Notre-Dame on Fire
Notre-Dame on Fire is a 2022 disaster film based on the Notre-Dame de [Paris fire] that occurred on 15 April 2019. The film is directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud from a script written by Annaud and Thomas Bidegain. Produced by Pathé Films and TF1 Films Production, it is an international co-production with Italian company Wildside.
Notre-Dame on Fire was released in France on 16 March 2022, by Pathé Distribution in IMAX, Dolby Cinema, and standard formats. In Italy, it was released on 28 March 2022, by Vision Distribution.
Synopsis
On 15 April 2019, a violent fire breaks out in Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. Men and women will do everything to save the building and the religious and art treasures stored within.Production
In April 2020, Jean-Jacques Annaud announced that he wanted to make a film about the fire. He explained this choice later: "Obviously, I immediately felt the extraordinary cinematographic merits. Beyond the disaster and the grief, of course, there is precisely the emotion and the spectacle of the fire". The filmmaker had first thought of making a documentary.Filming began in March 2021 in Bourges. Bourges Cathedral was used for its resemblance to Notre-Dame. The team then began to shoot in the studio at the Cité du Cinéma. A sequence was then shot in mid-April in Versailles, in the Versailles-Château-Rive-Gauche12 station. Sequences were also shot in Amiens Cathedral, whose spire and certain parts of the building are similar to those of Notre-Dame.
The scenes recounting the start of the fire were set in the 13th-century framework of Saint-Étienne cathedral in Sens. In this place, shots were also taken on the forecourt, on the stairs of the towers, and in the nave.
To complete his film, director Annaud made a public call for actual footage from the day of the fire:
"I still need the traffic jams that were created by this event, the people singing in the night to cheer on the firefighters who saved the cathedral. I also need testimonies from foreign countries to discuss the planetary event. If you have these images, we would be happy to take advantage of them and put them in the film."