Politics & Power Quote by Jean-Jacques Annaud

Annaud’s line lands like a politely sharpened knife aimed at French cultural exceptionalism. It’s not really about “regional” stories being unworthy; it’s about the brutal arithmetic of modern filmmaking, where scale isn’t just an aesthetic choice but a survival strategy. He’s arguing that the economics of cinema have quietly rewritten the rules of identity: if your budget is big, your audience must be bigger, and the easiest way to get there is to sand down anything that reads as too locally specific, too linguistically closed, too culturally “for us.”

The provocation is in how he frames it as a lesson the French “have got to understand.” France prides itself on cinema as art, protected by state support and a critical culture that treats national film as a kind of civic good. Annaud—who has worked comfortably in international co-productions and large-scale spectacles—sounds like a man reporting back from the global marketplace, where patriotic sentiment doesn’t pay for cranes, VFX, or months of location shooting.

The subtext is a warning and a dare. The warning: insisting on a purely national scope can become a luxury belief when budgets climb. The dare: either adapt to an internationalized model or accept smaller ambitions. There’s also a quiet grief buried in the pragmatism. If films “can no longer afford” to be national, then cinema isn’t just getting more expensive; it’s getting less rooted. What’s at stake isn’t only funding, but the permission to be culturally particular without apologizing for it.