French genre films are having a bit of a moment.
The wave of critical, box office, and streaming hits from Gallic directors has included cop dramas like The Stronghold, November, and The Night of the 12th, high-paced action films Sentinelle and Athena, mystery thrillers like Only the Animals, and Black Box, and such high-concept sci-fi as The Animal Kingdom and Oxygène.
Leading this new genre charge is Cédric Jimenez. Like many of his 70s New Hollywood heroes, Jimenez came from documentaries — his first film was a 2003 non-fiction profile of French rapper JoeyStarr—and his feature thrillers often draw from real life. Box office hit The Stronghold (2021) was based on a real anti-gang unit in Marseille, his home town. November (2022) follows French anti-terrorist police response to the November 2015 Paris attacks.
But Dog 51, Jimenez’s upcoming feature, is “pure fiction.”
Adapted from a French bestseller, the dystopian thriller imagines a near-future Paris in which neighborhoods have been divided up into zones based on social class, with a police force operating under the command of ALMA, a predictive AI system (voiced, in the film, by an actual AI system). When ALMA’s creator is murdered, top agent Salia (Adèle Exarchopoulos) teams up with jaded beat cop Zem (Gilles Lellouche) to solve the case, not knowing their investigation will expose the dark secrets of the system they serve. Romain Duris, Louis Garrel, and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi co-star.
Dog 51 will close the Venice film festival, screening out of competition on September 6. Studiocanal will release the film theatrically across multiple territories, including France, Germany, and Australia, and is handling worldwide sales.
Jimenez spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about pushing French genre cinema into the future, the narrative risks of creating an AI villain, and why he’ll never trade a human actor for a synthetic one. “100 percent, 200 percent, I prefer working with real actors.”
This interview was edited for length and comprehension.
What are your cinematic inspirations?
American cinema from the 70s is, I think, my biggest inspiration: Coppola, Friedkin, Scorsese, and, more recently, Michael Mann. I’m very inspired by American independent cinema. I’m influenced by the cinema of the 70s, which I try to make more modern.
What attracted you to the story of Dog 51?
I love the book [from Laurent Gaudé] I always loved his work. And when this one came out [in 2022] I read it, and I fell in love with it. The other reason is, a lot of my recent movies were based on true stories and I wanted to do a pure fiction. When you talk about the future, you can’t get more pure fiction that that. I wanted to play with the challenge of trying to put the future into the present society that we live in. In French, I would say “present magnifié”— meaning you take the reality right now and you push everything higher, up 25 percent. It’s in everything of the film, all the details, from the kind of phones the characters use, the kinds of cars, the kind of food.
You will recognize the society in the movie but it’s all a little bit more. That was the artistic direction for everybody: “Take our society from the very last week, and push it 25% more.”
For example, in the movie, Paris is divided into zones. You have the free zone in the center of Paris and other zones in the suburbs. And the zones are separated by checkpoints, like little borders inside the city. Those boarders already exist, in Paris and in every city in the world, where the rich people living in one neighborhood don’t mix with the people from poorer quarters. Now we have an invisible wall. In the movie, it’s a real wall.
AI plays a major role in the film, with police forces using an AI system, ALMA, to fight crime. How much research did you do into the current state of artificial intelligence?
AI is something that wasn’t in the book, we added it to the story. We talked about it with top specialists in France, about how AI works, how it is being brought into institutions and to what purpose. Dog 51 is a mainstream movie, but I always love to mix entertainment with deeper ideas about the society we are living in.
So AI already exists and I think my role as a director is to ask questions about it, not to provide the right answers. I think AI could be good for many things, and could be wrong for others. It depends on how human use it. It’s a very powerful thing. It can be a tool, it can be a weapon.
The movie is specifically about the police system and the question is: Should the police use a tool which is faster than human thinking, but has no conscience, no humanity, to enact justice? For me, justice needs a human brain.
What were the main challenges in making a sci-fi action film on a French budget?
The challenge was not really about the budget, but about imagining a future that feels real, about taking the society we have now and imagining a realistic future. I always work within the budget I have. Of course, you can’t do Minority Report with 10 percent of the budget of Minority Report. And if I had 10 percent of the budget I had for this, I couldn’t have done it. But I knew early on what we had to work with. I didn’t try to do more with less. The most important thing for me was to be precise in what I wanted to say, in my storytelling, in terms of character, and it what I wanted the audience to understand and feel about the movie.
Were there any specific films, dystopian dramas, that influencedDog 51?
I try not to put other films in my head when I’m making a movie. They’re there anyway, living in me every day. The good movies are already made, they’re already good, and I don’t think they need to be copied. But they are in me, so maybe one scene will be influenced by Godard and another by Michael Mann. It depends on the scene. In terms of artistic director, the film that came close to what I wanted to do with this is [Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 drama] Children of Men. It wasn’t an obsession. It was just when someone asked me: “What kind of future is this?,” I’d say: “Close to the future of Children of Men.” But when I’m in prep, I don’t watch any movies and I don’t read many books. I watch the news and documentaries. I want real human beings, real stuff, to feed me.
What was the single biggest narrative challenge for you?
The AI, ALMA, because it’s a villain that doesn’t exist. ALMA is a character, its the main antagonist in the film, it has a narrative arc in the movie, but it doesn’t exist, it doesn’t have a body, it doesn’t have a face. Creating a character which doesn’t physically exist but is the main antagonist, an untouchable, uncatchable antagonist, was incredibly difficult.
Sounds like a similar challenge to that in the last Mission:Impossible movie.
Yes, but in Mission: Impossible, if I remember it correctly, the AI is something they want to disable, like a weapon. Here, ALMA is not a weapon, it’s a character.
How did you create ALMA’s voice?
It’s an AI voice, not an actor’s. It was pretty easy, actually. Like using ChatGTP. You choose a male or female voice, write something and tell it: ‘Say that.’ Then: ‘louder’ or ‘more sad,’ ‘more impactful.’ And it does it. It was very easy. It’s a very good actor (laughs).
Would you ever prefer using AI actors over real ones?
No, no, no. What I love the most, when I do a movie, is the set, talking with people, and living in the moment. I’d never say I prefer AI. I 100 percent, 200 percent, prefer working with real actors.
Your next film is a biopic of the late French rock star Johnny Hallyday. What’s your interest in the music biopic, which, with the Bob Dylan film [A Complete Unknown] and Sam Mendes’ upcoming Beatles movies, is having a bit of a moment?
First, you have to know how huge Johnny Hallyday was. He was, by far, the most iconic, famous, and adored singer in France. When he died, one million people came out in the street for his funeral. That never happened in France. Not even for General de Gaulle. He is a French god. What Elvis was for America, Johnny was for France.
I think music biopics of the 60s–70s, are very interesting for young audiences. The Doors was one of my favorite movies as a teenager. I think we live in a very tough society at the moment. To show the younger generation a person like Johnny Hallyday, who had this rock-and-roll lifestyle, this young, wild, and free mindset, is very valuable. You can show them: Freedom is something great. Don’t be afraid about the future—just live your present.
