Jacques Audiard

After working extensively as a screenwriter since the 1970s, Audiard made his directorial debut with See How They Fall (1994), followed by A Self-Made Hero (1996) and Read My Lips (2001). His drama The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005) was seen as his breakout film, earning him a BAFTA Award and his first César trifecta, followed by a second for the prison crime drama A Prophet (2009), which earned a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. After Dheepan (2015), mostly in Tamil language and which won him Cannes' Palme d'Or, he made his English-language debut with the western The Sisters Brothers (2018) and his Spanish-language debut with the musical Emilia Pérez (2024), which won Golden Globes for Best Musical or Comedy and Best Non-English Language Film, and also earned Audiard an Academy Award for Best Original Song (for "El Mal") along with three nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay.

Audiard was born in Paris, the son of Marie-Christine Guibert and Michel Audiard, who was a film director and screenwriter. He began his screenwriting career in the 1980s with films including Réveillon chez Bob!, Mortelle randonnée, Baxter, Fréquence Meurtre, and Saxo.

In 1994, he directed See How They Fall (French: Regarde les hommes tomber), a road movie starring Mathieu Kassovitz and Jean-Louis Trintignant. The film won the César Award for best first film and the Prix Georges-Sadoul. Two years later he reunited with Kassovitz and Trintignant for Un Héros Très Discret – A Self-Made Hero in English, adapted from the novel by Jean-François Deniau. In 1996, A Self-Made Hero won the Best Screenplay Award at Cannes and received six César Awards nominations. In 2002, Read My Lips was nominated for nine Césars and won three, for Best Actress (Emmanuelle Devos), Best Screenplay and Best Sound. His fourth movie, De Battre Mon Cœur s'est Arrêté, received 10 nominations at the Césars and won eight, among them the Césars for Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Film Music and Best Cinematography. He has won both the César Award for Best Film and the BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language twice, in 2005 for The Beat That My Heart Skipped and in 2010 for A Prophet, as well as winning the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival. In 2009, A Prophet won the Grand Prix at Cannes and the BAFTA award for Best Film Not in the English Language, and was nominated for 13 César Awards, winning nine: Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor and Most Promising Actor for Tahar Rahim, Best Supporting Actor for Niels Arestrup, Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Editing and Best Production Design. His 2012 film Rust and Bone competed for the Palme d'Or at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language and the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and won the BFI London Film Festival Award for Best Film. In 2015, his seventh movie, Dheepan won the Palme d'Or at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival. Audiard is one of the first filmmakers to participate in LaCinetek's project, a streaming platform where the films are curated exclusively from lists of favorites by acclaimed directors. Published on the platform's launch day, his list of 61 films notably includes Charlie Chaplin's series of comedies from both Essanay Studios and Keystone Studios. He has released some music videos, among them Comme Elle Vient by Noir Désir in which all the actors were deaf-mute and interpreted the lyrics of the song in sign language. The beginning of the feature (a sequence with subtitles) created a minor scandal; it displayed three women discussing politics who come to the conclusion that "it is better to be deaf than to listen to that". On 2 September 2018, his first English language American film The Sisters Brothers had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. In 2022, a five episode special about Audiard's pre-production process was released by Télérama. It was revealed that Audiard was in development of a script adaptation of the opera libretto Emilia Pérez, this would mark the first time Audiard has written a film alone. Filming began in the summer of 2023 with Selena Gomez and Zoe Saldaña. The film premiere at the 77th Cannes Film Festival on May 18, 2024. It later won the Jury Prize, and its female ensemble won the Best Actress award at the festival. It went on to be selected as the French entry for Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards.

Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez faced significant criticism for its portrayal of Mexico. The film, a Spanish-language musical set in Mexico, was shot entirely in a studio near Paris with a predominantly non-Mexican cast and crew. Many Mexican audiences and critics found its depiction of their country stereotypical, reducing it to a landscape of violence, drug cartels, and gangsters, while using the real-life crisis of missing persons as a backdrop for musical numbers. Héctor Guillén labeled the film a “racist Eurocentrist mockery,” even calling on the Academy to take note of Mexico’s disapproval. In response, Mexican trans filmmaker Camila Aurora created Johanne Sacreblu, a parody that exaggerated French stereotypes, as a form of critique. Initially, Audiard seemed dismissive of the backlash, stating, “I didn’t study [Mexico] much. What I needed to know I already knew a little bit”. However, at a press conference in Mexico, he later apologized, acknowledging the concerns. The controversy deepened on August 21, 2024, when Audiard stated in an interview with Konbini, a French digital media platform, that “Spanish is a language of emerging, developing countries, of modest people, of the poor, and of migrants”. Following further criticism, the director attempted to clarify his remarks, claiming they had been taken out of context and did not reflect his appreciation for the Spanish language or the cultures that speak it.