In the early evening of Monday, April 15, 2019, as Holy Week Mass was being held at Notre Dame in Paris, a fire alarm went off in the cathedral’s control room. It was 18.17. The fire safety officer, working a double shift on his first day on the job, read the board and radioed to alert one of the guards. He went to investigate what he understood to be a fire in the sacristy ceiling and found nothing. The evacuation notice was dismissed as a false alarm and the worshipers were invited back into the building.
Still, the fire was contained — not in the sacristy, but in the ceiling of the nave, an area known as “the forest,” where a grid of 900-year-old oak beams held up the roof. After a crucial delay of half an hour, during which time tourists outside photographed the smoke above the cathedral, the source of the fire was discovered.
With no sprinkler system or fire walls to slow the spread, it was soon burning out of control. President Emmanuel Macron arrived in time to see the 19th-century spire collapse and crash through the nave’s vault. As the world watched, the flames spread to the bell tower and the total destruction of one of Europe’s most visited buildings seemed imminent.
Miraculously, thanks to a small group of firefighters who volunteered to return to the intense heat – temperatures peaked at over 1200C – Notre Dame was saved and there were no casualties.
Now, with his new film Notre-Dame on Fire, director Jean-Jacques Annaud (The Name of the Rose) has turned these real-life events into one of the most compelling dramas of the year. Faced with the idea of making a documentary, the 78-year-old Oscar winner, whose other films include Enemy at the Gates and Seven Years in Tibet, saw the dramatic potential of recreating the fire when he began researching exactly what happened.
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