The award-winning filmmaker, Sylvain Chomet who lovingly put Scotland and Edinburgh on screen in the animated hit The Illusionist after a five-year sojourn in the city, received an honorary degree from the University of Edinburgh yesterday.
Chomet who has settled back in his native France and is working on a new live action feature, was given the doctorate by Sir Timothy O’Shea, Vice-Chancellor and Principal at a ceremony in the McEwan Hall during the run of the 20th edition of the French Film Festival UK of which he is a patron. The degree ceremony was followed today by a civic reception at the City Chambers in honour of the French Film Festival and Chomet, hosted by the Lord Provost Donald Wilson.
Chomet and his wife Sally, his producer on The Illusionist, said they were delighted by the honour. “I am looking forward to returning to the city that I grew to love so much during my time there,” said Chomet. Richard Mowe, a film critic and director of the French Film Festival, said: “It is wonderful that the city’s most venerable University has seen fit to honour the talents of Sylvain.”
Chomet made his first feature film, Belleville Rendez-vous, in Quebec. It was a hit on both sides of the Atlantic and secured a couple of Oscar nominations. Chomet visited Edinburgh when Belleville Rendez-vous screened at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 2003, and “fell in love” with the city. Mowe met him at a Quebec cinema event in Paris and urged him to come to work in the city.
The Illusionist was based on a script that the great French icon Jacques Tati had intended to make as a live-action film with his daughter. Tati died in 1982, but Chomet inherited his great ‘lost’ script because Tati’s daughter was so impressed with Belleville Rendez-vous, in which one of the characters watches Tati’s film Jour de Fête on television. The Illusionist, which won a BAFTA prize, was originally set in Prague and the Czechoslovakian countryside, but Chomet relocated it to London, and especially Edinburgh and Mull.
Chomet managed to find time while in Edinburgh to complete his first live action short film: part of a portmanteau project set around the French capital called Paris je t’aime, with various directors contributing, among them the Coen Brothers, Walter Salles, and Gus Van Sant. It was presented at the French Film Festival in 2007 in the presence of Chomet and Amelie producer Claudie Ossard.
Currently Sylvain Chomet, 48, has returned to the City of Light to work on his first live action feature Attila Marcel, a musical comedy set in Paris. The main character, Paul (Guillaume Gouix, a guest of the festival for Mobile Home), lost both his memory and the ability to speak at the age of two when his parents died. He lives a monotonous life with his two aunts until he meets Mme Proust. She has a herbal remedy that will allow Paul, now aged 33, to travel back to the very beginning of his memory and discover what happened to his parents.
