"THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN" An interview with Jean-Pierre Jeunet & Marc Caro

The success of their surreal French comedy, Delicatessen in 1991, enabled Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro to afford their dream of making The City of Lost Children, which they had written fourteen years previously. Filmed in the summer of 1994, The City of Lost Children cost $14 million dollars to produce, making it the most expensive movie to come out of France at that time.

In an interview with PREMIERE Magazine, September1995, Jeunet and Caro described their rather unique way of working together. Here are some excerpts from that interview.

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After half an hour of getting your leg pulled by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, the French duo behind the surreal comedy Delicatessen, you realise that the possibility of wringing out a straight answer is about as likely as them collaborating with Merchant Ivory on a portrait of repressed sexuality and whippet-racing in 1920's Blackburn. They're slippery, they're irreverent, one of them is bald. Welcome, fearless ones, to the very peculiar sphere of Jeunet and Caro.

The thing is, they don't look that peculiar. They're here in London to promote their new film, a part-whimsical, part-apocalyptic fable called The City of Lost Children.

But can these ordinary-looking chaps really be the same men who, in just two films, have fashioned an entire new world patrolled by militaristic Cyclops, vegetarian freedom-fighters, giggling clones, and psychopathic butchers? They look like the sort of people who would scoff at such trifles. The towering Jean-Pierre Jeunet, for instance, could indeed be your bank manager, with his fortnight-in-Portugal tan. Opposite him sits Marc Caro, minus hair, dressed head to toe in black.

Jeunet assigns himself to directing and co-writing duties while Caro also works on the screenplay, as well as designing the films. The ideas, characters and even emotions are plucked from a box into which the pair deposit scribbled notes whenever they feel the urge. Some of those are absorbed into the script, others are left on the bottom of the box to fester, perhaps to be used in a future project. It's Caro's job to storyboard every single shot - the storyboards alone for The City of Lost Children took three months, and Jeunet and Caro's mutual understanding was, as ever, pivotal in its development.

"Once the script is written," Jeunet explains, "I go through the scenes one by one. But if it gets too complicated, Marc helps me out by sketching what I mean to say. It's better that we know each other this well because I have to rely on him to sketch what is in my head."

"What is in my head." It sounds so vague. Unless you've seen Jeunet and Caro work, in which case you'll know that "what is in their heads" would make Lewis Caroll look like a shop steward whose only dream is to win the lottery and settle down with his fiancée Beryl. When Delicatessen was released in 1991, it turned all prejudices about European cinema upside-down. It was like a live-action comic-strip, fizzling with ideas, a welcome gust of fresh air into an area of cinema (arthouse) often condemned for its elitism.

The City of Lost Children doesn't trade quite so enthusiastically in its predecessor's batty excesses. That, Caro stresses, is because the first film was a comedy, whereas this is a fairy tale. It concerns Krank, a sad old man who has no dreams of his own and has resorted to kidnapping young 'uns and trying to empty theirs into his own skull. I recognise a progression here - , two men, creeping towards middle-age and wading through their darker preoccupations, forsaking the frivolity of their debut for something more sober. But Caro's got an answer to that one.

"It was actually written 14 years ago, but it was too expensive for us to make. So we wrote another script which was too black and also too expensive. Then finally we wrote Delicatessen, and the success of that enabled us to get the money together for this."

"We have our own producer," Jeunet adds, "which is a good thing. If we were to actully meet the financers ourselves, we'd probably whack them across the face. It would be a bit disturbing." He smiles wickedly.

Whether the progression is chronological or not, the film certainly feels more conscientious - a step closer to the real world. Do dreams represent an unattainable innocence?

"Absolutely," Caro agrees. "The children are a symbol of innocence in the film. And you do keep your innocence if you dream."

In the closing stages of this interview Caro admits, "Our universe is rather bizarre and strange. Everything in it - actors, decoration - has to fit. It's a question of taste.