Scavenging Angel

It’s not quite in the nouvelle vague league but contemporary French cinema is not short of international players. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine our cultural landscape without the likes of Jacques Audiard, Gaspar Noé, or Laurent Cantet. None of these chaps, however, could hope to match one Jean-Pierre Jeunet at the box-office, on the awards circuit or as a global auteur brand.

Ever since Mr. Jeunet burst onto the scene with 1991’s Delicatessen, a spectacular fantasy co-created with his erstwhile collaborator, Marc Caro, his bizarre fables have enlivened our arthouses and multiplexes. The filmmaker behind such niche hits such as City of Lost Children and A Very Long Engagement has scored mainstream converts through Alien:Resurrection and the wildly successful crossover hit, Amélie, triumphs which may explain the bidding frenzy that erupted around Micmacs, the latest flick to bear the director’s distinctive visual imprimatur.
Based around an underground community of human scavengers, Micmacs à tire-larigot (to use its full French title) presents an Aladdin’s Cave of grotty wonders, both literally and figuratively as M. Jeunet’s regular set designer, Aline Bonetto, turns the style up to 11.
Sitting in London’s Soho Hotel, the director shakes his head in mock disapproval: “My set designer likes to surprise me,” he says. “Sometimes it’s weird. When I first saw the set for Amélie I said ‘But it’s all red’. I did not know what to think. Okay, it could be red. Maybe I can work with that. By the end of the shooting day, I was saying ‘Look, it’s all red, isn’t it fantastic?’ Sometimes you need time with Aline’s sets for it to make sense.”
Micmacs, a whimsical all-ages fable, sees a merry band of rejects take on the military-industrial complex with gadgets build from garbage and elaborate cartoon schemes. The sight-gags are ingenious and the tomfoolery is broad, but it’s the film’s inimitable look that steals the show.
“I start with a strong concept”, says M. Jeunet. “I try to start with a strong concept! For this film it was a mix of three different ideas. I wanted to make a film with strange and funny looking people, like the seven dwarves in Snow White or the toys in Toy Story. Then I sit down with my scriptwriter (Guillaume Laurent) and we take down many notes and keep the best ideas. That is why we end up with so many details.”
These oddball details are carried over into the casting process. The Micmacs collective, including actors Dany Boon, Andre Dussolier, Nicolas Marie, Yolande Moreau, Jean-Pierre Marielle, Julie Ferrier, are movie stars but not as Hollywood knows them. How does one put the call out for, well, less conventional looking sorts?
“I can’t explain,” says the director. “It’s like a sculpture. I love African art much more than Greek art. I do not like boring conventional faces. I want something striking. For me an actor like Dominique Pinon is beautiful to film. But my main reason to choose these people is that they are very good actors.”
Written and performed in the classic French style of Marcel Carne and Jacques Tati, Micmacs relies heavily on the facial clowning of Welcome to the Stick’s Dany Boon. It’s difficult to imagine the film without him, but the role was initially created with Jamel Debbouze in mind: the famous one-armed Moroccan actor left the production after three weeks citing ‘creative differences’.
“I hardly needed to touch Micmacs when Dany came in,” says M. Jeunet. “I went through the same process before when Emily Watson was replaced by Audrey Tatou on Amelie. Sometimes a change works out better and gives the film something you had not expected.”
The same description holds for filmmaker’s entire career. Born in the Loire valley, young Jean Pierre Jeunet expected to work for the same telephone company that employed his dad. As a teenager, he taught himself film by messing around on a camera and went on to study animation. He began a film career in earnest by making television commercials and short films. In the process, he became fast friends with Marc Caro, an artist and a designer who became his right-hand man and co-director on Delicatessen and City of Lost Children.
Micmacs comes at a strange junction in the French director’s career. He has done the Hollywood thing with Alien: Resurrection though he has recently abandoned a filmed adaptation of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi and turned down Harry Potter.
“The Life of Pi is unfortunate”, he says. “But it is a film about talking animals on water. There is nothing more expensive to put on screen. It was simply not going to work without an astronomical budget. I was never interested in Harry Potter. Why would I be? Those films require a director to shout ‘action’ and ‘cut’ and do nothing in between. They are finished before they start shooting. Every creative decision has been made before they even hire a director. It would be pointless.”
He insists, however, that he’s not sour on the whole Hollywood beat. “I had a great time on Alien,” he says. “I had all my regulars around me. It was just another Jeunet film. And I met my wife on that film so it was a happy time in my life, except for...”
He pauses and grins. Except for what?
“Well, she’s an American. But nobody’s perfect.”

Micmacs opens February 26