Renowned filmmakers Gédéon and Jules Naudet discuss their latest documentary Notre Dame: Our Lady of Paris on the second anniversary of the devastating fire, as well as the impact of streamers and smartphone technology on doc making.

Gédéon (left) and Jules Naudet

If you don’t recognise French documentarian brothers Jules and Gédéon Naudet by name, you’ll certainly know them from one particular piece of footage.

Having moved to New York City from Paris as teenagers and studied film and television at NYU, their first project saw them follow a childhood fascination with firefighters by embedding themselves with the New York City Fire Department to shadow a young recruit through training after they graduated from the academy.

“After three months, spending four days and four nights a week sleeping in the fire house, going to false alarms, we were concerned we would have a fantastic cooking show but no fire in a documentary about firefighters,” Jules says. “Unfortunately, one morning – September 11, 2001 – I was in the street filming them checking for an odour of gas. We heard a loud roar and looked up, I tilted the camera and filmed the first plane crashing into the North Tower at the World Trade Center. From then, that day – which started like any other – became anything but.”

Inadvertently, Jules had become one of only two people to film the first impact in what would become the most infamous and deadly terrorist attack the world has ever seen. The Naudets filmed with the firefighters for the rest of the day, including inside the towers prior to their collapse, and the iconic film that resulted, titled simply 9/11, aired on US broadcast network CBS the following March.

“It’s a strange project to look back on,” Jules says. “First and foremost, we’re grateful we survived, and the firefighter who helped us to do the project survived, when so many people, so many of his friends, did not. Not only were we spared but we were able to spotlight the incredible firefighters and the work they did, which felt important for us. At the same time it was the opening of our career, so it’s a weird mixture of emotions when your career starts with a terrible tragedy.

“I’m proud of it, proud of being able to show the firefighters doing what they do every day – that’s part of a long love story with them, we owe them a debt we’ll never be able to repay. That improbable moment on a sunny Tuesday morning started our career.”

Their latest project also spotlights a fiery disaster, although mercifully one that comes without a death toll. Notre Dame: Our Lady of Paris examines the dramatic fire and valiant attempts to save the iconic cathedral, which happened two years ago this week, and has already aired on ABC in the US and the BBC in the UK, among other broadcasters.

Unlike on 9/11, the Naudets were not on the ground as the event unfolded. Instead they followed it via the news back in the US.

“We were in New York when the cathedral was burning in Paris, watching live on a computer screen like the rest of the world. It was shocking to see the cathedral from our hometown where we grew up,” Gédéon recalls.

“It was also very surprising to receive phone calls and texts from friends and people here in the city who’d never been to Paris but somehow felt connected to this beautiful monument, either through religion or architecture, the beauty, this history. We were so surprised to have neighbours knocking on the door almost crying and we were trying to understand why there was this connection for people.

“It took us time but we realised that the cathedral of Notre Dame is among those monuments in the world, like the Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty or Egyptian Pyramids, that are not supposed to disappear – they’re supposed to stay forever. Suddenly, when one of those monuments is being destroyed in front of our eyes, it feels like the ground beneath our feet is disappearing and there is nothing sacred and nothing that can withstand the test of time. Every catastrophe is possible.”

The brothers had not long wrapped on another terrorism doc, November 13: Attack on Paris, for Netflix so knew they had connections that would allow them to put together a Notre Dame film after the diasaster.

“We already had friendships with the fire and police department in Paris,” Jules says. “When it happened, I sent a text to some of our firefighter friends in Paris who were going to the blaze. In the following days, we reached out to the leadership we knew there to say we were in awe of the incredible job they did saving Notre Dame and they started telling us some incredible stories of both courage and humour. We started thinking, ‘Why not make a documentary about it?’

“One thing all our programmes have in common is taking a difficult story and showing how you sometimes see the best in people at the worst moments – very human stories of courage and ordinary people doing extraordinary things. We yearn to tell these stories to inspire people.”

Notre Dame: Our Lady of Paris has already aired on ABC and the BBC

The desire to tell the human stories in tragedies shines through in this project in the form of candid interviews with firefighters and people who were there on the day, including an almost comedic, Keystone Cops-style incident where attempts to save a crown of thorns believed to have been worn by Jesus Christ became mired in a farce of mistaken identity and lost door keys.

“You would never put that in a movie; you’d think it was too much, that it would never happen. But reality is often much stranger and funnier than fiction,” Jules says. “We like to get into the human condition and tell the human stories, and it also has to be enjoyable to watch.”

The brothers’ long-time champion, agent and collaborator Ben Silverman exec produces, along with Howard T Owens, through their production and distribution outfit Propagate.

The editing of the doc had, in part, to be done remotely in lockdown conditions when the Covid-19 pandemic swept France and America early in 2020. With no cinematic releases for docs possible for more than a year now, and an economic crisis looming around the world, there are industry fears that funding for documentaries, already challenged, is going to be difficult to lay hands on for the foreseeable future. The Naudets, however, are more optimistic about the state of the doc nation.

“The good thing now is the networks are also opening online platforms,” Gédéon says. “Every single channel is opening a web platform. That means double the need and thirst for content. Maybe we are too optimistic but there is a quest and thirst for content that is so high today that anybody can find their calling or style.”

“In the US, where we work, the pandemic has opened up all of the streaming platforms. You’re seeing Netflix, Amazon, HBO Max and others investing a lot in documentaries,” says Jules. “You’ve seen with things like Tiger King an improbable pandemic success story, that documentaries have evolved and the serialisation of them as limited series enables you to tell a true story and, just like a great book or fiction series, you get caught up and want to see the next episode, and the next and the next.

“When we were at university in the 1990s most of the time docs were on theatrical release, and not very big ones. Then we saw HBO started doing a lot of great docs, and PBS in the US also. With Netflix and these serialised documentaries we’re in the third iteration of the success of documentary making. It’s never been as successful as it is now, and hopefully will be in the future.”

Ben Silverman

Jules also points out that a lot of the entry barriers to the genre are being broken down by technology, with most smart phones now carrying broadcast-quality cameras and editing apps and a whole slew of video and blogging sites enabling people to boast their work. The production team on Notre Dame covered a four-block radius in each direction from the cathedral collecting footage locals had shot on the night of the blaze to add into the doc – very different to 9/11 when the Naudets made their names with that piece of footage of the first plane.

“There is so much more possibility we see for emerging filmmakers,” says Jules. “If you have an iPhone you are a one-man production team – you can film, you can record sound, animation, edit, it’s incredible. With this level of technology you can do great things without a big budget. Yes, it’s always complicated to be recognised but it’s much easier now than it was before. You can put it on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and somebody will find it and tell somebody else about it. There are so many different platforms now, just saying Netflix, Amazon and HBO Max is already old fashioned. It’s much more than that now, and in the future there is no ceiling to it for doc filmmaking.

“9/11 was the last least-documented moment of history. Imagine if it happened now – you would have videos from inside the planes, videos from people on the floors above the fire, images from firefighters inside the tower, images from everywhere. Technology has changed everything. Then, we were the only ones filming at 08.45 at that particular part of the city and it was just happenstance. Now everybody is a journalist, a cameraman and a sound recordist. It’s documenting the world and transforming journalism and documentary filmmaking.”