Jeunet, Jean-Pierre

Personal

Born September 3, 1955, in Roanne, France.

Addresses

Office—c/o DGA, 7920 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90046; c/o Artmédia, 20, Avenue Rapp, 75 007 Paris, France.

Career

Film director and screenwriter. Director of films, including (with Marc Caro) L'evasion, 1978; (with Caro) Le manège, 1980; (with Caro) Le bunker de la dernière rafale, Zootrope, 1981; Pas de repos pour Billy Brakko (animated short film), 1984; Alien: Resurrection, Twentieth Century-Fox, 1997; and Ulysses 31, 1999.

Awards, Honors

French Academy of Cinema Awards for best first film and best original screenplay, Tokyo International Film Festival gold award, César awards for best writing and best direction, Catalonian International Film Festival best director award, and Screenwriter's Critic and Writer's Catalan Association prize, all 1991, all for Delicatessen; Cannes Film Festival Golden Palm nomination, 1995, and Independent Spirit Award nomination, 1996, both for La cité des enfants perdus; Cesar Award for best short animation film, 1981, for Le manege; Cannes Film Festival Golden Palm, 1989, for Foutaises; Saturn Award nomination, Academy of Science Fiction, Horror, and Fantasy Films, 1997, for Alien: Resurrection; Academy Award nominations for best foreign-language film and best original screenplay, British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards for best director and best original screenplay, European Film Academy Award for best director, and French Academy of Cinema Award for best director, all 2001, and Goya Award, Independent Spirit Award, Amanda Award (Norway) and Czech Lion award for best foreign film, and César awards (France) for best director and best film, all 2002, and numerous film festival audience awards, all for Amélie.

Writings

SCREENPLAYS

(With Bruno Delbonnel; and director) Foutaises, Zootrope, 1989.

(With Gilles Adrien and Marc Caro; and director with Caro) Delicatessen, Miramax, 1991.

(With Gilles Adrien; and director with Marc Caro) La cité des enfants perdus (also known as City of Lost Children), Sony Pictures Classics, 1995.

(With Guillaume Laurant; and director) Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (also known as Amélie), Miramax, 2001.

(With Guillaume Laurant; and director) Un long dimanch de fiançailles (also known as A Very Long Engagement; based on the novel by Sébastien Japrisot), Warner Bros., 2004.

Sidelights

French film director and screenwriter Jean-Pierre Jeunet gained international attention in the late 1990s, beginning as an independent film maker with partner Marc Caro and moving on to direct the big-budget motion picture Alien: Resurrection. A self-taught director who possesses a distinctive style and aesthetic, Jeunet gained even more acclaim following the release of his 2001 film, the charming romantic comedy Amélie. Together with animator Caro, Jeunet had achieved cult status early in his career with the 1991 film Delicatessen, a black comedy set in a post-apocalyptic future.

Jeunet was born in France's Loire region in 1953, and he began exercising his vivid imagination at an early age. Speaking to interviewer Scot Tobias on the Onion AV Club Web Site, Jeunet remembered: "When I was a kid, I used to escape from my family with my imagination, and I kept this spirit into my adult life. This doesn't always happen. All children have imagination, but for some it doesn't carry over." Along with his working partner, Caro, Jeunet spent several years making commercials, short films, music videos, and animated films, all the while developing the fantastic, otherworldly style he would later be known for. These animated films were, as Jeunet explained to Tobias, made "with puppets, like Tim Burton, but very cheap and not with the same talent. I'm a little ashamed of the films, actually, but it was the same kind of technique."

Delicatessen Gains Converts

In 1991 Jeunet and Caro released their first feature-length film, the madcap Delicatessen. Set in a wacky boarding house in a post-apocalyptic future, the film portrays a host of eccentric characters, including a woman who invents ridiculously complicated machines for committing suicide, a man who lives in the building's flooded basement along with various amphibians, and an ex-clown who still wears his oversized shoes and hopes to marry a possibly cannibalistic butcher's daughter. The boarding house residents, all meat-eaters, wage unrelenting war against a group of underground-dwelling vegetarians in Jeunet's dark, damp, mutated world. Shot "in your face with baroque camera angles à la Citizen Kane and zillions of rude sight gags," as Georgia Harbison maintained in a review of the film for Time.

Delicatessen became an instant cult favorite among the art film set because of Jeunet's now-recognizable style and its sheer inventiveness. Joanne Kaufman in People dubbed the film a "hilarious French black comedy," while, according to Tobias, it "introduced a dark and playfully surreal sensibility that combined fairy-tale imagery with a flair for rhythmic, Rube Goldberg-style comic sequences." Delicatessen earned its directors several important film prizes, including two awards from the French Academy of Cinema.

