ScreenWize

When he was just eight years old, Jean-Pierre Jeunet – director of Amelie (2001), Alien: Resurrection (1997) and Delicatessen (1991) - made a small theatre from cardboard. He painted it, built sets and puppet characters, costumes and props and used his parents’ bedside lamps for lighting. For the boy who was an only child until eleven, it was the start of an obsession with creating storyworlds - carefully managed environments where everything is controlled, and from which would emerge Jeunet’s distinctive cinematic style. “There’s something wonderful about being able to create a whole universe”, says Jeunet, “especially when you have no brothers and sisters.”

In Australia to promote his latest film Micmacs, Jeunet recalls the moment that he decided his future. “When I was 16, a friend of my parents came to our home with a Super-8 camera. It was an absolute revelation, and I realised then that as soon as I worked and got some money, I would buy a camera and make a film.”

It didn’t take him long. A year later he bought that first camera and began making animated films using stop-motion techniques. From there, Jeunet moved quickly to live-action, and his first feature film Delicatessen was a smash hit – a dark and quirky tale of a butcher and his tenants in a post-apocalyptic world. After picking up awards all over the world, Jeunet came to the attention of Hollywood, and was offered the fourth film in the Alien franchise, in which he carefully managed to maintain his now eccentric style. After Hollywood, he once again struck gold with Amelie, a much-loved film starring Audrey Tatou. More recently he spent three years working on a screen adaptation of Life of Pi only to pull out of the project after Fox studios refused the necessary budget. And in France he’s almost as well known for being the man who turned down directing a Harry Potter film, as he is for the films he’s written and directed in French.

Whether he’s working big budget or small, it is his early years as an only child that still seems to influence Jeunet as a filmmaker. Being orphaned – or at least being an innocent in the world - is a theme that pervades much of his work. In an early 9-minute short film called Foutaises (English title: “What I like, what I hate”), one of Jeunet’s regular actors Dominique Pinon declares “I hate butchers’ shop windows….but I like the innocence of kids.” Jeunet still laughs at the recollection. “There is a saying that every child starts life as a poet but only a few remain as poets once they grow up. And it’s a bit the case with me. At least half of me has stayed a kid.” But Jeunet is quick to qualify the statement. “But I must say that the other half – the left hemisphere - is very much an adult. To be successful on a big film with a big budget, you have to be an adult.”

As a screenwriter, Jeunet also turns to childhood, believing that at some level he has remade the same basic children’s tale over and over again. “I always loved the story of Tom Thumb,” he says. “Tom is an only child and spends most of his time fighting monsters. Sometimes I think that I am just recycling this simple recipe of a story – not on purpose of course – and the monsters are different in each film: a tiger in The Life of Pi, a butcher in Delicatessen, introvertedness in Amelie and a slimy beast in Alien.”

The other habit that comes with him from childhood is his obsession with detail. “I take a lot of time to do everything,” he says. “It’s something that comes from a background in animation. I spoke to Terry Gilliam and he said the same thing - when you’ve done animation, you are a control-freak. I could easily spend three days choosing the right paper for my storyboards. I know it sounds a bit silly, but I don’t care, I love to work this way and to be present at every step of the process in detail. I scout for locations myself on a scooter, and I’m there from casting to editing – I follow everything very closely.”

The result is the carefully constructed Jeunet film style: complex sliding camera shots that reveal a face or an object in close up; the use of wide angle lenses; exquisitely designed future-retro settings, and a nostalgically glowing colour palette. Jeunet is proud that his style can be recognised instantly. “I love directors with a strong style, people who you recognise after only ten seconds of their films. It used to be the case with Fellini, Kurosawa, Orson Welles, and now with David Lynch, Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton.” Jeunet likens his approach to a boy obsessed with using everything in the Meccano set. “I heard a French director recently saying that she didn’t care about the lighting and the production design, and that she was only interested in the actors. I don’t understand this at all. Me, I want to play with everything.”

There’s no missing the total style of Jeunet in Micmacs, a story of two French arms dealers undone by a crazy collection of junk collectors, led by a man with a bullet lodged dangerously in his brain. Jeunet explains how he came to write the story. “ It was definitely a reaction after the end of my work on Life of Pi. I had lost three years of research, with model building and storyboards. I took over 300,000 photos and I loved the story. When it all fell through, I felt like making a story about revenge.” When Jeunet threw the Seven Dwarfs and arms dealers into the mix for inspiration, he had the film he wanted to make. “I love a group of characters who are a little bit weak, a bit cowardly, a bit strange and who each have very specific qualities. In Micmacs, they’re a bit like the toys from Toy Story, characters with imagination who work as a group to get things done. I love this kind of stuff, its very funny.”

SW

Filed Under: Interviews by Simon