Emmanuel Priou, producer of The March of the Emperor, Oscar winner for best documentary in 2006

 "My encounter with the American film industry was decisive. The March of the Emperor, which the three of us produced with Yves Darondeau and Christophe Lioud, was our first feature-length documentary for the cinema. So it was a big surprise when Warner and National Geographic offered us a million dollars to buy the rights to it, even before it was released in France. What we couldn't have predicted was that the film would become the biggest French success in Hollywood, making $78 million! But for the Americans, 'business is business'... So there was no way of renegotiating the contract. However, this success opened up the international scene for us, and today the Americans listen to us when we present them with new projects. But our working methods are very different. For The Emperor's March, we had to change the music, choose something more conventional, and replace the penguins' dialogue with voice-over narration. As for the beginning, which is a little mysterious and poetic in French, it has become much more down-to-earth in English. The Americans want to do everything they can to captivate the audience quickly, to avoid people leaving the theatre because they don't understand what's going on in the first five minutes. This experience encouraged us to produce a documentary, J'irai dormir à Hollywood, a French 'anti-Borat', a kind of road movie filmed and directed by a single person. For the record, after the Oscars ceremony, we were invited to a party from which we each came away with a suitcase full of extravagant gifts: an iPod, a diamond-studded necklace, collagen syringes, shoes... Excess, you could say! "