After producing two short solo efforts—1984's Pas de repos pour Billy Bradko and 1989's Foutaise—Jeunet returned to the feature-length format. Having teamed with Gilles Adrien to pen the screenplay for Delicatessen, Jeunet renewed this successful working relationship in his next film, released in the United States as City of Lost Children. He also renewed his working relationship with Caro, with whom he had been planning this film for over a decade. A far more surreal, nightmarish vision is presented in this film, although Jeunet's characteristic style is still present. The film, which features a number of innovative, computer-generated special effects, draws viewers into a fantasy world wherein a mad scientist named Krank faces death because he cannot dream. With the aid of six cloned henchmen and the guidance of a disembodied brain, Krank captures young children, imprisons them in his dark, dank fortress, and feeds off their dreams. The film's action revolves around a strong but simple circus performer, who attempts to track down his young brother, one of the evil Krank's latest victims, with the help of a gang of homeless orphans. Like many of Jeunet's films, City of Lost Children benefits from the acting talents of Ron Perleman and Dominique Pinon, both of whom bring an off-balance to the film due to their appearance and mannerisms.

Directs Alien Installment

Although City of Lost Children was not to everyone's taste, most critics agreed that it reflected a unique creative vision. Jeunet was soon contacted by Hollywood producers to direct Alien: Resurrection, a big-budget film in a popular series begun in 1979 that had already spawned several hits due to the work of directors Ridley Scott and James Cameron. While most directors would have jumped at the chance of signing on to the latest Alien project, Jeunet insisted on retaining some of the privileges he had come to enjoy as an independent filmmaker. He announced to the film's producers that he would not agree to direct the film unless he was allowed sufficient time to do it his way, and the studio—Twentieth Century-Fox—finally agreed.

As the fourth in a continuing series of popular science-fiction films featuring established monster characters, Alien: Resurrection needed to meet fan expectations. At the same time, director Jeunet was expected to break enough new ground to keep the series storyline fresh. "The film turned out to be an amazing adventure for me," Jeunet recalled to Tobias. "It was unlike anything I've made before."

Released in 1997, Alien: Resurrection brings back the familiar character of Lieutenant Ellen Ripley (played by Sigourney Weaver). Although Ripley died in the previous "Alien" movie, in Resurrection she returns as a genetically engineered clone endowed with superhuman strength and intellect. The time is two hundred years in the future, and as the film opens the cloned Ripley is giving birth to an alien, which renegade government scientists believe will reveal medical and scientific advances—if only they can be kept contained. As in the earlier films in the series, the parasitic alien creatures quickly grow in size, strength, and numbers, and also quickly break free of their confines. Together with the rag-tag crew from a intergalactic freighter (including Jeunet proteges Perleman and Pinon, as well as the surprisingly miscast Winona Ryder), Ripley once again reprises her role battling ooze-dripping alien monsters in an isolated space station. Noting the horrific visual violence characteristic of the "Alien" movies, David Ansen stated in Newsweek: "Under the reins of Jean-Pierre Jeunet . . . , the franchise has lost none of its taste for acid-spewing, flesh-impaling, entrail-dripping gore." "The guts of any Alien movie, of course," Lisa Schwarzbaum maintained in Entertainment Weekly, "are the high-tension confrontations between vulnerable humans in their unmoored isolation and amoral monsters. As directed by the French Jean-Pierre Jeunet with the kind of visual panache he brought to Delicatessen ..., Alien: Resurrection doesn't stint on the chases."

While many reviewers expressed admiration for the film's action and setting, the science behind the fiction had become increasingly questionable during the life of the series, and Alien: Resurrection would become the final of four "Alien" sagas. Noting that Jeunet "brings a mordant, crackerjack wit to the world of chest-busting, head-ripping creepazoids from beyond," Washington Post reviewer Stephen Hunter added the caveat: "Pay no attention to the laws of genetics.... Alien Resurrection turns out to be far more interested in fiction than science." Still, the film was popular at the box office, proving that "Jeunet could prevail in Hollywood on the American film industry's own bottom-line terms," as Bruce Crumley maintained in Time International.

From Sci-Fi to Fairy Tale

Following the success of Alien: Resurrection Jeunet decided to make a film on his own, this time without a Hollywood studio and independent of long-time creative partner Caro. Since the mid-1970s he had been writing short stories; now he collected some of them and developed a script. At first unsure about the collection's unifying theme, Jeunet picked one of the stories—about a waitress who wanted to help people—as the central axis for his film script, then added a love story to the mix. "And then everything was easy—easy to write, easy to shoot, easy to edit," the director and writer told a contributor to Daily Variety. Jeunet claimed that "almost all the stories in Amélie are true. . . . I use a lot of small details from my childhood." The final screenplay was coauthored by Jeunet and collaborator Guillaume Laurant.

The film that resulted was Amélie, an unexpectedly popular romantic comedy. The film focuses on a young, naive waitress who works at a small Paris café and decides to help everyone she meets. The lonesome and pixieish Amélie Poulain (played by Audrey Tautou) begins to involve herself in the lives of those around her, gathering threads and then weaving them into regained dreams, answered prayers, and requited passion. Eventually, the young woman discovers the answer to her own loneliness in the form of a romantic attachment to an equally eccentric young man. Amélie was called "a priestess of the imagination, a ruthless schemer, a canny do-gooder, a lover," by Jess Cagle in his Time review of Jeunet's 2001 film. "She has mischief in her, and a kind of secular sainthood." Describing the film as "both a fairy tale and a shaggy-dog story," Joseph Cunneen noted in his National Catholic Reporter review that Amélie is "a series of picture postcards of an essentially pre-WWII (and all-white) Paris that pass by at breakneck speed, to the accompaniment of a wisecracking commentator." Praising the film as a "delectable French confection" with a "darkly funny side," Washington Post contributor Rita Kempley singled out particular praise for Tautou, as well as for Jeunet, whose "visual dynamics and whimsical storytelling" set the film apart.

