Thierry Frémaux Talks Bringing Classic Cinema Back To Life At The Lumière Film Festival & Nobel Prize Inspiration For Its Honorary Lumière Prize

Melanie Goodfellow
·7 min read
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Thierry Frémaux is best known internationally as the long-time head of France’s Cannes Film Festival, which is organized out of its offices in Paris’s trendy Marais neighborhood.

The double-hatted cinema expert is perhaps more in his element in his home city of Lyon, where he is the director of the Institut Lumière, situated on the site of the former mansion and factory of cinema pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumière.

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Alongside its late co-founders Bernard Chardère and Bertrand Tavernier, Frémaux has been a driving force behind the expansion of the institute and its activities, including the creation of its classic cinema-focused Lumière Film Festival, which has just wrapped its 15th edition.

Highlights this year included German director Wim Wenders receiving its prestigious Lumière Prize, following in the footsteps of the likes of Clint Eastwood, Martin Scorsese, Jane Campion and Francis Ford Coppola. As part of the honor, the Paris, Texas filmmaker also got to shoot his version of the 1895 Lumière film Workers Leaving The Lumiere Factory.

Wim Wenders directing his version of Workers Leaving The Lumiere Factory

As per the festival’s format, the line-up mixed new restorations of films such as Jean-Jacques Annaud’s The Name Of The Rose and Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys; cinema concerts celebrating Disney’s 100th anniversary and Tavernier; an homage to the late Jane Birkin; photo exhibitions around Wenders’ work, and previews of upcoming releases including Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy And The Heron and Scorsese’s Killers Of The Flower Moon.

Other official guests included Wes Anderson, Marisa Paredes, Alexander Payne, Karin Viard, Taylor Hackford, Rintaro, Alfonso Cuaron, Michel Hazanavicius, J.A. Bayona, Alice Rohrwacher, Tran Anh Hung, Albert Dupontel, Jonathan Glazer, Joachim Lafosse, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Alexandre Arcady, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Lou Doillon while Sean Penn made a flying visit on the downlow.

Deadline sat down with Frémaux in the final hours of this year’s edition, which ran in the cinemas of the Institut Lumière, and across another 35 cinemas, theatres and auditoriums across Lyon, from October 14 to 22.

DEADLINE: You quietly launched the Lumière Film Festival in 2009 and since then it has gone from strength to strength. As the event marks its 15th edition, did you think it would grow into what it is today?

THIERRY FRÉMAUX: It was a miracle that the festival got-off the ground in the first place and that 15 years later, it’s still there, getting stronger and stronger. Our hypothesis and the bet we took on classic cinema has been proven correct. We felt there was conjunction between history, culture, society and the technical part, the digital restorations, and we weren’t wrong. We have shown it can work and we think there’s scope for festivals like this everywhere.

DEADLINE: As the festival draws to a close what is the estimated attendance this year?

FRÉMAUX: Including the photo exhibitions, it will be around 250,000 visitors. For paying entries, it will be around 130,000.

DEADLINE: You’ve just come from a packed 5,000-capacity screening of the 1986 hit The Name Of The Rose which is the closing film. I saw full-price tickets cost €18. Were there free tickets?

FRÉMAUX: It’s never free. The special events like the opening and closing are always a bit more expensive, but for all the other screenings we try to keep the prices lower, at €4 to €8, to democratize the event. We’re mainly showing films that were hits when they first came out and we want to attract a mainstream audience.

DEADLINE: The atmosphere at The Name Of The Rose screening must have been incredible with 5,000 people in the hall?

FRÉMAUX: Yes, you could see there were lots of people who had seen the film the first time round and were coming back to see it on the big screen again, and then there lots of people who didn’t know the film at all, particularly youngsters.

DEADLINE: One of the particularities of the festival is the way in which the films and filmmakers are presented in a very spectacular way, with grandstanding music and rousing applause. The award ceremony for Wim Wenders in front of 3,000 people on Friday was incredible. Is that a deliberate move on your part?

FRÉMAUX: Yes, of course. You’ve never been to the opening? That’s even more spectacular. I want it to be a party. We kind of showed the Lyon public that they had this enthusiasm within themselves and that it was good to let it out.

DEADLINE: All the events and screenings seem to be packed and it’s a mixed crowd, with a lot of youngsters too. The masterclass with Annaud this morning was full, which was pretty impressive, given it started at 10.30 a.m. on a Sunday. Do think Lyon is a more cinephile city than Paris these days?

