Jacques Audiard
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Jacques Audiard (born April 30, 1952, Paris, France) is a French film director and screenwriter whose crime films have been acclaimed for their scripts and strong lead performances.
Audiard is the son of noted screenwriter Michel Audiard, who is best known for his screenplays for crime films, particularly director Henri Verneuil’s Mélodie en sous-sol (1963; Any Number Can Win) and Claude Miller’s Garde à vue (1981). Jacques Audiard studied literature at the Sorbonne but left before completing his degree. He entered the film industry as an assistant editor on several movies in the late 1970s, including Roman Polanski’s Le Locataire (1976; The Tenant). He switched to screenwriting with the spy thriller Le Professionel (1981; The Professional).
(Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film preservation.)
Audiard’s first film as a director was Regard les hommes tomber (1994; See How They Fall), which wove together two separate story lines—one about a man (played by Jean Yanne) searching for the killer of his friend and the other concerning the actions of the murderers (Jean-Louis Trintignant and Mathieu Kassovitz) before the crime. Audiard also cowrote the screenplay, as he would for many of his subsequent movies. Audiard won the César Award (the French equivalent of the Academy Award) for best first film, the first of many Césars to come his way. His next film, Un Héros très discret (1996; A Self-Made Hero), is about a salesman (Kassovitz) who, after the end of World War II, concocts a new identity as a hero in the French Resistance. Sur mes lèvres (Read My Lips, 2001) centers on the relationship between a deaf, lip-reading secretary (Emanuelle Devos) and an ex-convict (Vincent Cassel), each of whom relies on the other’s abilities.
Audiard remade American director James Toback’s film Fingers (1978) as De battre mon coeur s’est arrêté (2005; The Beat That My Heart Skipped). Actor Romain Duris won acclaim for his performance as a young man torn between following either his father (Niels Arestrup) into the shady fringes of the real-estate business or his dead mother as a concert pianist. Audiard’s 2009 film Un Prophète (A Prophet) is a gangster drama about a young Arab convict (Tahar Rahim) who falls in with the leader (Arestrup) of a Corsican prison gang. The story of the young man’s rise under the gangster’s tutelage led many critics to compare Un Prophète favorably to classics of the genre, particularly Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972). Un Prophète was nominated for an Academy Award for best foreign-language film and for 13 César Awards.
Audiard subsequently directed the gritty love story De rouille et d’os (2012; Rust and Bone), which starred Marion Cotillard as an orca trainer struggling to recover from the loss of her legs in a gruesome occupational accident. Dheepan (2015), which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival, tells the story of a former Tamil Tiger who immigrates to France. In 2018 Audiard helmed Les Frères Sisters (The Sisters Brothers), a crime comedy set in the American West during the 1850s.
In 2020 Audiard directed two episodes of the French espionage TV show Le bureau des légendes (The Bureau). He returned to the big screen with Les Olympiades (2021; Paris, 13th District), a subtle, observational love story shot mostly in black and white. In 2024 Audiard released Emilia Pérez, starring Zoe Saldana as a lawyer helping a Mexican drug cartel boss (Karla Sofía Gascón) obtain gender-affirming surgery.
