(from left): Gilles Lellouche and Adèle Exarchopoulos in 'Dog 51,' director Cédric Jimenez on set. (c) 2025 - Chi-Fou-Mi Productions- Studiocanal - France 2 Cinéma - Jim Films/(c) Ombeline Le Gendre-Martin Share on Facebook Share on X Share to Flipboard Send an Email Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Print the Article Post a Comment French genre films are having a bit of a moment. The wave of critical, box office, and streaming hits from Gallic directors has included cop dramas like The Stronghold, November, and The Night of the 12th, high-paced action films Sentinelle and Athena, mystery thrillers like Only the Animals, and Black Box, and such high-concept sci-fi as The Animal Kingdom and Oxygène. Leading this new genre charge is Cédric Jimenez. Like many of his 70s New Hollywood heroes, Jimenez came from documentaries - his first film was a 2003 non-fiction profile of French rapper JoeyStarr-and his feature thrillers often draw from real life. Box office hit The Stronghold (2021) was based on a real anti-gang unit in Marseille, his home town. November (2022) follows French anti-terrorist police response to the November 2015 Paris attacks. Related Stories Lifestyle Julia Roberts Debuted Dario Vitale's First Versace Pieces During Venice Film Festival Appearance Movies 'Cover-Up' Review: Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus' Sharp, Sensitive Doc Brings Relentless Truth-Seeker Seymour Hersh Into Focus But Dog 51, Jimenez's upcoming feature, is "pure fiction." Adapted from a French bestseller, the dystopian thriller imagines a near-future Paris in which neighborhoods have been divided up into zones based on social class, with a police force operating under the command of ALMA, a predictive AI system (voiced, in the film, by an actual AI system). When ALMA's creator is murdered, top agent Salia (Adèle Exarchopoulos) teams up with jaded beat cop Zem (Gilles Lellouche) to solve the case, not knowing their investigation will expose the dark secrets of the system they serve. Romain Duris, Louis Garrel, and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi co-star. Dog 51 will close the Venice film festival, screening out of competition on September 6. Studiocanal will release the film theatrically across multiple territories, including France, Germany, and Australia, and is handling worldwide sales. Jimenez spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about pushing French genre cinema into the future, the narrative risks of creating an AI villain, and why he'll never trade a human actor for a synthetic one. "100 percent, 200 percent, I prefer working with real actors." This interview was edited for length and comprehension. What are your cinematic inspirations? American cinema from the 70s is, I think, my biggest inspiration: Coppola, Friedkin, Scorsese, and, more recently, Michael Mann. I'm very inspired by American independent cinema. I'm influenced by the cinema of the 70s, which I try to make more modern. What attracted you to the story of Dog 51?I love the book [from Laurent Gaudé] I always loved his work. And when this one came out [in 2022] I read it, and I fell in love with it. The other reason is, a lot of my recent movies were based on true stories and I wanted to do a pure fiction. When you talk about the future, you can't get more pure fiction that that. I wanted to play with the challenge of trying to put the future into the present society that we live in. In French, I would say "present magnifié"- meaning you take the reality right now and you push everything higher, up 25 percent. It's in everything of the film, all the details, from the kind of phones the characters use, the kinds of cars, the kind of food. You will recognize the society in the movie but it's all a little bit more. That was the artistic direction for everybody: "Take our society from the very last week, and push it 25% more." For example, in the movie, Paris is divided into zones. You have the free zone in the center of Paris and other zones in the suburbs. And the zones are separated by checkpoints, like little borders inside the city. Those boarders already exist, in Paris and in every city in the world, where the rich people living in one neighborhood don't mix with the people from poorer quarters. Now we have an invisible wall. In the movie, it's a real wall. AI plays a major role in the film, with police forces using an AI system, ALMA, to fight crime. How much research did you do into the current state of artificial intelligence? AI is something that wasn't in the book, we added it to the story. We talked about it with top specialists in France, about how AI works, how it is being brought into institutions and to what purpose. Dog 51 is a mainstream movie, but I always love to mix entertainment with deeper ideas about the society we are living in. So AI already exists and I think my role as a director is to ask questions about it, not to provide the right answers. I think AI could be goo