'De Gaulle' Epic Crosses the Atlantic: Goldwyn Bets $74M French Saga Can Win U.S. Audiences

Antonin Baudry's two-part World War II epic about Charles de Gaulle drew a seven-minute standing ovation at its U.S. premiere on Saturday at the American French Film Festival in Los Angeles. Both installments, each running more than two and a half hours, played back-to-back to packed houses at the DGA Theater.

The €74 million production stars Simon Abkarian as the French general and Simon Russell Beale as Winston Churchill. It marks one of Pathé's boldest gambles, following "The Count of Monte Cristo" and the two-part "The Three Musketeers," both also distributed in the U.S. by Samuel Goldwyn Films.

The films found their audience slowly in France, then built through word of mouth to sell more than six million tickets. In the U.K., the first installment, "De Gaulle: Resistance," which charts the general's fight to build a Resistance movement after France surrendered to Nazi Germany in 1940, currently ranks as the highest-grossing French-language film of the year. Light Films will release the epic in China in late November — a rare feat for a French production.

What does the U.S. release look like?

Goldwyn is rolling out the saga theatrically across major markets — New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Seattle, Austin, Minneapolis, Houston and Atlanta — while making it available nationwide on transactional VOD. The second film, "De Gaulle: Liberty," arrives in early December.

"The films have proven themselves, and audiences are audiences, whether they're American or French," Peter Goldwyn told Variety. "It's an amazing feat of filmmaking that you don't quite see anymore and ultimately, World War II is an easy entry point for U.S. audiences."

Goldwyn argued the films' ambition places them closer to Hollywood blockbusters than European arthouse fare. "You're looking at something on the scale of 'The Odyssey.' It's just really broad and massive, and yet instead of getting lost in the effects and the war itself, it really does come down to a character study which drives the story along," he said. "The only thing that makes it an arthouse movie is because it's in a foreign language."

The French language, he noted, "makes it hard for theaters to commit on that wide of a screen count." The VOD pairing reflects the American market's impatience. "In France it had this sort of slow start and was really discovered, but theaters in the U.S. don't have the patience or time to let things be discovered," Goldwyn said. The distributor is mounting a single campaign for both films, targeting arthouse moviegoers, history buffs, schools, cultural institutions and younger audiences through social media.

How do the films challenge the WWII story?

The films expose the tensions among De Gaulle, Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt, played by Campbell Scott. Baudry and co-screenwriter Bérénice Vila read more than 150 books and dug into archives to reconstruct the general's journey from an isolated officer in 1940 to leader of the French Resistance.

"Roosevelt, for his part, thought Churchill was being completely absurd with his romantic ideas about supporting this admirable little leader called De Gaulle," Baudry said. "All of this history has never really been told. Historians, real historians who research this period and have access to the sources, know all of this, but the general public doesn't."

Baudry organized early screenings for young students to test accessibility. "My goal was that you could watch the film without any outside references, without ever having heard of that period or of De Gaulle," he said.

How did Abkarian become De Gaulle?

Abkarian spent roughly six months preparing for a figure whose rigid posture, distinctive voice and eccentric manner have long made him difficult to portray.

"I read the screenplay more than ten times. I read it and reread it and annotated things," Abkarian told Variety. "There was nothing to change in the writing, not even a comma." He transcribed every line of his dialogue into a small notebook carried through the 150-day shoot, which he eventually gave to Baudry. "All the dialogue went right up to the very last page."

The speeches came naturally. "There were the great speeches, and that's where I feel at home because I come from the theater," he said. He abandoned mere imitation: "You can invoke him, evoke him, but you can't actually become him."

A breakthrough came when Abkarian and Baudry spent an evening recording De Gaulle's speeches together, exploring the frequency and musicality of his voice. "Between doing nothing and caricature, I had to find the right balance," the actor said.

Abkarian is less certain than Goldwyn about the American response, but he believes De Gaulle's defiance could resonate in today's political climate. "There may be something in De Gaulle's struggle that speaks to Americans' own battles, to their sense of nobility and their democratic convictions," he said.

Goldwyn sees a simpler through-line. "It's a story of an ally," he said. "This man was very patriotic, which I think is very American. He didn't go along with what his government dictated and said, 'I don't believe this, I need to fight for my country.'"