The Genesis of the Film
“I made La Grande Illusion because I am a pacifist”
(Renoir, quoted in Sesonske, 232).
The film was the 1934 brainchild of Renoir and an old friend and ace Great War pilot, Général Armand Pinsard, who had saved Renoir from enemy attack. Pinsard had been shot down and imprisoned in German prisoner-of-war camps several times during the war. He escaped such camps multiple times. His life tales would form the basis for the script of La Grande Illusion, but it would take two-and- a-half years to develop a script that a producer would actually finance.
Below is a photograph of Pinsard. Note how closely he resembles de Boëldieu in the film.
Source: O’Shaughnessy, 2009, 29; Sesonske, 207-211.
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