Bruno Delbonnel

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Bruno Delbonnel (2012)

Bruno Delbonnel (* 1957 in Nancy ) is a French cameraman and film director .

biography

childhood and education

Bruno Delbonnel was born in Nancy, in the Meurthe-et-Moselle department in eastern France. At the age of ten, his family moved to the French capital, Paris . Originally, Delbonnel was neither interested in working with the film camera, nor was he enthusiastic about photography . He was fascinated by the biographies of the great painters and dreamed of pursuing a career as an artist himself. However, his wish to attend an art school met with the rejection of his father, who had envisaged a more solid education for his son, such as that of a lawyer . Delbonnel became interested in the film while attending the college . When he was fifteen, his parents gave him an Instamatic camera , which he said he never used to take pictures of people, but mainly landscapes or empty spaces. After graduating from school, Delbonnel began studying philosophy , which he completed at the Sorbonne in Paris , and then studied film studies at a private school . At this time he was mainly influenced by the film directors Ingmar Bergman , Julien Duvivier , Sergei Eisenstein and Federico Fellini , as well as Francis Ford Coppola's films Love Never A Stranger (1969) and The Godfather (1972) and Jerry Schatzberg's Asphalt Blossoms (1973).

Around 1975 Bruno Delbonnel began working on a script for a short film and at the age of 18 received financial state support from the Center national de la cinématographie (CNC) to make it come true. Delbonnel started looking for a film producer and got to know Jean-Pierre Jeunet , who worked for a film production company . It was agreed to produce Delbonnel's film, but on the condition that the work should be shot as an animated film . The young Delbonnel did not agree and went to another producer. Almost six months later, shortly before the state grant was canceled, he succeeded in directing his first short film Réalités rares with Jean-Pierre Jeunet as assistant and the help of cameraman Henri Alekan (1909–2001) . Alekan was one of the most renowned cameramen in France, was responsible for the pictures of Jean Cocteau's Once Upon a Time (1946) as well as for William Wyler's A Heart and a Crown (1953) and was considered a master of black and white film .

Work in the advertising industry

Through Alekan's collaboration, Delbonnel came into contact with camera work and decided to pursue a career as a cameraman. He tried to gain his knowledge from books, but failed the entrance exam at the Paris film school. Delbonnel then began to take lessons in the evening and decided to go to New York in 1980 when the success continued to fail. After six to nine months in the USA, the Frenchman received advice from the cameraman Nestor Almendros to go back to France. Through his stay overseas, Delbonnel had improved his English and back home he got a job as a camera assistant in the advertising industry. According to his own statements, Delbonnel worked in the advertising industry for ten to fifteen years and assisted, among others, the three Oscar- nominated Britons Douglas Slocombe and Gerry Fisher before he could also recommend himself for work in the film. In 1981 he worked as a camera operator for Jean-Pierre Jeunet's and Marc Caro's third short film, Last Burst of Fire in the Bunker . Three years later, Delbonnel was involved in the same position in the shooting of Jeunet's short film Pas de repos pour Billy Brakko . 1986 followed an engagement as the second assistant operator in the production of Jean-Jacques Seeleix 'relationship drama Betty Blue - 37.2 degrees in the morning , which was to be nominated in 1987 (official count 1986) for the Oscar for best foreign language production . After the 80-minute documentary Le Grand cirque (1989), which he directed, Delbonnel was involved in the shooting of François Dupeyron's drama Un coeur qui bat as a camera assistant in 1991 .

Collaboration with Jean-Pierre Jeunet

After ten years as an experienced camera assistant in film, Bruno Delbonnel felt ready to implement his own ideas in camera work and the use of light. In 1993 Delbonnel worked for the first time as a cameraman on Vincent Monnet's 14-minute short film Jour de fauche . In the same year he worked as a cameraman for Jean-Jacques Zilbermann's semi-autobiographical comedy Tout le monde n'a pas eu la chance d'avoir des parents communistes , which was praised by the critics. In the years to come, working on one low-budget film a year alternated with Delbonnel's work in the advertising industry, where he was also able to experiment as a cameraman. The great success in France and internationally did not follow until 2001, when he worked with Jean-Pierre Jeunet on the film The fabulous world of Amélie . Originally won as a substitute for Darius Khondji , he spent three months preparing with Jeunet to film the film, which is about a young waitress (played by Audrey Tautou ) who tries to improve the lives of others in the Montmartre district of Paris . The fairy-tale images in shades of gold and green that Delbonnel created using digital timing technology contributed to the success of the film, which was popular with audiences and critics and worldwide at an estimated 11.4 million euros production costs 140 million US dollars -Dollars grossed. The fabulous world of Amélie has won 49 international film awards, including the French César for Best Film of the Year , two British Academy Film Awards (BAFTA Awards) and five Oscar nominations. Delbonnel himself received the European Film Award , as well as nominations for the César, Oscar, BAFTA Award and the Award of the American Society of Cinematographers .

