The lighter side of dark

French filmmaker Patrice Leconte doesn’t have a best friend. And that suits him just fine.

“I have very good friends,” says the 59-year-old writer-director of such films as “Ridicule,” “The Hairdresser’s Husband” and “Intimate Strangers.” “I realize that perhaps you can live without one person as long as you have other friends.”

The nature of friendship has been an integral theme in Leconte’s movies.

“It’s really the relationship between people that interests me and nourishes my thinking about films,” the convivial Leconte says, through a translator. “I don’t need to feel like I need to teach anybody anything or give lessons or any kind of morals. It is more about exploration.”

In his new film, the charming comedy-drama “My Best Friend,” which opens Friday, Leconte explores the relationship between two lonely men who become the most unlikely of friends.

Daniel Auteuil, who appeared in Leconte’s “Girl on the Bridge” and “The Widow of St. Pierre,” plays Francois, a divorced, middle-aged Parisian antiques dealer who lives in a swank apartment and seems to have a great life. But he’s absolutely clueless that he’s so arrogant, pompous and demanding that he has no friends.

One evening at dinner with associates and acquaintances, his business partner makes him a bet that if he can’t produce a best friend within 10 days, she’ll keep a beautiful Greek vase he acquired. Francois accepts the wager but quickly learns that people he thought were friends hate him.

Enter Bruno (Dany Boon), a jovial, trivia-loving cab driver whom Francois keeps encountering on his excursions through Paris. Observing Bruno’s personable nature with his passengers, Francois asks the man to teach him how to make friends, or what Bruno declares the “three S’s” -- to be sociable, smiling and sincere. But Francois soon learns that Bruno is just as friendless as he is.

Leconte explains over two double espressos and glasses of grapefruit juice at the Chateau Marmont courtyard that he’s made a decision at this point in his career to veer away from serious films: “My intent is to keep making films that have the appearance of lightness and yet be about something that is deeper, to talk about serious things without taking myself too seriously.”

Leconte, whose films have included comedy, dramas, thrillers, film noirs and period pieces, says he arrived at this decision because the world in general is not all that “rosy,” and there’s a tendency in films “to bring people down and hold their head under water. I feel like I want to do the opposite and lift people up.”

That wasn’t the case when he was younger. “I had a taste for the darker side of things,” he says with a smile. “But now I have lost that appetite. Having a light approach to life does not mean that you are oblivious to the world.”

Screenwriter Olivier Dazat sent Leconte “My Best Friend” as a possible project to direct.

“I adored the idea of the script,” Leconte says. But he liked only the beginning of the screenplay because the second half didn’t have the humanistic dimension he prefers.

“I asked if I could keep the beginning and modify the rest,” Leconte says. With Dazat’s blessings, Leconte and his co-writer, Jerome Tonnerre, began drafting a new script.

The end result is a rich combination of laughs and pathos.

Though Francois and Bruno are trapped in their own fortresses of solitude, Leconte sees Francois as the more tragic character “because he lives in the world of his own construction and he’s barred everybody out.” In addition, being an antiques dealer, “he’s under the impression that everything has a price and can be bought, including people. That’s very dangerous.”

Leconte believes the world is filled with Francoises and Brunos who have lost the true meaning of friendship.

“You only have so many hours, and our lives consume so much -- to have a friendship, you have to put time aside,” he says.

“Time is the thing that slips away from our fingers more and more because of the craziness of our life,” he adds. “That is something that actually scares me.”

susan.king@latimes.com