PM: How did you move on to directing?

SC: I already had the project for The Old Lady and the Pigeons when I was working in London. But I continued to make comic strips and then, in 1990, I went to Annecy and, in the big cinema, there I saw a dozen or so films, all really boring experimental films. That reinforced my feeling that animation was either something very commercial with no real value or something very intellectual. I told myself that there was no “third way” when Nick Park’s Creature Comforts came on. From that moment on, I knew what I wanted to do. I then went on making comic strips, particularly as a writer, but I wanted to make animation films like Nick Park did. I met the producer Didier Brunner and from then on everything fell into place. We made The Old Lady…

PM: Belleville Rendez-vous is really striking for the quality of its animation, which is sustained throughout the film. It stands out from many European feature films, which can be very uneven in this respect. What’s your secret?

SC: Fundamentally, I am an animator. I know the craft. I’ve worked at all levels within it. Many people making feature films in Europe don’t have that kind of training. The animation is often sub-contracted out to South Korea or China, to purely industrial studios. And then, animations that are adapted from comic strips often fail because the original artists and writers are not involved.

For Chomet, animation is like a manifesto -- technique and message come together.

For me, it is very important to be there, at the heart of the team, it’s that companionship element I mentioned earlier. With Belleville Rendez-Vous, I continued to animate scenes, it’s that team spirit that is important, you have to be totally involved in the physical production. For me, animation is like a manifesto. You have a style, a technique, but it is an art and you express yourself through that art. We’re lucky in Europe to have people who have a sensibility, a culture and have also acquired all the techniques contributed by the Anglo-Saxons. It is like that in Eastern Europe, Germany, Spain, Belgium, Italy.

PM: But all these people disperse once the production is finished.

SC: That’s the problem; there are not enough permanent studios, there are too many structures created just for the one production. That was what happened with Belleville Rendez-Vous: the Belgian and Canadian studios that worked on it have since closed down; the people involved have gone their different ways. Many animators can’t find work or they are under-employed in the sense of not being used to their full capacity. You would have to create networks of studios like there were in London in the ’70s and ’80s, which worked pretty well. People were very united and often worked together on particular projects. That’s why I really admire a setup like Folimage; they have really understood this.

PM: Where did the idea to make a feature film with no dialogue come from?

SC: I’m very involved with the whole “line test” thing. For me, when you’ve worked all day on an animation and that moment when you see the drawings move, that’s a really magic moment, and there is no sound to it. I also think that an animation without the constraints of spoken words is stronger. If you have to fit everything to the words, all the gestural movement revolves around the mouth. Without it, you are much freer to create true animation, to talk through animation itself. Animation modeled around the dialogue is like something, which has already been set in stone, there’s less scope for interpretation. I have always wanted the animators to bring something to it.