EXCLUSIVE: French actor-director Mathieu Kassovitz is joining forces with Monaco-based space entrepreneur Gildo Pastor to launch Venturi Product
EXCLUSIVE: French actor-director Mathieu Kassovitz is joining forces with Monaco-based space entrepreneur Gildo Pastor to launch Venturi Production to make features, series, video games and documentaries rooted in the worlds of science, engineering and technology.
“Technology is going to have a major role in cinema so we need to master it before it masters us,” said Kassovitz. “Humans will make art and machines will serve to express their vision.”
Projects in development include “feature films fusing cinema and video games where we shoot a film with real actors, into which audiences can enter,” Kassovitz told Screen.
Venturi Production is also developing a documentary about the moon that will employ archival images from NASA, integrated with AI and CGI.
“The possibilities offered by audiovisual and space technologies seem endless,” said Pastor. “ It’s a vast new playground that awaits us.”
The company plans to work extensively with AI technology – “not generative AI, but collaborative AI,” Kassovitz specified. “The idea is to rewrite the model to correspond to the norms of filmmaking.”
Venturi Production is currently financed by Pastor, but the team is looking to work with startups in technology and collaborate with creatives to develop upcoming projects.
“Cinema should be more interactive, like choose-your-own-adventure books. We have the technology, now we have to learn to use it,” Kassovitz explained. “We want to reach people outside of traditional film audiences.”
Pastor is the president of electric car company Venturi and Venturi Space that is preparing its first lunar missions with the FLIP rover due to land on the moon in early 2026.
“Rewriting the language of cinema”
Kassovitz, who earned a best director prize for La Haine in Cannes early in his career, has been dipping his toes in more experimental filmmaking. He is gearing up to start production this summer on The Big War, a hybrid CGI animation and live action family adventure film set during the Nazi occupation of France during World War II.
The film will be shot on location in French forests before bringing in animators for special effects and CGI work.
He has also restaged La Haine as a live and immersive theatrical experience, a process which he described as “taking a 30 year-old film to rewrite the language of cinema with new technology”.
Kassovitz described Pastor as “a true collaborator whose vision has no limits but remains rooted in reality, a partner who shares this vision of cinema that uses technology rather than the other way around”.
“I have films that have been in the works for the past 20 years that I’ve been looking for producers crazy enough to invest in who are not afraid to take risks.”
Kassovitz and Pastor unveiled the project on May 21 in Cannes alongside astronaut Jean-François Clervoy, a veteran of three NASA space shuttle missions and Venturi space ambassador.
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