered with something close to a motto: if someone tells him a thing is impossible, that means it can be done.

The harder question about Annaud is not technical. The French director who turned forests, deserts and grasslands into his studio also spent much of his career negotiating with forces he could not train: national memories, festival juries and, most visibly, a government that banned him and later welcomed him back. His filmography reads as a record of those negotiations, and Paris is currently showing how the machinery behind it worked.

Annaud was born on 1 October 1943 in Juvisy-sur-Orge, south of Paris. He studied at the technical school in Vaugirard and graduated from IDHEC, the Paris film school, in 1964. National service sent him to Cameroon as a civilian coopérant, an assignment he had tried to avoid and which shaped his first feature. Before that debut he spent years directing television commercials, a trade that brought him Golden Lions at the Cannes advertising festival and taught him to tell a story in images before anyone speaks.

La Victoire en chantant, released in English as Black and White in Color, turned that African experience into satire: French colonists at a remote trading post learn that their country is at war with Germany and decide to attack the German post down the road. The film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. He followed it with Coup de tête, a football comedy with Patrick Dewaere that became a cult film in France.

La Guerre du feu (Quest for Fire, 1981) is where the method appeared in full. Shot in Kenya, Scotland and Canada, it followed early humans in search of fire and won the César Awards for best film and best director. The Name of the Rose (1986) put Sean Connery inside Umberto Eco’s monastery mystery, filmed in Italian and German abbeys, and brought him the César for best foreign film and a David di Donatello. Two years later came L’Ours, known in English as The Bear, built around a trained Kodiak bear and an orphaned cub in the Dolomites. It earned him a second César for best director.

L’Amant (1992), adapted from Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical novel and starring Jane March, recreated colonial Indochina on location in Vietnam. Wings of Courage (1995) was the first fiction film made in IMAX 3D. Then came the English-language period: Brad Pitt in Seven Years in Tibet (1997), Jude Law and Ed Harris as rival snipers in Enemy at the Gates (2001), and live tigers among the temples of Angkor in Deux Frères (2004), released in English as Two Brothers.

The cost of that ambition was paid in politics more than in budgets. Beijing objected to the way Seven Years in Tibet showed the Chinese army’s arrival in Tibet, banned the film and declared Annaud unwelcome. Enemy at the Gates was booed at the Berlinale, Stalingrad veterans asked the Russian Duma to ban it, and Annaud called the festival a “slaughterhouse”. The most revealing episode came later. When Chinese producers wanted him for Wolf Totem, Jiang Rong’s bestseller about Inner Mongolia, his personal ban was lifted. In an open letter circulated online in Chinese in December 2009, according to The Economist, he wrote that he had “never supported Tibet’s independence” and had no “personal relationship” with the Dalai Lama. The Economist read that self-criticism as protection against domestic critics who wanted the project stopped. Annaud himself has said his mistake was to assume China would treat Tibet the way France treats Algeria, as history open to revisiting. The finished film played down the novel’s political edge and leaned on ecology. Seven Years in Tibet is still banned in China.

Wolf Totem opened for Chinese New Year in February 2015 as the first Chinese production directed by a foreigner. Annaud filmed for more than a year in Inner Mongolia with a pack of wolves raised from pups and trained for years by Andrew Simpson, and asked his crew to walk to locations whenever possible to spare the grassland. It was the purest version of his method, made on terms set by someone else.

The later work moved between formats. He directed Patrick Dempsey in the ten-episode The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair (2018), adapted from Joël Dicker’s novel and shot in Canada. Notre-Dame brûle (2022), released in English as Notre-Dame on Fire, rebuilt the 2019 cathedral blaze for IMAX screens with Pathé and a script co-written with Thomas Bidegain. It sold 388,293 tickets in its first week in France, yet critics split: L’Obs found it stuck in a television style, and Les Inrockuptibles said it lost itself in anecdote.

This year belongs to the archive. The Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé in Paris has devoted an exhibition to his working process, “Le Chantier invisible”, open until 31 October 2026, with storyboards, casting material, location scouting, animal training, giant sets and costumes, including the dress Jane March wore in L’Amant. The programme included a masterclass in April and, in May and June, a carte blanche in which he presented the silent films that formed him. He has been a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts since 2007, and married Laurence Duval in 1982.

The project he carried longest in recent years has reached the screen in other hands. In 2022, France Télévisions announced L’Insoumise, a four-part series on Alice Guy, the first woman film director, to be written by Annaud and the British screenwriter Tim Loane, who had joined him on it in late 2019. It now arrives as Alice: Pioneer of Cinema, six episodes directed by Virginie Verrier and Guillaume Lonergan, with Bérénice Bejo as Guy. After its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, HBO Max launches it in France in December.

No new feature has been announced. The exhibition closes at the end of October, and the series about the woman France Télévisions credits with inventing fiction cinema reaches French viewers before the year ends. For a director who has always measured a project by how hard it would be to shoot, the open question is whether one more impossible film is still waiting.

Featured Films

Two Brothers (2004) — Notre-Dame on Fire (2022)

Tags: Brad Pitt, Sean Connery, The Name of the Rose, Jean-Jacques Annaud, Quest for Fire, Seven Years in Tibet

Related People

Featured Films

Related People

Discussion