![thorns of the black rose puzzle thorns of the black rose puzzle](https://wordmint.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/p/A_Court_of_Thorns_and_Roses_671422.png)
His film teases us with the possibility of the building’s destruction: as the Paris fire brigade races to save it, he employs button-pushing thriller dynamics in a kind of ecclesiastical version of The Towering Inferno. That the idea that the cathedral could collapse represented the risk that the west was going to collapse.” But dwelling on the building’s possible destruction made him realise its wider significance, something “premonitory” that went further than its religious associations: “Lots of people told me that it was symbolic of the west. Notre Dame was also the place where a producer confirmed to him the financing for his 1986 medieval detective film The Name of the Rose, which starred Sean Connery. A few metres away, the truck where the politicians composed themselves for the media: “The truck of lies, I call it!”Įngulfed … a scene from Notre-Dame on Fire. Here, in front of the Hôpital Hôtel-Dieu, the emergency response tents. Just over there, one of the traffic jams that delayed the fire brigade. Annaud excitedly points out spots where he was able to shoot scenes for Notre-Dame on Fire, his new, scrupulously dramatised account of the catastrophe. The cathedral facade looks chipper but the building is cordoned off and sheathed on its sides by gauzed scaffolding that makes it look like a medieval Pompidou Centre. Three years on, we are emerging from Rue du Cloître, very much intact, on to Notre Dame’s forecourt.
![thorns of the black rose puzzle thorns of the black rose puzzle](https://cdn.unifiedcommerce.com/content/product/large/9780764984532-X.jpg)
If it fell on the side of Rue du Cloitre, the whole neighbourhood would be gone.” “There were violent swirling winds that day,” he says, “and the building was an enormous brazier, a giant barbecue. The cathedral was not the fire brigade’s only worry. My young actors were actually afraid – I put them in front of 800☌ jets of flame His main residence was just a few hundred metres away, near the Pont Neuf. He was in a family house on the west coast of France as the news of the fire broke without access to television, he listened on the radio as its spire collapsed and flames licked the towers. So it was understandably dismaying for Annaud when, decades later, on the evening of 15 April 2019, the place that kindled his directorial eye was transformed into a Dantesque inferno. “My parents weren’t believers, but she had that Christian tradition of doing that kind of thing.” “She used to go there to light a candle for a friend who was ill,” he explains. They lived on the outskirts of Paris, and she would bring him to the cathedral every Thursday. The director Jean-Jacques Annaud, 78, was a boy when he picked out the beast for his second ever photograph he took it with a camera given to him by his mother (the subject of his first photograph). O n the south-west corner of the facade of Notre Dame cathedral is a horned chimera, peering out at the Left Bank of Paris with an awestruck gawp.