‘Amelie’ director Jean-Pierre Jeunet names his five favourite movies
When Amelie was released in 2001, it became an instant classic. The French film about a shy café worker who makes it her mission to uplift the lives of those around her appeared to have a kind of magic to it as it uplifted the lives of its team, too. “It was a dream the entire time,” director Jean-Pierre Jeunet said of the process. As the film became an enduring fan favourite, it joined the league of cinematic masterpieces that Jeunet himself worshipped.
Amelie was an unlikely but storming success. “All throughout that year, we experienced good surprises and good news,” Jeunet remembered of its release. “We won at the Baftas and the César Awards. We won over the critics and the general audiences. We had made a hugely successful French-language film throughout the world, and then we got nominated for the Oscars.”
The reason for it all seems to come down to the film’s heart and style. As a director, Jeunet coloured the movie with visually stunning signatures and sequences that mixed art, feeling and heartwarming silliness. Despite being a sweet story of love and optimism, Jeunet gave it a heavily cinematic treatment. When considering his favourite films, it seems he knew no other way.
“The most important film of my life is Once Upon a Time in the West,” he said, starting out his list of favourites with an epic. “For me, it was the sound design and the close-ups with the short lenses. Sergio Leone plays with everything, and the real subject of the film is cinema itself,” he explains. As Amelia is packed with interesting angles and cinematic decisions, it’s easy to see how impactful this was as he added, “It was a big, big influence on me.”
His tastes remain highbrow as he picks Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. He said simply, “It’s so great. Everything about it is fucking great.” Another cinematic giant he celebrates is Francis Ford Coppola. “It’s difficult to avoid The Godfather when you’re making a list like this,” he said about his choice of the 1972 mafia classic, “It’s a cliché to include it, but it’s such a huge masterpiece.”
Celebrating his home country, he had to pick a French director. “I can’t avoid mentioning Port of Shadows, a French film from the 1940s made by Marcel Carné,” he said. This film especially was transformative for his journey into cinema as he explained, “I’ve collected and studied everything I can about Marcel Carné and about the film, from the production design to the press book that was released for it. Everything.”
For his final choice, Jeunet reminded everyone that you’re never too old to learn or discover new things. He picked the 1957 film The Cranes Are Flying, but it was new to him. “I only discovered it one year ago. I was very happy, because even though I’m 70 now, I realized that I can still make some big discoveries.”
Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s favourite films:
- Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1969)
- La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1961)
- The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)
- Port Of Shadows (Marcel Carné, 1938)
- The Cranes Are Flying (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1957)