FRÉMAUX: Maybe… even we’re surprised. What’s particularly surprising is the mix… from a young public to older audiences, who I’m also very fond of because they have the purchasing power, a cultural knowledge and time. What’s interesting is that sometimes we say, ‘This is a film for an older audience’, and it’s full of youngsters, and vice versa. There’s a curiosity and when you solicit it, people show their best side.

DEADLINE: Wim Wenders received the Lumière Prize this year, following in the footsteps of the likes of Scorsese, Coppola and Quentin Tarantino. What’s the thinking behind this prize and who decides the honoree?

FRÉMAUX: There’s a small committee made up of the Institut Lumière management, including of course, [the institute’s president] Irène Jacob, before it was Bertrand Tavernier.

It’s the fruit of a long reflection and is also tied to things in the air. For example, it’s a perfect year to celebrate Wenders, who is enjoying a comeback with two magnificent films [Perfect Days and Anselm]. Thanks to films like Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire, he was huge in the 1980s, but he had dropped a bit from view more recently as his work took another direction. The public were saying ‘Wim who?’ and then screenings for films like Alice In The Cities and Kings Of The Road were packed, with lots of youngsters in the audience.

Last year, we had Tim Burton. Then it was because people were no longer talking about Tim Burton, so it was a way of putting the light on him. Then, of course, his Netflix series [Wednesday] came out.

It’s always a difficult mission. I first conceived the prize in the 1990s when I was a young director of the institute, for Billy Wilder and Ingmar Bergman, who was no longer making films, but it didn’t get off the ground.

We see it as sort of Nobel Prize for cinema. When the Nobel Prize was invented [in 1901] there wasn’t cinema, so its for literature and other fields. Of course, there are lots of prestigious cinema prizes, the Palme d’Or, the Oscars, but they focus on one film. The Lumière Prize is for a body of work. Architecture has a prize, the Pritzker, Mathematics too, the Fields Medal. We want to the Lumière Prize, to be the prize for cinema.

DEADLINE: The winners to date are Clint Eastwood, Miloš Forman, Gérard Depardieu, Ken Loach, Quentin Tarantino, Pedro Almodóvar, Martin Scorsese, Catherine Deneuve, Wong Kar-wai, Jane Fonda, Francis Ford Coppola, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Jane Campion, Tim Burton and Wim Wenders. The one big obvious name that seems to be missing is Steven Spielberg?

FRÉMAUX: We invite him every year, and think of him every year, but he is always working.

DEADLINE: Do you already have ideas for the 2024 Lumière Prize honoree?

FRÉMAUX: It’s too early. We start thinking about it in the spring when we have a better sense of what’s coming up and the currents of the time.

DEADLINE: Aside from Wenders, the festival hosted a raft of top directors this year, including Wes Anderson, Jonathan Glazer and Alfonso Cuaròn. The Lumière Film Festival isn’t an A-list festival, it’s more of a public-facing event. Why do you think they come?

FRÉMAUX: For the love of cinema. There is no competition, prizes or red carpets, apart from the Lumière Prize ceremony two nights ago. They come for friendship and because it’s a festival of admiration. Cineastes are also admirers. They admire one another and its fantastic to see directors talking about their work.

DEADLINE: Institut Lumière co-founder Bernard Chardère died this summer and you lost Bertrand Tavernier in 2021. They were both your mentors when you started working as a volunteer at the Institut Lumière back in the early 1980s. How does it feel as you carry on the work of the institute without them.

FRÉMAUX: There example is precious, as was that of Tom Luddy. There is a generation that is dying out. I’m part of that intermediary generation, neither young, nor old. We’ve got a lot of youngsters in the team, as well as women, who are in the majority on the management board.

DEADLINE: As the festival comes to a close, you’re gearing up for the reopening of the revamped Lumière Museum, based in the mansion of Auguste and Louis Lumière’s father Antoine Lumière. Having been at the institute since its early days in the 1980s, when all that remained of the Lumière family’s presence on the site was the unrestored house and a delapidated factory shed, how do you feel about what has been built?

FRÉMAUX: In these symbolic places with serious teams in place, you can do so much. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, here and we built it bit by bit. When I speak to youngsters who want to go into cinema, I always say to them show your love for cinema, and cinema will love you back.

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