After working with Peter Bogdanovich ( The Cat's Meow , 2001) and Cédric Klapisch ( Not For, Not Against - There is no back , 2003) Delbonnel worked again with Jean-Pierre Jeunet on the war drama Mathilde - Eine große Liebe , der wieder with Audrey Tautou in the lead role. With 47 million euros one of the most expensive European productions in film history, Jeunet managed to win the praise of the critics again, but not repeat the great financial success of his previous film. Bruno Delbonnel won the César and the prize of the American Society of Cinematographers for the pictures of the First World War, which were dark compared to The fabulous world of Amélie . While Delbonnel had lost out to Australian Andrew Lesnie ( The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring ) three years earlier at the Academy Awards , he had to admit defeat to the American Robert Richardson at the 2005 Academy Awards (official census 2004) , who won for Martin Scorsese's Howard Hughes biography Aviator received the Academy Award.

Artistic advancement

After the successful collaboration with Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Bruno Delbonnel did not appear again until 2006 as a cameraman on the Paris, je t'aime project . In the compilation film , twenty-four international directors, including Tom Tykwer , Gus Van Sant and Walter Salles , take on twenty love stories that are set in the twenty different arrondissements of the French capital. In 2006 Delbonnel went to the USA and worked with director Douglas McGrath on the film Kaltes Blut - In the footsteps of Truman Capote , which, like Bennett Miller's Capote (2005), takes on the legendary research work Truman Capote for his book In Cold Blood. In the same year, the Frenchman was responsible for the pictures of Julie Taylor's musical Across the Universe .

In 2007 a new collaboration with Jean-Pierre Jeunet should follow. 20th Century Fox asked Jeunet to make a film version of Life of Pi based on the successful novel by Yann Martel . The novel, which won the Booker Prize , tells the story of an Indian boy, the son of a zoo owner , who survived a ship disaster and found himself in a lifeboat on the Pacific with a hyena , an orangutan , a zebra and a 450-pound Bengal tiger. According to initial estimates, however, the project turned out to be so expensive that the shooting was initially postponed to 2008, and the cameraman gave preference to the filming of the sixth Harry Potter volume Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009) by David Yates , which earned him another Oscar nomination. Jeunet finally refrained from realizing Life of Pi . The film was finally realized in 2012 by Ang Lee .

Delbonnel's next project also proved successful - the camera work for Faust , a free cinematic interpretation of the tragedy of the same name by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and the novel Dr. Faustus by Thomas Mann. The film by Russian director Alexander Sokurov won the Golden Lion at the 2011 Venice Film Festival . Delbonnel also pursued high artistic standards with his camera work for Inside Llewyn Davis , a musician drama by the Coen brothers set in the 1960s , for which Delbonnel received his fourth Oscar nomination in 2014.

The Frenchman justifies his collaboration with constantly changing and very different directors with his desire for artistic change: “I want to develop myself and try something different.” Delbonnel also speaks of films as “reflections of our lives” (original tone: “reflections de nos vies " ). "They are a different kind of literature that touch us allows people to encourage them to think and to understand our world better" ( "They are another form of literature did Allows us to touch people and make them think and better understand our world " ), So the French.

Filmography (selection)

Awards

Oscar

  • 2002 : Nominated in the Best Camera category for Amélie's fabulous world
  • 2005 : nominated in the category best camera for Mathilde - A great love
  • 2010 : nominated in the Best Camera category for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
  • 2014 : Nominated in the Best Camera category for Inside Llewyn Davis
  • 2018 : nominated in the category Best Camera for The Darkest Hour

British Academy Film Award

  • 2002: Nominated in the Best Camera category for Amélie's fabulous world

César

  • 2002: Nominated in the Best Camera category for Amélie's fabulous world
  • 2005: Best camera for Mathilde - a great love

European film award

  • 2001: Best camera for Amélie's fabulous world
  • 2005 : nominated in the category best camera for Mathilde - A great love
  • 2012 : nominated in the category best camera for Faust

Further

American Society of Cinematographers

  • 2002: Nominated in the Best Camera category for Amélie's fabulous world
  • 2005: Best camera for Mathilde - a great love

Satellite Awards

  • 2005 : nominated in the category best camera for Mathilde - A great love
  • 2007 : nominated in the category Best Camera for Across the Universe

Camerimage

  • 2007: Silver Frog for Across the Universe

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Jean-Pierre Jeunet - Official Site: Life of Pi . Filmography
  2. ^ Katzenberger, Paul: Interview with Bruno Delbonnel . In: Film & TV cameraman . February 20, 2012, pp. 6-12.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Delbonnel, Bruno
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French cameraman
DATE OF BIRTH 1957
PLACE OF BIRTH Nancy , France