Jean Renoir Trivia
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60 free Jean Renoir trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Jean Renoir trivia quiz covers the whole career of the French director many critics call the greatest of all: the painter's son from Montmartre, the wounded pilot who fell for cinema, the silent films made for Catherine Hessling, and the 1930s masterpieces — Boudu, Toni, Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, La Grande Illusion, La Bête Humaine and The Rules of the Game. It follows him into Hollywood exile with Swamp Water, This Land Is Mine and The Southerner, then to India for The River and back to Europe for The Golden Coach, French Cancan and Elena and Her Men, ending with his honorary Oscar and burial at Essoyes. Along the way you will meet Gabin, Stroheim, Michel Simon, Anna Magnani, Ingrid Bergman, Goebbels's ban and the negative that was bombed. Questions run from easy to expert with the difficulty shown on each one. Every answer has been checked against a primary reference and each question carries its citation. Fans of classic cinema may also enjoy our French Cinema and Film Directors quizzes.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Jean Renoir's father, who often painted him as a child, was a leading figure of which art movement?
Impressionism
Impressionism. Pierre-Auguste Renoir so loved painting his son's long golden hair that he kept it uncut until Jean was seven, to the boy's embarrassment.
Q 02In which Paris district was Jean Renoir born in 1894?
Montmartre
Montmartre. As a small boy he was taken to Guignol, France's answer to Punch and Judy, and the puppet shows left a lasting mark on his films.
Q 03Which US president said everyone who believes in democracy should see Renoir's La Grande Illusion?
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt. He saw it at a White House screening arranged for his wife Eleanor's birthday, and the subtitled French film went on to play in New York for months.
Q 04Who took the young Jean Renoir to puppet shows and to his first film?
Gabrielle Renard, his nanny
Gabrielle Renard, his nanny, was his mother's young cousin, hired just before his birth. He closed his memoirs with the cry of his childhood: 'Wait for me, Gabrielle.'
Q 05What role did Renoir take on in World War I after being wounded in the leg?
Reconnaissance pilot
Reconnaissance pilot. He photographed German troop movements until a rough landing aggravated his leg wound and sent him back to Paris, where he passed the time in the cinemas, catching up on Chaplin's films.
Q 06What craft did Jean Renoir take up after World War I, at his father's suggestion?
Ceramics
Ceramics. Albert Barnes, the American collector who amassed his father's canvases, also acquired dozens of Jean's pots, which the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia holds.
Q 07Renoir claimed he took up filmmaking to make a star of whom?
His first wife, Catherine Hessling
His first wife, Catherine Hessling, had been his father's last model. She later insisted she had never wanted to be a film star at all.
Q 08Which silent-era director, the young Renoir's idol, later played the German commandant in La Grande Illusion?
Erich von Stroheim
Erich von Stroheim. He devised the commandant's rigid neck brace himself, and Renoir recalled that the Vienna-born star had to learn his German lines like a foreign language.
Q 09Renoir's 1928 silent film The Little Match Girl adapts a tale by which writer?
Hans Christian Andersen
Hans Christian Andersen. Renoir's freezing match seller dreams herself into a toy-shop window, and the petals that fall on her at the end turn out to be snow.
Q 10Renoir's 1926 silent film Nana was based on a novel by which author?
Émile Zola
Émile Zola. The lavish film flopped, and Renoir had to sell paintings left to him by his father to pay the debts, yet he came back to Zola in 1938 for La Bête Humaine.
Q 11Which director remade Renoir's La Chienne in Hollywood as the 1945 film noir Scarlet Street?
Fritz Lang
Fritz Lang. Nine years later he did it again, filming the novel behind another Renoir picture, La Bête Humaine, as Human Desire.
Q 12Which actor played the tramp Boudu in Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932)?
Michel Simon
Michel Simon had played Boudu on stage in 1925. Set on bringing the tramp to the screen, he helped pay for the film himself and is credited as its producer.
Q 13Renoir's 1938 epic La Marseillaise dramatises the early years of which upheaval?
The French Revolution
The French Revolution. The film follows 500 Marseille volunteers marching to Paris with the song that became the anthem, and trade unions helped pay for it by public subscription.
Q 21At the end of La Grande Illusion, the fugitives Maréchal and Rosenthal cross the snow into which country?
Switzerland
Switzerland. A German patrol opens fire, then lowers its guns: the two specks in the snow have already crossed a border that, as Rosenthal says, nature cannot see.
