10 · 22 · 16

Pierre Rissient at FICM 2016

Gustavo R. Gallardo

Gentleman Rissient

The Pierre Rissient documentary, Gentleman Rissient, directed by Benoît Jacquot, Pascal Merigeau and Guy Séligmann, was presented during the fourteenth edition of the Morelia International Film Festival (FICM).

Pierre Rissient is one of the most influential men in film, discoverer of several world-renowned filmmakers and unknown film rescuer with a long career at the Cannes Film Festival. Gentleman Rissient is an interview with this character in which he recounts his beginnings as a movie buff, his conversations with filmmakers such as Fritz Lang, Clint Eastwood, Martin Scorsese and Alfred Hitchcock, and his passion for Asian cinema.

Rissient on making movies with passion

Interviewed by the Mexican actress Diana Bracho, Pierre Rissient declared: "I believe that in life you can't do anything without passion. It's something you decide, either you have it inside or you do not."

And he added: "Much passion is missing now in filmmakers, in writers and politicians. It seems that many people now lack motivation. The first directors were adventurous, they did their work with passion, even thinking about earning money (...) what we know is that great directors really work by instinct, by learning from the experience of life... I realized at a young age that I was interested in discovering new films, which, in addition to being unknown, were good movies. So, we have to face the unknown, it does not matter if it's unknown as long as it's good movies."

On the connection between the filmmaker and the audience:

"First you have to like your audience, not think that they are dumb, that they won't react. Second: you need to have a lot of passion inside of you for what you do, it's not just about the intellectual, the intellectual is a hoax, you need to work with passion to create something that you like. Last: do not trust what your teachers tell you."