Patrice Leconte

Patrice Leconte
Patrice Leconte in 2011
Born	(1947-11-12) 12 November 1947 Paris, France
Occupation	Film director, actor, screenwriter
Years active	1976–present

Patrice Leconte (French: [ləkɔ̃t]; born 12 November 1947) is a French film director, actor, comic strip writer, and screenwriter.

Life and career

Leconte grew up in Tours, and began making little amateur films at 15. He went to Paris in 1967 and studied at Institut des hautes études cinématographiques. While attending film school in the late 1960s, Leconte also worked as cartoonist, in particular for the Franco-Belgian comics magazine Pilote. He directed his first feature film in 1976, and had a number of major successes with comedy films that were barely distributed outside France. He first came to international attention in 1989 with Monsieur Hire, which was shown at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival^[1] and which was a radical departure from his previous work. Although he had already directed more than half a dozen features, many foreign critics, unfamiliar with his previous work, essentially treated him as a newcomer. Since then, he has alternated between films such as Ridicule and L'homme du train which have had success in the international arthouse market, and others, like Les Grands Ducs, whose appeal has been limited to France.

In the 2000s, Patrice Leconte received more recognition in the United States with the successful United States releases of Girl on the Bridge, The Widow of Saint-Pierre, Man on the Train and Intimate Strangers (Paramount Classics released three of these films in the United States^[2]). Ryan Mottesheard of IndieWIRE wrote: "you could even argue that no other foreign filmmaker (INCLUDING Pedro Almodóvar) has had as strong of an impact on United States arthouses."^[3]

An English language remake of Leconte's film Man on the Train was remade by an independent Hollywood studio in 2011, and two others are in 'development': Intimate Strangers and My Best Friend.^[4]

Patrice Leconte's film, The Suicide Shop, was screened at the Newport Beach Film Festival in Newport Beach, California, on April 28 and May 2, 2013.^[5]

Director

Notes

• Lisa Downing, Patrice Leconte (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004)

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Patrice Leconte.

• Patrice Leconte at the Internet Movie Database
• Patrice Leconte at Allmovie
• Short bio
• Interview with Patrice Leconte on The Widow of St. Pierre

César Award for Best Director
	1976 Bertrand Tavernier 1977 Joseph Losey 1978 Alain Resnais 1979 Christian de Chalonge 1980 Roman Polanski 1981 François Truffaut 1982 Jean-Jacques Annaud 1983 Andrzej Wajda 1984 Ettore Scola 1985 Claude Zidi 1986 Michel Deville 1987 Alain Cavalier 1988 Louis Malle 1989 Jean-Jacques Annaud 1990 Bertrand Blier 1991 Jean-Paul Rappeneau 1992 Alain Corneau 1993 Claude Sautet 1994 Alain Resnais 1995 André Téchiné 1996 Claude Sautet 1997 Patrice Leconte / Bertrand Tavernier 1998 Luc Besson 1999 Patrice Chéreau 2000 Tonie Marshall 2001 Dominik Moll 2002 Jean-Pierre Jeunet 2003 Roman Polanski 2004 Denys Arcand 2005 Abdellatif Kechiche 2006 Jacques Audiard 2007 Guillaume Canet 2008 Abdellatif Kechiche 2009 Jean-François Richet 2010 Jacques Audiard 2011 Roman Polanski 2012 Michel Hazanavicius 2013 Michael Haneke 2014 Roman Polanski 2015 Abderrahmane Sissako 2016 Arnaud Desplechin