Q 22La Grande Illusion became the first foreign-language film ever nominated for which Academy Award?
Best Picture
Best Picture. It lost to Frank Capra's You Can't Take It with You, and at Venice in 1937 Fascist pressure had kept it from the top prize, the Mussolini Cup, leaving it the award for best artistic ensemble.
Q 23Which Nazi minister branded La Grande Illusion 'Cinematic Public Enemy No. 1'?
Joseph Goebbels
Q 14Which 1986 American comedy remade Boudu Saved from Drowning?
Down and Out in Beverly Hills
Down and Out in Beverly Hills. Paul Mazursky swapped the Seine for a swimming pool: Nick Nolte's drifter tries to drown himself in a rich family's backyard.
Q 15Renoir's 1935 Toni, shot on location with untrained actors, is widely seen as a forerunner of which movement?
Neorealism
Neorealism. Renoir filmed the true story of immigrant quarry workers near Martigues in Provence, close to where it happened, years before Italy's postwar directors took the same approach.
Q 16Which political movement were Jean Renoir's mid-1930s films associated with?
The Popular Front
The Popular Front. Renoir supervised Life Belongs to Us, the Communist Party's campaign film for the 1936 elections that brought the left-wing coalition to power.
Q 17In The Crime of Monsieur Lange, a writer of Western stories and his workmates form a cooperative running what kind of business?
A publishing house
A publishing house, which thrives on Lange's tales of the cowboy Arizona Jim once its crooked boss vanishes. The film's stills photographer, Dora Maar, met Picasso that winter through the poet Paul Éluard.
Q 18Renoir's The Lower Depths (1936) was based on a play by which Russian writer?
Maxim Gorky
Maxim Gorky. Renoir shot his Russian slum on the banks of the Seine near Paris, from a script co-written by Yevgeny Zamyatin, the exiled author of the dystopian novel We.
Q 19Which Japanese director made his own film of The Lower Depths in 1957, two decades after Renoir's?
Akira Kurosawa
Akira Kurosawa. He moved the play's flophouse from Russia to an Edo-period tenement, with Toshiro Mifune as the thief Jean Gabin had played for Renoir.
Q 20Marcel Dalio, Rosenthal in La Grande Illusion, fled the Nazis and played the croupier in which Hollywood classic?
Casablanca
Casablanca. While Dalio played Emil the croupier in Hollywood, the occupiers back in France put his face on posters as 'a typical Jew'.
Joseph Goebbels. He banned the pacifist film, and as German troops advanced across Europe they had orders to seize its prints and negative.
Q 24Which singer has a cameo in Renoir's French Cancan as the café-concert star Eugénie Buffet?
Édith Piaf
Édith Piaf. Renoir filled his tale of the Moulin Rouge's birth with music-hall stars of his own day playing the legends of the 1890s, with Patachou as Yvette Guilbert.
Q 25Haut-Koenigsbourg, the castle that plays the fortress prison in La Grande Illusion, stands in which French region?
Alsace
Alsace. Kaiser Wilhelm II had the ruined castle rebuilt while the region was under German rule, so Renoir found a ready-made German fortress on French soil.
Q 26Which New Wave director named his production company Les Films du Carrosse after Renoir's The Golden Coach?
François Truffaut
François Truffaut. He called The Golden Coach 'the noblest and most refined film ever made', though it had failed with critics and public alike on its release.
Q 27Which actress, later the star of Hollywood's Cat People, played opposite Jean Gabin in La Bête Humaine?
Simone Simon
Simone Simon. She had come home dissatisfied with her first Hollywood contract when Renoir cast her as Séverine, and found her American fame only on her second try.
Q 28What job does Jean Gabin's character, Jacques Lantier, do in La Bête Humaine?
Railway engine driver
Railway engine driver. The film grew out of Jean Gabin's own wish to play a train driver, and Renoir treats Lantier's locomotive, La Lison, almost as a character.
Q 29In The Rules of the Game, Renoir's character Octave says the awful thing in this world is that everyone has what?
His reasons
His reasons. Renoir spoke the line himself as Octave, and it became the motto of his films, which refuse to sort their characters into heroes and villains.
Q 30How did the audience react at the 1939 Paris premiere of Renoir's The Rules of the Game?
With boos and jeers
With boos and jeers. One spectator even tried to set fire to the cinema with a newspaper, and within months the government had banned the film as demoralising.