[press conference for
A Man of His Time (2026) at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival] I discovered the correspondence between my ancestors and when I read the letters there were two things that really struck me, namely, the feeling of just ordinary daily life during the war and, despite the current events at the time, there were questions like mending worn socks and more general questions – how can one survive? Also, there was quite a surprising dimension in terms of the language used when Henri speaks to Paulette – there are some troubling moments. He talks about his job using very technical words and you get the impression that you're reading almost a verbatim – he talked about setting up partial unemployment, which was crazy. And one last thing was the Romanesque dimension of things, in a literary sense of the word, not in terms of the drama. All these little episodes fitted together rather badly but when you wrote 4 or 5 letters together, suddenly there was something that fell into place. It was like yeast – it took hold. And I thought, "Well, I have to do something with this."
