-Who is J.P. Ferré?

I’m a french director/editor/VFX artist who’ve been working in the industry for 15 years. I mostly work as a movie trailer editor and have made trailers for films such as A Prophet (Jacques Audiard, 2009), all Gaspar Noé’s films since Enter The Void (2009) and more recently Boy From Heaven (Tarik Saleh, 2022) or the French trailering campaign for Dune (Denis Villeneuve, 2021).

I directed several short films. Entity (co-directed with Andrew Desmond, 2014) was the first french short to be mixed in Dolby Atmos. Another live action short called 3:36 (2016) is my most personnal project to date. Also, using in-game footage from Digital Combat Simulator by Eagle Dynamics (DCS World) and in addition to DCS: The Right Stuff, another short called the DCS: The Ghost (2020) is the most viewed DCS World film on YouTube (+5,6M views in January 2023).

Today, I’m associated with IIW STUDIO-LUX, a post-production company, and I’m in the writing process of my first feature film produced by The Project.

-What inspired you to become a filmmaker?

I guess I owe my grand-father and father my passion for cinema, as they both showed me a lot of movies since my very early age. Western or noir films with one, sci-fi and drama with the other.

I always enjoyed telling stories to others using moving pictures, either they’re animated drawings, captured frames on film, digital or whatever. There’s something unreal about it when you think about the process. Like many filmmakers have already said before, it’s like entering a dream. He can be an escape for some people, and I like the idea that I can be the hand to take for starting a journey.

-Do you think the cinema can bring a change in the society?

Yes, of course it can! Because, as filmmakers, we have this precious gift of being able to present an audience new perspectives. We can make them change their point of view on the world, on people, with picture and sound. We can make them understand the feelings of someone’s happiness, oppression or relief. That’s a powerful tool to inspire and help being more open-minded, something we all desperately need these days.

–What would you change in the world?

To me, any change starts on a personnal level. It’s being more aware of what’s happening around the world. Only then, we can start working together and make things better. So, I’d say I simply wish most people, world leaders above all, need to be more focused on communication and cooperation, more than selfishness, greed and power.

Maybe what I would change is to make us all stop looking down on our phones, pictures of ourselves, counting the followers, etc. and start looking up again, towards the person next to us, towards what’s above us, towards tolerance and progress.

-Where do you see the film industry going in the next 100 years?

The world is moving so fast, I’m not sure anyone could predict how the film industry will

look like in a century from now… With all the new digital innovations that start to emerge on the horizon, I would guess that virtual and augmented reality will take a much more important place in our lives and in the way we make films and watch them, definitely.

But, to me, shall our civilization fall or be reborn, the only thing that will never change is our need to tell stories, not only with motion pictures, but through all forms of art.