PASCAL HEROLD LOOKS me in the eye and, straight-faced, says: 'Cinema is like a relationship between a man and a woman. It is the most important thing.'
He pulls the statement off, too. First, because he says it with a thick French accent and, secondly, because he's in a better position than most to make such a call.
Herold is chairman of the Duran Duboi Group, a company that for more than 20 years has been providing the French film industry with cutting-edge visual effects, and which grabbed international attention when it took on a Hollywood franchise, along with director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, in 1997's atmospheric Alien Resurrection.
More recently, the company has moved into the world of Computer- Generated Imagery (CGI), that catch cry for the new century, and the technical development that has turned the film industry on its ear.
Now, Herold has teamed with illustrator-turned-filmmaker Enki Bilal to produce Immortal, a dazzling and often bizarre story lifted from the pages of Bilal's comic books. It's full of strange characters (a woman who cries blue tears, a falcon-headed Egyptian god given seven days to live on earth before he is killed), uses both animated and real actors, and is set is a remarkable reworking of a futuristic New York City. It opened last year's French Cinepanorama in Hong Kong, and is on general release from today.
For Herold, CGI work has been a natural - and challenging - progression. 'When we started the company we wanted to use the skills we had as illustrators,' he says. 'We were lucky because it was the dawning of the truly digital age in the film industry and we were really the only ones in France who could provide these special effects.