Politics & Power Quote by Jean-Jacques Annaud

There’s a compliment hidden inside the jab: Americans make films with the confidence of an empire; the French make films with the intimacy of a neighborhood. Annaud isn’t just noting differences in market size. He’s diagnosing two artistic reflexes. Hollywood, with its financing structures and distribution muscle, builds stories that travel well: clear stakes, universalized emotions, legible arcs, fewer local references that might stall the subtitle reader. “Aim at the entire planet” is less about arrogance than design logic. Global appeal is engineered.

“Aim at Paris” sounds provincial until you hear the pride in it. Paris functions as shorthand for a specific cultural public: cine-literate, argument-loving, allergic to obviousness. French cinema’s reputational brand is density - social texture, moral ambiguity, talkiness, erotic frankness, politics that aren’t simplified into good-versus-evil. Those movies don’t always “scale,” and they’re often not trying to. The target isn’t everyone; it’s the right someones.

The subtext is a quiet warning about what globalization does to art. When you aim at the planet, you risk sanding off the particularities that make a film feel alive. When you aim at a city, you risk turning taste into a gated community. Coming from Annaud - a director who’s worked on ambitious, internationally minded projects - the line reads as self-aware: he understands the seduction of worldwide reach and the cost of it. It’s a cultural map drawn in one sentence, and like all good maps, it exaggerates to tell the truth.