For the younger generation, he is largely unknown, director Antonin Baudry tells TT.
They know he was an airport, he jokes.
But Baudry intends to change that. He has directed two films about de Gaulle, which are now in cinemas. Part one, “The Price of Resistance,” will premiere on August 14, and part two, “The Voice of Freedom,” will be released in October. The films have a combined running time of six hours and are set entirely during World War II.
Two films of three hours each - wouldn’t it have been better to make a TV series? But Baudry is a filmmaker who wants to make films, he explains.
It works better than as a TV series. And to tell the story of the Free France movement from 1940 to 1944, it takes two films. That was obvious from the beginning. I was lucky to find producers who thought the same.
Tricky and odd
Baudry shows how the headstrong and arrogant Charles de Gaulle refused to accept the Vichy government's capitulation to the Nazis and depicts how he led the Free France movement from London.
The de Gaulle we meet is a pompous, lonely person who at one point even contemplates suicide. He speaks of himself in the third person, saying things like “mosquito bites don’t bite de Gaulle.” Winston Churchill found him unbearable, according to Baudry.
Many people perceived him as tricky and odd. They said "he seems crazy, he's unpleasant, when we talk about what’s going to happen next week he answers with things that happened 200 years ago".
At the same time, he was the only prominent right-wing politician in France who did not accept the Nazi occupation without resistance, emphasizes Baudry.
A kind of heroism
Do the films portray de Gaulle as a hero? Not exactly, according to the director. But he thinks the ruler's actions still indicate a kind of chivalry.
A person who throws himself into something that seems like a lost cause, who sacrifices himself, who is sentenced to death in his homeland, whose family is threatened because of this. It doesn't seem to lead anywhere but he does it anyway, it's a kind of heroism that existed at that time in France, probably for the last time.
Facts: Antonin Baudry
Age: 51.
Lives: Paris.
Occupation: Screenwriter, director.
Previous film: "The Wolf's Call".
Current: With “De Gaulle: The Price of Resistance” which has its Swedish premiere on August 14. The sequel “De Gaulle: The Voice of Freedom” will premiere on October 30.
