60 Fun Facts About Jean Renoir

Which Impressionist painter was the director's father?

Jean and his brothers posed for many of their father's canvases, and he later sold inherited paintings to fund his silent films.

In which Paris district was Jean Renoir born in 1894?

His nanny Gabrielle took him to the Guignol puppet shows there, an influence he credited for teaching him to detest cliché.

Which two Renoir films are most often cited as among the greatest films ever made?

He was ranked fourth greatest director in the BFI's 2002 Sight & Sound poll.

Who raised the young Renoir and introduced him to puppet shows and early cinema?

He ended his 1974 memoir with the words he had often spoken as a child: 'Wait for me, Gabrielle.'

What role did Renoir take on in World War I after being wounded in the leg?

Recuperating with his leg raised, he watched Chaplin and Griffith films and fell for the cinema; the injury left him a permanent limp.

What craft did Renoir try after the war, at his father's suggestion?

Some of his ceramics were bought by Albert Barnes and sit beneath his father's paintings at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.

Renoir claimed he took up filmmaking to make a star of whom?

Hessling had been his father's last model; she starred in most of his nine silent films.

Which director's work particularly inspired the young Renoir?

He later cast his hero as the German commandant von Rauffenstein in La Grande Illusion.

How many silent films did Renoir direct, beginning with Catherine in 1924?

They lost money, and he gradually sold paintings inherited from his father to finance them.

Renoir's 1926 silent film Nana was based on a novel by which author?

He returned to the same novelist in 1938 for La Bête Humaine.

What were Renoir's first two sound films, both released in 1931?

La Chienne was later remade in Hollywood by Fritz Lang as Scarlet Street.

Which actor played the tramp Boudu in Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932)?

Renoir changed the play's ending so Boudu escapes marriage and floats off to vagrant freedom, angering the playwright René Fauchois.

From which Paris bridge does Boudu leap into the Seine?

A bourgeois bookseller fishes him out and tries to reform him with disastrous results.

Which 1986 American comedy remade Boudu Saved from Drowning?

Paul Mazursky directed it; a French remake with Gérard Depardieu followed in 2005.

Renoir's 1935 film Toni was notable for what practice that later influenced the New Wave?

Some accounts claim Luchino Visconti worked as an assistant on it, though that is disputed.

Which political movement were Renoir's mid-1930s films associated with?

The Crime of Monsieur Lange, Life Belongs to Us and La Marseillaise all reflect its politics.

The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936) centres on what kind of workplace?

Lange writes Western stories about Arizona Jim; when the crooked owner returns, Lange shoots him to save the cooperative.

Renoir's The Lower Depths (1936) was based on a play by which Russian writer?

It won the very first Louis Delluc Prize in 1937; Kurosawa filmed the same play in 1957.

Which award did The Lower Depths win in 1937, the first ever given?

The National Board of Review also placed it among its top ten foreign films that year.

Which two stars headline La Grande Illusion (1937)?

Stroheim, though Vienna-born, had lived in the US since 1909 and needed a dialect coach for his German lines.

What is the setting of La Grande Illusion?

It is a war film with no battle scenes; the aristocrats Boëldieu and Rauffenstein bond across enemy lines.

What did La Grande Illusion achieve at the 1939 Academy Awards?

It lost to You Can't Take It with You, but the nomination was unprecedented.

Which Nazi minister branded La Grande Illusion 'Cinematic Public Enemy No. 1'?

He ordered prints seized, and Vichy France banned the film in 1940 'for the duration of hostilities'.

The title La Grande Illusion comes from a 1909 book by which British journalist?

The Great Illusion argued that war was futile because Europe's economies were so intertwined.

Which Alsace castle stood in for the mountain fortress Wintersborn in La Grande Illusion?

Other exteriors used the artillery barracks at Colmar and Neuf-Brisach on the Upper Rhine.

Which real WWI pilot, who saved Renoir's life in 1915, inspired La Grande Illusion?

Pinsard was shot down, captured and escaped from German camps seven times each, as he told Renoir during the making of Toni.

Renoir's La Bête Humaine (1938) starred Jean Gabin alongside which actress?

The film is often seen as a forerunner of film noir; Fritz Lang remade the story as Human Desire in 1954.

What is Gabin's character Lantier's job in La Bête Humaine?

The train itself is treated almost as a main character; the story unfolds around Le Havre station.

Which character did Renoir himself play in The Rules of the Game (1939)?

His Octave delivers the famous line that 'everyone has his reasons'.

