We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Alexandre Donot-Saby a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alexandre, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear about the things you feel your parents did right and how those things have impacted your career and life.

My biggest chance growing up was to have parents who shared diverse centers of interest but who were very supportive of one another. My father was a serious runner. In his youth, he was a 1500m champion and, in his forties, ran the New York City Marathon in less than 2h40 mins! He was like a hero to us. And he got us all into running. We would go up in the hills around Saint-Etienne, my hometown in France on the weekends.
My mother was a social worker, but she was also a comedian and later became a stage director. This passion for theatre comes from her own father. My grandfather shared it with his children and grandchildren. It was certainly a big inspiration for me, and why I wanted to become a filmmaker.
Both theatre and long-distance running need a strong commitment. You find pleasure in hard work and repetition. It taught me that you can’t take anything for granted, but the greater the effort, the greater the reward. Those two activities brought me a strong sense of balance. They made me proud of my roots, helped me understand who I was, and where I came from, and never let go of that sight.

Alexandre, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I grew up in Saint-Etienne, France. It’s a blue-collar, modest but hard-working city, not far from the Alps. I had a peculiar childhood: I spent a lot of my free time in my grandfather’s theatre. He was a railroad worker, so passionate about theatre that he decided to create his own place where he would perform, direct plays and give classes.

As a kid, I was fascinated by the place and its spirit. It was fun, yet serious and disciplined. I learned at a young age that being on stage was not about serving your ego or showing off. Telling stories is what makes us human beings. It helps bind societies together all around the world. Whether you’re on stage or making films, it is the same as telling a story around a campfire at night. The story is a thread that goes from the speaker to the listener and creates common roots. Art is a necessity, like water or air. Learning that as a kid had a lot of influence on me. As I went on to study filmmaking in schools like La Fémis in Paris and U.C.L.A. in California, my grandfather’s original lessons stayed with me.

After film school, I decided to be an editor. I did it the old-fashioned way: intern to assistant editor to editor. Every editor should be an assistant because it gives you an overview of what post-production is about, and how all the people involved interact: producers, directors, sound editors, composers… You see the whole process, until the first public screenings. Filmmaking is a collective art form that involves a lot of people.

In 2016 I took the leap from assistant to editor on the film “Guy” by actor-director Alex Lutz. This film was a hit in France and was selected as the closing film of the 2018 Semaine de la Critique in Cannes. Studying in the US opened the doors for international projects like “Our River…Our Sky” directed by British-Iraqui filmmaker Maysoon Pachachi. This film was nominated for 3 awards and won Best Ensemble Cast at the British Independent Film Awards. My next film will be released in theaters in January 2025. It is writer Maxime Caperan’s directorial debut “Un Monde Violent“.

I’m very lucky to practice an activity that I love. I also feel blessed to work on a variety of projects, from narrative films to documentaries. The great thing about this job is to dive into the director’s universe, understand what they want to say, and listen to their desires as well as their fears. Being an editor sometimes makes you feel like the director’s therapist. This job requires a great commitment, it can be emotionally intense as you end up fighting for every single frame to get the most out of the footage you have. The editing process is hard to describe, it’s almost magical. Editing can be long hours of sweat behind your screens, sometimes having to reinvent the script. But when the film starts working, when you feel the thread between the screen and the audience, it’s one of the most magical feeling you can ever have.

I love editing and want to continue doing it. But I also want to direct. I’m currently in pre-production for my second documentary and working on two fiction films, one short and one feature film.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

When I’m editing or writing, my main purpose is to serve the subject as best I can. As I said, filmmaking is a collective process and a combination of strong egos, including mine! But telling a story is always about respecting your subject and your audience. If you’re not honest about your craft, or if you only think about how the project can serve you, it will have a negative impact on screen.

Respecting your audience means knowing they can cope with demanding narrations and subjects. With ever shorter YouTube or TikTok videos, there is this tendency from decision-makers to think the audience is not patient anymore, and that you need to standardize the way the stories are being told. But making a film is like inviting the public to a journey. There is no journey people can’t handle if they can relate to it emotionally.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

When I tell non-film people how much time it takes to make a film they never believe it: “It takes you 4 months to edit a 2-hour film ????!” And then, when I tell them it takes the same time to shoot and sometimes years to write, they wonder what kind of industry is this.
It’s hard to imagine how much effort is put into the process, how many drafts, how many tries, how many failures. You also spend a lot of time on your friends’ projects, reading their scripts, watching their new cut, and giving feedback. To make a film “work” is incredibly difficult, and it’s usually neither very romantic nor very sexy.
What people see is the glamour, the stars, the festivals… But they don’t see the craft, the getting up early in the cold to catch a sunset, the tears (sometimes the screams!), or the moments of despair because nothing goes the way you want.
Filmmaking is all that, and it’s fascinating. And the moment your job is over, you forget all the bad memories attached to it, and you look to the next one.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.alexandredonot.com
• Instagram: Xandrdo
• Facebook: Alexandre Donot

Image Credits

ACH / Justine Thivin / Anna Sauvage