How was your interest in Alice Guy born?

As a producer of classical music, I wondered why all the great composers were so little known and why they did not appear mostly in the dictionary. That's exactly what happens to Alice Guy. And yet, what a fate of the one who had begun as a stenographer at Léon Gaumont to become an out-of-the-ordinary legend of cinema!

How do you explain this silence around this monument of silent cinema?

She was doing a job not acceptable for the time so we preferred to forget it. The erase. I went to investigate as a good basic journalist for three years. A real police investigation. I concentrated on an era: from its birth, in 1873, to its stop of the cinema in 1922. Of all the pioneers of the cinema, it is that which had the longest professional life: 17 years! I have seen all that it is possible to see on dvd, on Internet. I met his 83-year-old daughter, his great-grandchildren ...

How was she in life?

A bulimic work. She produced, directed, and produced her own films. She did everything but play. It was the time when women artists were almost assimilated to half-mundane, which was a drama for her who considered herself primarily as a businesswoman. Alice Guy has struggled all her professional career in this constant duality.

But was she recognized then?

Yes, we respected her. She was once the richest business woman in the United States, the most media-loving filmmaker. She fascinated men, but loved only one, ten years her younger. A Franco-British who directed the first film with Buster Keaton.

Is your biographical novel also a plea in favor of a great forgotten film?

Yes, absolutely. Alice Guy is always scandalously underestimated among film historians, probably linked to the fact that specialists do not like to question themselves. I am not a specialist, but I hope to make up for this injustice.

"Alice Guy, the first female filmmaker in history" (Plon).