Director Jean-Pierre AMÉRIS met with ESRA students at the ESRA ESRA Thursdays on March 11, 2021.
Jean-Pierre AMÉRIS began to appreciate the cinema in his teens, and movie theaters are for him a shelter in which to hide and escape. A victim of social phobia and excessive shyness, he loves great stories and the vicarious life offered by cinema. He wanted to film the living to keep a trace of it, and bought himself a camera to film his grandparents. Jean-Pierre AMÉRIS made a number of amateur films during his teenage years and went on to train at the CLCF. At the same time, he wrote a short film which he self-financed and submitted to a Lyon-based production company. He then went on to study at IDHEC, where he was exposed to the various film professions and acquired more technical skills. His short film Interim won the Grand Prix at the Clermont Ferrand Festival in 1987, and in 1992 he directed his first feature film , Le Bateau de mariage.
Gifted with great sensitivity and empathy for the human race, her films have taken her to different environments, such as a palliative care center, a prison, or working with nuns to help them find their way. Marie Heurtin which he discussed with students. After 7 years of writing and research, he encountered difficulties finding funding for this film, which tells the story of a young girl who is deaf and blind from birth. Jean-Pierre AMÉRIS likes to feed his fiction with reality, but without the desire to make documentaries.
The director also spoke to the students about casting his films and the spark he needs when meeting an actor. For Les Émotifs Anonymeshe followed his intuition and immediately felt that Benoît Poelvoorde was the right person for the role. For him, the relationship and trust between the director and the actor is paramount: there has to be a desire to be filmed and to let himself be filmed. Jean-Pierre AMÉRIS takes great pleasure in choosing the costumes; he feels more like a director than an author, needing to imagine the scenes and see how they will unfold.
