Yann Samuell

His first feature-length film, LOVE ME IF YOU DARE (2003), featured Guillaume Canet and Marion Cotillard. The film was an immediate international success and went on to become the most widely distributed French movie. It was remade numerous times, turned into novels, and adapted for the theater and for a live musical comedy on Broadway. This success opened the doors of Hollywood, where he made MY SASSY GIRL in 2007 with Elisha Cuthbert. He returned to France with WITH LOVE…FROM THE AGE OF REASON (2010), in which Sophie Marceau has to keep the promises she made as a child. Yann Samuell returned to the mainstream with his adaptation of WAR OF THE BUTTONS (2011). Next came two ghost movies, with the American-British THE GREAT GHOST RESCUE and an adaptation of the Oscar Wilde story THE CANTERVILLE GHOST (2016), with Audrey Fleurot, Mickael Youn, and Michelle Laroque.

“I like the nature of childhood, the ability of children to redefine themselves, whatever the circumstances. As in The Night of the Hunter, they overcome adversity and are able to reset the counters. Also, as I was writing, I was scouting and I realised why I felt so appealed by this film: there is a famous shot of a child perched on a tank during the Liberation of Paris in August 1944, and it happens to be my father, who had just died. I realised that this film was a way of paying tribute to him. [...] In my eyes, war is a situation of decay where you lose loved ones, material goods, but also hope, convictions and ambitions for the future. What interested me in my approach was that the children in the film, who are orphans and have nothing, go the other way round: the further they move on, the more they grow. They find their own image of mother, father, grandfather and big brother in the course of their encounters, and I wanted them to come out of the war as winners.”