The Oscar‑winning director of The Artist spent five years creating The Most Precious of Cargoes. He talks about why he would never have made it as a live action movie

When the acclaimed French film-maker Michel Hazanavicius was approached by his parents’ best friend, the author and playwright Jean-Claude Grumberg, to adapt his fairytale The Most Precious of Cargoes (2019) into an animated film, he hesitated. The short book is a fable about the Holocaust, and the extraordinary acts of kindness that people are capable of. Although moved by it, Hazanavicius was initially reluctant: he had never made an animated film, and he thought he would never make a film about the Holocaust. The grandson of eastern European immigrants who came to France from Lithuania and Poland in the 1920s, Hazanavicius, 58, had felt that the subject was not his to tell. “It was more my grandparents’ and my parents’ story, not mine,” he says, speaking from his home in the 10th arrondissement, Paris, the sunlight streaming through the window behind him. “I was born in Paris in the late 1960s, and I had a wonderful, very happy childhood.” That period, however, coincided with when Holocaust denial began and survivors, who had until then remained silent, started to speak out about their experiences in the camps. “For many years, the priority [of those seeking to preserve the memory] was hearing testimony from witnesses. And I thought fiction on the subject was not appropriate.”

It was Hazanavicius’s wife, the actor Bérénice Bejo – who starred as Peppy Miller, an ambitious young actress in The Artist, Hazanavicius’s Academy Award-winning film about Hollywood’s black-and-white silent era – who changed his mind. Bejo told him he had not explained enough about his family’s Jewish history to his four children, now aged 26, 23, 16 and 13, and she persuaded Hazanavicius to take on the project, not only for them, but also for other people’s children. “[I realised] that if I hadn’t told my kids stories about my family – how they came to France and what happened during the war – it was likely that other [Jewish parents] hadn’t passed on [their heritage] either.”