Andrzej Wajda

Danton

Danton

Gérard Depardieu and Wojciech Pszoniak star in Andrzej Wajda’s powerful, intimate depiction of the ideological clash between the earthy, man-of-the-people Georges Danton and icy Jacobin extremist Maximilien Robespierre, both key figures of the French Revolution. By drawing parallels to Polish “solidarity,” a movement that was being quashed by the government as the film went into production, Wajda drags history into the present. Meticulous and fiery, Danton has been hailed as one of the greatest films ever made about the Terror.

Film Info

  • France
  • 1983
  • 136 minutes
  • Color
  • 1.66:1
  • French
  • Spine #464

Special Features

  • New high-definition digital transfer
  • Video interviews with director Andrzej Wajda, screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, and Polish film critic Jerzy Plazewski
  • Wajda’s "Danton," a 42-minute behind-the-scenes documentary on the making of the film
  • Original theatrical trailer
  • New and improved English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: A new essay by film scholar Leonard Quart

    New cover by Riccardo Vecchio

Purchase Options

Special Features

  • New high-definition digital transfer
  • Video interviews with director Andrzej Wajda, screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, and Polish film critic Jerzy Plazewski
  • Wajda’s "Danton," a 42-minute behind-the-scenes documentary on the making of the film
  • Original theatrical trailer
  • New and improved English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: A new essay by film scholar Leonard Quart

    New cover by Riccardo Vecchio
Danton
Cast
Gérard Depardieu
Georges Danton
Wojciech Pszoniak
Maximilien Robespierre
Anne Alvaro
Éléonore Duplay
Roland Blanche
Lacroix
Patrice Chereau
Camille Desmoulins
Andrzej Seweryn
Léonard Bourdon
Angela Winkler
Lucille Desmoulins
Alain Macé
Héron
Bogusław Linda
Saint-Just
Lucien Melki
Fabre d’Eglantine
Credits
Director
Andrzej Wajda
Screenplay
Jean-Claude Carrière
Screenplay
Agnieszka Holland
Screenplay
Andrzej Wajda
Screenplay
Jacek Gasiorowski
Screenplay
Boleslaw Michalek
Based on the play by
Stanislawa Przybyszewska
Music
Jean Prodromides
Cinematography
Igor Luther
Editing
Halina Prugar-Ketling
Production design
Allan Starski

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Jean-Claude Carrière

Writer

Jean-Claude Carrière
Jean-Claude Carrière

A quietly influential force in art cinema throughout the second half of the twentieth century and beyond, screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière (also an author, actor, opera librettist, and occasional director) has collaborated with such important screen artists as Luis Buñuel, Milos Forman, Jean-Luc Godard, Philip Kaufman, Louis Malle, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, and Andrzej Wajda. He got his start working with the comic filmmaker Pierre Etaix on the Oscar-winning slapstick short Happy Anniversary (1962), which the two codirected; Carrière would go on to cowrite all of Etaix’s 1960s features. Meanwhile, Buñuel enlisted Carrière to cowrite 1964’s Diary of a Chambermaid, the beginning of a grand partnership that would also result in increasingly surreal visions like Belle de jour (1967), The Milky Way (1969), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), The Phantom of Liberty (1974), and That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). (In 2012, Carrière said of working with Buñuel, “How we mixed together is impossible to say. One started an idea, the other finished it.”) As is clear from those productions, he has a way with the absurd, but the versatile and erudite Carrière is also a keen literary adapter, translating such daunting novels as The Tin Drum and The Unbearable Lightness of Being into formidable films. Carrière’s career continues to take surprising turns: he has a small but crucial role in Abbas Kiarostami’s 2010 Certified Copy, for example.