Amélie Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet Reveals His One Regret About the Re-Released Classic
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The post Amélie Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet Reveals His One Regret About the Re-Released Classic appeared first on Consequence.
Jean-Pierre Jeunet doesn’t know how many times he’s seen Le Fabuleux Destin D’Amélie Poulain — or just Amélie, as his most beloved film to date is known. However, he does remember the most recent occasion — in July 2021, at a special free screening on the beach, organized by the Cannes Film Festival. “A big screen on the beach for free,” he remembers. “And it was a rainy day. And they warned me, probably we will have 50 people, no more… It was packed. They refused 200 people. And everybody [had seen] the film before. It wasn’t new for them.”
Watching Amélie on a rainy beach is exactly the sort of unconventionally beautiful moment Jeunet’s titular heroine, played by Audrey Tautou, would appreciate. The 2001 film, which will be re-released in theaters beginning Wednesday, February 14th, is a modern fairy tale about a lonely young woman wary of other people — until a series of events draws her out into the world, where she finds a new level of connection with those around her.
That 2021 Amélie screening also had a deeper significance for Jeunet, because in 2001, the film was submitted to the Cannes festival and was subsequently rejected. “I remember the screening where the boss of the Cannes Film Festival watched the film in the theater — I saw the bald head of the boss shining in the light of the projector,” Jeunet says, adding that he knew, just from watching Gilles Jacob (president of the Cannes Film Festival from 2001-2014) watch the movie, that Jacob didn’t like the film.
However, he adds, being rejected by Cannes actually worked to the film’s advantage, “because it was such a big controversy in France, it was big advertising for us.” That initial notoriety was karmically redeemed by the film’s international success, earning almost $175 million at the box office and receiving five Oscar nominations, including original screenplay and foreign language film (as the International Film category was known at that point).
That early success has translated into a film which holds up remarkably well 23 years later. Perhaps that’s due, in part, to the film’s existence outside of space and time: “It’s a little bit timeless, the look of Amélie. It’s vintage, and sometime it’s modern,” Jeunet says. “You have a TV screen, but in a square frame. It’s the same thing when you see Blade Runner — it’s very modern science fiction, but when you see the screens, they’re all old fashioned.”
Amélie is also set in a fairytale version of Paris that Jeunet freely describes as “fake,” because if nothing else, “at that time, so many dogs would shit on the street. You couldn’t walk on the sidewalk. Now it’s getting better. It’s a little bit cleaner. The city is worse now because of so many construction sites and traffic jams, but it’s cleaner in term of dog shit.”
When it came to figuring out the film’s signature palette, Jeunet says that it was something he had to communicate visually to his team, “because if you speak with words, everybody will be lost, because of course, everybody thinks differently.”
Instead, Jeunet showed the production team paintings by Brazillian artist Juarez Machado, and during the post-production process was able to handle the film’s color grading digitally. “We pushed the color — we got crazy,” he remembers, adding that the effect would not have been possible “in a chemical process. With the digital [color grading], we could get everything we wanted.”
Also digital, and holding up remarkably well after all this time, are the movie’s visual effects. “I think the most important thing,” Jeunet says, is that “I use visual effects, but not for spaceships or for monsters, but for poetry. When you see the heart beating, it’s different. When she falls like water on the floor — it was original. This is the most important thing — not the technique, but to imagine something different, an original way to use the visual effects.”
As much as Amélie has that timeless feel, it is ironically very rooted in a specific moment in time: the late summer and fall of 1997, in the aftermath of Princess Diana’s death. Watching the movie, you might assume that Jeunet was deeply affected by the tragedy, but he says that’s not really the case.
“I have to say something, I totally don’t care about the English royal family,” Jeunet says. “I don’t know anything. The big guy with the big hair, I don’t know who is he. I don’t want to see The Crown. I don’t give a shit about this family. So I am sad for this lady because she had a stupid accident with a stupid French driver. This drives me crazy because she died because of a stupid French guy, French incompetence. But that’s it. I did not know her.”
Perhaps that’s why Diana’s death plays no role in Jeunet’s recent return to the world of Amélie — the filmmaker recently released La Véritable Histoire d’Amélie Poulain, a short film reediting Amélie into a new narrative (of questionable truth). “It’s just a pleasure to make something with freedom,” he says, “because now, to make a feature, it’s so difficult — you have to wait a long time to find the money, to convince people and blah, blah, blah. So I love to make short films, and some sculpture…”
Like the 21st century artist he is, he then says to “look at my website. You will see what I do.”
In addition, he’s excited about the re-releases of his earlier films, including other ’90s classics like Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children — and he has no issue with rewatchign them. “I am probably the only director in the world who likes to watch his own movies, because usually they don’t like that — I suppose because they know they won’t be very proud if they rewatch it.”
However, Jeunet continues, “I don’t care, because when I watch my own movie, it’s a kind of souvenir. I remember the good memories about the shooting — ‘Ah, that day we shot that, et cetera, et cetera.’ Sometimes I see this defect, and today I would make something different, but I don’t care. I love to [rewatch]. Sometimes it’s on TV, and you watch just to check the quality of the frame, and then you continue until the end. It’s a pleasure.”
Jeunet does have one specific regret about Amélie, when he rewatches it — “the gag where she is Zorro. I wanted to cut it and my editor said, ‘No, no, it’s good.’ And each time we watched it, I said, ‘Ah, I should cut it.'”
The gag remains in the film to this day. Says Jeunet, “It’s not a big regret.”
Amélie returns to theaters on Wednesday, February 14th.
Amélie Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet Reveals His One Regret About the Re-Released Classic
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