France, June 27 -- Jackson is Britain's leading authority on Charles de Gaulle and the author of the 2018 biography A Certain Idea of France, which inspired filmmaker Antonin Baudry's film.
When the two men began working together, Jackson's instinct was to reach for a red pen.
"At the beginning I would say, 'oh, that's wrong, that's wrong, that's wrong'," he recalls. "Then I realised that was absurd."
That realisation led to a fruitful collaboration between a history scholar obsessed with the facts and a director aiming to sell tickets.
La Bataille de Gaulle covers the two years from the then-little known General De Gaulle's arrival in London in June 1940 to the assasination of Admiral Darlan in Algiers by a resistance fighter in Decemb...