Between mind and film

It is rare for a French director to storyboard a whole film -- most use them to draft complicated action sequences, if at all. But Jean-Pierre Jeunet, whose international hit “Amelie” reimagined Paris in a dreamy light and employed unprecedented special effects for a French movie, can’t start shooting until he has a storyboard for every intricate vision in his head.

The man he calls on for that job is Luc Desportes, 38, “le storyboarder” for “Amelie” and Jeunet’s new film “A Very Long Engagement,” an epic love story also starring Audrey Tautou that is set in France during World War I. . One of a handful of working French storyboard artists, Desportes studied painting at Paris’ renowned Ecole des Beaux Arts and met Jeunet while working on advertising campaigns for the French bank BNP.

For “Amelie,” Jeunet walked him around Montmartre to point out building styles and suggest the right shade of orange to edit the color of the Paris sky. For “A Very Long Engagement,” they studied period photographs and puzzled over the right perspectives for scenes involving hundreds of extras in trenches and on battlefields, working mostly in black and white.

The director does his own pre-sketches, and Desportes redraws while they discuss what Jeunet is aiming for in each scene. “It’s my job to translate his vision and make it readable for everyone,” says Desportes. “I want my sketches to be like Herge’s drawings for Tintin -- so clear and obvious that nobody can be mistaken.” Desportes produced some 4,000 sketches over five months.

“Jean-Pierre is very, very, very, very precise,” says Desportes. “He has no notion of what a detail is -- everything is important. And there is nothing that he doesn’t think of beforehand. When the storyboards are done, he’s always very relieved, because it means that his period of reflection is over, and he can begin to build the world that he has dreamed.”