Alain Goldman, who produced “La Vie en Rose,” which earned Marion Cotillard an Oscar, and most recently produced ”An Offer and a Spy,” is having a milestone 2025.
After delivering Alain Chabat’s hit Netflix series “Asterix & Obelix: The Big Fight,” Goldman is at the Venice Film Festival with the world premiere of Valerie Donzelli‘s “At Work,” one of the three French movies in competition. He’s also about to kick off filming on two massive projects, Laszlo Nemes‘ (“Son of Saul”) period project “Moulin” and prestige TV series “The Lost Paradise” in Eastern Europe. He’s the doing the latter two with Patrick Wachsberger’s 193 Legendary.
“At Work,” an adaptation of Franck Courtès’s 2023 novel “A Pied d’oeuvre,” marks Goldman’s first collaboration with Donzelli, an acclaimed French filmmaker best known for the Cesar award-winning “Declaration of War” and “Just the Two of Us.” The film tells the true story of a successful photographer (Bastien Bouillon, recently seen in Cannes’ opening movie “Leave One Day”), who gives up everything to devote himself to writing, and ultimately faces financial hardships and poverty.
“I read this book and was recently struck with it because it says something profound about our vulnerability and the violence of capitalism,” said Goldman, adding that the book’s themes are even more palpable now “for artists and authors who are seeing the value of their work downgraded or threatened by technology.”
“Valerie Donzelli was equally moved by this novel and she gave the story an immense sincerity, but also some fantasy and unpredictability,” said Goldman. “The film could have been a depressing drama but that’s not the case; it’s uplifting, intellectual and cinematic because [Donzelli] directed it.”
The film, co-written by Donzelli and Gilles Marchand, received support from France’s National Film Board (CNC) and the Ile de France region, but Goldman said it’s “likely the smallest budget of the Venice competition.” While he’s best known for producing epic, big-sized movies and TV shows such as “La Vie en Rose,” “HHhH” with Jason Clarke, “An Officer and a Spy” with Jean Dujardin, Martin Scorsese’s “Casino” (as a co-producer), “Babylon AD” with Vin Diesel and “The Spy” with Sacha Baron Cohen, Goldman says he’s always been drawn to social themes due to his own upbringing as the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland. “Social justice has always been important to me,” he says.
Goldman pointed out he’s always had the ambition to work with auteurs who have a vision, but is also conscious of audiences. “I’ve never understood filmmakers who make movies only for themselves, like two-million-euros-therapies,” he quipped.
On working with Donzelli, he said he found her understanding of the book compelling and universal because “she didn’t want to focus too much on the pure economic hardship of the story since ‘Souleymane’s Journey’ [Boris Lojkine’s film that won four Cesar awards this year] has just done it, but rather zoom in on the experience of an artist who sacrifices everything for his craft,” Goldman said.
“At Work” is being represented internationally by Kinology, who is on the ground in Venice, alongside Goldman, Donzelli and the film’s cast.
Next up, Goldman’s companies Pitchipoï Productions and Montmartre Films, which are part of Banijay Group, will be filming Nemes’ “Moulin,” starting on Sept. 15. The movie will mark Nemes’ French-language debut and will star Gilles Lellouche as the French Resistance hero who is captured and tortured by Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie (Lars Eidinger).
Penned by Olivier Demangel (“November”), “Moulin” will be distributed in France by Studio TF1 and has been pre-bought by TF1, Disney+ and HBO. Wachsberger’s 193 Legendary is repping global sales. The project will be Nemes’ follow up to “Orphan” which competes at this year’s Venice.
Goldman says he had long wanted to work with Nemes whose Oscar-winning « Son of Saul » is « one of the films about the Holocaust that gets the closest to the hell that it was, » the producer says.
“Moulin” is an “immense project that resonates strongly today because it will remind everyone what it means to resist,” Goldman argues. After having shed light on Alfred Dreyfus in “A Soldier and a Spy,” Moulin will also celebrate “one of greatest French heroes,” he says, describing the tone of the film as “very intense.” Rather than a biopic of Moulin, the film revolves around the relationship between Barbie and Moulin.
TF1 Studio came on board and brought a “massive support” to the film whose budget is €14 million, the producer points out.
Goldman is also about to start shooting “Lost Paradise,” an ambitious and highly personal eight-part thriller series written by Yehonatan Indursky (“Shtisel,” “Autonomies”). Directed by Alon Zingman (“Shtisel”), the saga, which will shoot in Yiddish, Hebrew and English, starts off in Lithuania in 1860, charting the lives of Ashkenazi Jews. It stars “Shtisel’s” Michael Aloni.
Darren Aronofsky serves as executive producer on the series while Goldman is producing with Wachsberger. The latter is also handling sales via 193 Legendary. “Lost Paradise” is backed by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Alcon Media Group and the Gesher Film Fund. It has been commissioned by Canal+ in France.
“Lost Paradise” has been in development for five years, says Goldman, who is a co-author on the series which starts shooting in September in Bucarest in Romania.
“It aims to tell the story of the Ashkenazi people from the mid-19th century to, I hope, the present day. The first season ends in 1880, just before a pogrom that led to the exodus of a large part of the community, but unfortunately not everyone,” Goldman says, adding that “If everyone had left, they would still be alive today, either in America or Israel.” His hope, he explains, is that the series will become the benchmark fictional work in the history of the Ashkenazi people, like “Fiddler on the Roof” has been for more than half a century.
The title of the series, “Lost Paradise” is “a little ironic,” he says, “because life was so hard where they lived, but they didn’t lose their desire to remain Jewish in almost an esoteric sense.”
Goldman says the series will also hopefully allow audiences to “visualise what these communities were like and how they threatened no one, and that they became the target of all kinds of violence, as they are today, because suddenly, when the world is not doing very well, we become the answer to the world’s problems.”
Reflecting on the difficulties to finance the series, Goldman says the “very fact that this series exists is a miracle, because it goes so much against the current state of mind, which is quite hostile to Jews in general, and I am very, very happy to have succeeded, with everyone’s help, in making this project a reality.”
Goldman is also about to see his film “The Incredible Shrinking Man” which he produced with Patrick Wachsberger get released in France by Universal Pictures on Oct. 29. The movie, starring Jean Dujardin, the Oscar-winning actor of “The Artist,” is a modern adaption of Richard Matheson’s science fiction novel.
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