Film professional Isabelle Fauvel tells us more about the Cook Your Project programme, an innovative scheme that blends cooking and film writing.

Cineuropa: You are known for having anticipated early on the importance of development with Initiative Film. With Silence&Conversation, you are now proposing a new step forward. What prompted you to make this move today?
Isabelle Fauvel: Indeed, in 1993, I created a company dedicated to development in the broadest sense. This new stage is linked to the evolution of the profession and, more broadly, that of society, which has turned culture into a product like any other, pushing talents towards greater conformism, including in the very way they learn their craft. It therefore seemed necessary to me to reconsider the codes of transmission, taking into account everything I have observed in recent years. Cook Your Project is the first outcome of this reflection.

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Cook Your Project blends cooking and film writing. What did you hope to inspire in participants by leading them into this sensory territory?
A different way to address their potential blockages, to combat the weariness of revisiting their scripts over and over again without ever getting the chance to truly speak about their vision, and to open up a more inclusive reflection on the notion of shared experience. Here, conviviality was built around cooking together, rather than through business-school-type exercises, which have become common in some support programmes. And it worked. For example, the notion of dividing tasks between a co-writer and a writer-director emerged in the kitchen as an immediate understanding of what should guide co-writing.

The sensory dimension also naturally led us to discuss images, sound and directing — the great forgotten element in today’s development conversations. I was also able to share my own relationship with cooking and what I have studied about its evolution. Drawing a parallel with our professions made the participants realise how much our practices and philosophies have in common. Opening the workshop with the words of Maria Nicolau in the French edition of the book Cuisine ou barbarie was particularly revealing: “What would happen to us human beings if we decided to stop being creators of culinary wealth and instead turned ourselves into mere consumers of ready meals?” One only needs to replace the words “culinary wealth” and “ready meals” for the question to become relevant to anyone attempting to make cinema today.

You insist on the need to resist the standardisation of narratives. What are the most effective ways today to preserve the singularity of voices and forms in cinema?
It’s a difficult question, and I only act on my own, humble level, but I believe it all starts with awareness. What is levelled against talents in some commissions, for instance, has nothing to do with what future films need. Instead, they are sent back, at best, to dramaturgical rules repeated in an almost scholastic way, and at worst to moralising principles that resemble a kind of censorship – one it’s difficult to fight back against. Both form and content are then attacked, as though through an unspoken attempt to normalise storytelling.

If we rightly honour filmmakers like Lynch, Tarkovsky, Angelopoulos, Pasolini and Eustache, to name just a few, it is clear that today, they would not find financing. For my part, if, today, I were to co-produce Léolo, the film by Jean-Claude Lauzon that marked the end of my producing career, I know that based solely on the script, I would be rejected everywhere… Yet, that movie was in the official competition at Cannes.

Yes, miracles still happen, with directors like Alice Rohrwacher and Óliver Laxe, but considering the sheer number of films produced each year, the originality of their work – in both form and content – should not distract us from the bigger picture.

How did you find this first seminar?
Unlike when I created AdaptLab for the TorinoFilmLab, inspired by Savina Neirotti’s enthusiasm, here, I had the feeling of jumping right in without a safety net, since everything was set up unconventionally. But I lived this first experience with the appetite it deserved; in Catherine Paprocki, I was delighted to have found the ideal culinary partner to support this initiative, and I was thrilled to see what it brought specifically to the first four participants. I also came out of it with new ideas.

Because, in cooking as in cinema, one must be wary of repetitive formulas, restrictive menus and trends, in order to adapt instead to individual universes, imaginations, cultural specificities in storytelling, and different career stages. We are already simmering the “four seasons” of Cook Your Project, but also a weekend format for producers and directors to cook together — both a meal and a project — and, most importantly, a workshop for film students, which will be launched in 2026.