Reaction to Amélie was overwhelming, and the film won film awards in the United States, England, France, Norway, and Germany, including many audience awards at film festivals around the world. Graham Fuller in Interview called the film "a sheer delight from beginning to end." Schwarzbaum found that "while Amélie the plucky girl beguiles, Amélie the charming movie, already an international success, seduces." Calling Amélie "in many ways a classic romantic comedy," Rex Roberts added in Insight on the News that "the wit with which the writers have woven together the subplots, all illustrating the timeless truths of hope, faith and charity, is rare in cinema."

If you enjoy the works of Jean-Pierre Jeunet

If you enjoy the works of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, you might want to check out the following films:

Big Fish, directed by Tim Burton, 2003.

Chocolat, directed by Lasse Hallström, 2001.

Like Water for Chocolate, directed by Alfonso Arau, 1993.

As director of one of the most internationally acclaimed films in French film history, Jeunet has continued to expand his creative scope. Continuing to work independently, in 2004 he released the film A Very Long Engagement, which is based on a novel by Sébastien Japrisot. Starring Jeunet alumni Pinon and Tautou, as well as French actors Gaspard Ulliel, André Dussoler, and Chantal Neuwirth, the film takes place on the battle fields of France during World War, as five soldiers sentenced to death are hand-cuffed and forced to walk behind enemy lines in lieu of a firing squad. The film, directed by Jeunet, was coauthored by Laurant.

Biographical and Critical Sources

PERIODICALS

Christian Century, February 27, 2002, James M. Wall, "A Critic's Choice," p. 51.

Daily Variety, January 15, 2002, "Jean-Pierre Jeunet," p. A19.

Entertainment Weekly, June 5, 1992, Owen Gleiberman, review of Delicatessen, p. 39; July 26, 1996, Nisid Hajari, review of The City of Lost Children, p. 62; December 5, 1997, Lisa Schwarzbaum, review of Alien: Resurrection, p. 47; November 9, 2001, Lisa Schwarzbaum, review of Amélie, p. 83.

European Report, December 8, 2001, "Amélie Wins Berlin European Film Award," p. 499.

Films in Review, May-June, 1992, Kevin Lewis, review of Delicatessen, p. 196.

French Politics, Culture, and Society, spring, 2002, Sylvie Waskiewicz, review of Amélie, p. 152.

Harper's Bazaar, January, 1992, Christopher Petkanas, review of Delicatessen, p. 99.

Insight on the News, November 19, 2001, Rex Roberts, review of Amélie, p. 29.

Interview, February, 1992, Julie Phillips, review of Delicatessen, p. 78; November, 2001, Graham Fuller, review of Amélie, p. 56.

Maclean's, December 29, 1997, Brian D. Johnson, review of Alien: Resurrection, p. 105.

Nation, December 22, 1997, Stuart Klawans, review of Alien: Resurrection, p. 35.

National Catholic Reporter, November 23, 2001, Joseph Cunneen, review of Amélie, p. 15.

Newsweek, December 1, 1997, David Ansen, review of Alien: Resurrection, p. 90.

New York, April 13, 1992, John Powers, review of Delicatessen, p. 66.

New Yorker, December 1, 1997, Anthony Lane, review of Alien: Resurrection, p. 102.

People, June 22, 1992, Joanne Kaufman, review of Delicatessen, p. 21.

Rolling Stone, November 22, 2001, Peter Travers, review of Amélie, p. 97.

Sight and Sound, January, 1992, Johathan Romney, review of Delicatessen, p. 42; December, 1997, Kim Newman, review of Alien: Resurrection, p. 36.

TCI, January, 1998, John Calhoun, review of Alien: Resurrection, p. 18.

Time, March 30, 1992, Georgia Harbison, review of Delicatessen, p. 14; December 1, 1997, Richard Schickel, review of Alien: Resurrection, p. 84; November 12, 2001, Jess Cagle, review of Amélie, p. 93.

Time International, April 22, 2002, Bruce Crumley, "Crossing Borders," p. 78.

Variety, November 17, 1997, Derek Elley, review of Alien: Resurrection, p. 63.

Video, May, 1993, Sol Louis Siegel, review of Delicatessen, p. 57.

Washington Post, November 28, 1997, Stephen Hunter, review of Alien: Resurrection; November 9, 2001, Rita Kempley, review of Amélie, p. C5.

ONLINE

Jeunet-Caro Web Site,http://jeunetcaro.online.fr/ (February 16, 2004).

Onion AV Club Web Site,http://avclub.theonion.com/ (December 10, 2003), Scott Tobias, "Jean-Pierre Jeunet."*