How was The Rules of the Game received at its 1939 Paris premiere?

He cut it from 113 to 85 minutes without success, and the government banned it weeks after war broke out.

What happened to the original negative of The Rules of the Game?

Enthusiasts Jean Gaborit and Jacques Durand reconstructed a near-complete version in the 1950s with Renoir's help.

What was the original budget of The Rules of the Game, then France's most expensive film?

Costs eventually passed 5 million; Renoir and cinematographer Jean Bachelet used deep focus and constantly moving cameras.

Where were the country exteriors of The Rules of the Game filmed?

Renoir chose it because his father had regretted never being able to paint the region.

Which future famous photographer assisted Renoir on The Rules of the Game?

Renoir's son Alain was an assistant camera operator and Dido Freire, his future wife, was script girl.

How does the aviator André Jurieux die at the end of The Rules of the Game?

He is wearing Octave's borrowed overcoat when Schumacher fires.

With whom did Renoir share a cabin on the ship from Lisbon to America in 1940?

He and Dido Freire had travelled from Marseille via Algeria, Morocco and Lisbon to escape the German invasion.

What was Renoir's first American film, released in 1941?

Shot on location in Georgia's Okefenokee Swamp, it starred Walter Brennan and Dana Andrews.

For which film did Renoir receive his only Academy Award nomination for directing?

The story of a poor family starting a Texas cotton farm was his biggest American success.

Which stars led Renoir's anti-Nazi film This Land Is Mine (1943)?

It won the Academy Award for Best Sound Recording.

Renoir's The River (1951) was shot in which country?

Filmed in Calcutta in Technicolor, it was his first colour film; a young Satyajit Ray sought him out for guidance.

The River was adapted from a novel by which author?

The film won the International Prize at Venice in 1951.

Which nephew of the director photographed The River?

The son of actor Pierre Renoir went on to shoot Barbarella and the Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me.

Which actress starred in The Golden Coach (1952)?

Truffaut named his production company Les Films du Carrosse after the film.

The Golden Coach follows a commedia dell'arte troupe in which country?

It was adapted from Mérimée's play about a viceroy's coach and set to Vivaldi.

What milestone did the 1955 musical French Cancan mark for Renoir?

The story of a Montmartre impresario launching a cabaret evokes Degas and Renoir's own father.

Elena and Her Men was Ingrid Bergman's first film after leaving which husband?

Its General Rollan was modelled on the real General Boulanger of the 1880s.

Where was Picnic on the Grass (1959) filmed?

Renoir made it and Doctor Cordelier the same year using techniques borrowed from live television.

The Testament of Doctor Cordelier (1959) retells which classic novella in 1950s France?

Jean-Louis Barrault plays both Cordelier and his alter ego Opale.

What honour did Renoir receive from the Academy in 1975?

The same year France made him a commander of the Légion d'honneur and London's National Film Theatre held a retrospective.

Where is Jean Renoir buried?

He died of a heart attack in Beverly Hills in 1979 and was returned to lie beside his family.

Renoir's brother Pierre was the first actor to play which detective on screen?

Pierre Renoir was a noted stage and film actor; his son Claude became Jean's cinematographer.

Which director wrote 'Jean Renoir: The Greatest of All Directors' on his death in 1979?

Robert Altman said simply that he 'learned the rules of the game from The Rules of the Game'.

What was the title of Renoir's 1974 memoir?

He ended the book with the words he often spoke as a child: 'Wait for me, Gabrielle.'

Who was Renoir's second wife, with whom he fled to the United States in 1940?

She had accompanied him to Rome in 1939 to work on a planned film of Tosca.

In which city was Renoir teaching film in 1939, working on a version of Tosca?

He taught at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia; France hoped the exchange would keep Italy friendly.

Renoir's 1946 Hollywood film Diary of a Chambermaid was adapted from a novel by whom?

It starred Paulette Goddard and Burgess Meredith, and was one of his last two American films.

Renoir's son Alain became a professor of medieval English literature at which university?

The same university gave Renoir an honorary doctorate in fine arts in 1963.

Which 1970 release, a set of three short films, was the director's last?

It is regarded as one of his most challenging and avant-garde works.

Where did Renoir rank in the 2002 Sight & Sound poll of the greatest directors?

The BFI poll placed him among the very top of world cinema alongside his lifetime achievement Oscar.

Renoir's penultimate film, The Elusive Corporal (1962), is set among French POWs in which war?

Starring Jean-Pierre Cassel and Claude Brasseur, it explores the twin needs for freedom and security.