Jean-Pierre Jeunet was born in
Roanne, France. He bought his first camera at the age of 17 and made short films while studying animation at Cinémation Studios. He befriended
Marc Caro, a designer and comic book artist who became his longtime collaborator and co-director. They met at an animation festival in Annecy in the 1970s. Together, Jeunet and Caro directed award-winning animations. Their first live-action film was
The Bunker of the Last Gunshots (1981), a short film about soldiers in a bleak futuristic world. Jeunet also directed numerous advertisements and music videos, such as
Jean-Michel Jarre's
Zoolook (together with Caro). Jeunet's films often resonate with the late twentieth-century French film movement
cinéma du look and allude to themes and aesthetics involving
German expressionism, French poetic realism, and the
French New Wave. They next made
The City of Lost Children (1995), a dark, multi-layered
fantasy film about a mad scientist who steals children's dreams so that he can live indefinitely. The success of
The City of Lost Children led to an invitation to direct the fourth film in the
Alien series,
Alien Resurrection (1997). This is where Jeunet and Caro ended up going their separate ways, as Jeunet believed this to be an amazing opportunity whereas Caro was not interested in working on a big-budget Hollywood movie on which he would lack creative control. Caro ended up assisting for a few weeks with costumes and set design, but then he decided to start a solo career in illustration and computer graphics.
Amélie was a huge critical and commercial success worldwide and was nominated for several
Academy Awards. For his work on the film, Jeunet won a
European Film Award for Best Director. In 2004, Jeunet released
A Very Long Engagement, an adaptation of the novel by
Sébastien Japrisot. The film, starring Audrey Tautou and
Jodie Foster, chronicled a woman's search for her missing lover after
World War I. In 2005 Jean-Pierre Jeunet was involved in the creation of a detailed history project about the life of French aviator
Louis Blériot. After a year Jeunet felt the movie was too close in historic timeline to
A Very Long Engagement and the project was abandoned. In 2009, he released
Micmacs, which is about a man and his friends who come up with an intricate and original plan to destroy two big weapons manufacturers. Jeunet has also directed numerous commercials, including a 2'25" film for
Chanel N° 5 featuring his frequent collaborator Audrey Tautou. In 2013, Jeunet released
The Young and Prodigious T. S. Spivet, an adaptation of
Reif Larsen's book
The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet that starred Kyle Catlett. In 2016, Jeunet and Romain Segaud co-directed the three-minute stop-motion animation film ''Deux escargots s'en vont'', based on a poem by
Jacques Prévert. Since his last release, Jeunet has tried to get other projects funded but has found it impossible to find investors willing to take a risk on his quirky films. He stated in 2019 that he may go to Netflix "as a last resort", and indeed his next film,
Bigbug, was released by the streaming video company in 2022. ==Filmography==