theartsdesk Masterclass: Jean-Pierre Jeunet on Micmacs

"I like directors whose style you recognise right away: Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, Emir Kusturica, David Lynch," asserts Jean-Pierre Jeunet, a statement which should surprise none of his followers. Fabled for its attention to minutiae, his work is honed down to the last millimetre, from the immaculately choreographed sight gags to the hyperstylised sets. Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children (both co-directed with Marc Caro), Amelie, A Very Long Engagement, even Jeunet's Stygian contribution to the Alien franchise, are instantly, unmistakably recognisable as his. "If a certain detail isn't in the perfect place, a sequence doesn't work," he says.

Jeunet, 56, grew up in Nancy, a provincial town in Eastern France, and was an only child until the age of 11: "I was a little solitary," says the director, who apparently displayed a keen business acumen at an early age. "When I was eight, I put on little shows and made my parents pay to see them. I had a very precocious sense of vocation." The son of a telephone engineer, he followed his father for four years as an unskilled worker, "drilling holes in walls and soldering wires. But with my first pay packet, I bought a Super-8mm camera." In 1974 he moved to Paris, where he lives today in Montmartre.

Drawing on sources from comic books to silent cinema, video games to French poetic realism, Jeunet's work displays a spectacularly eclectic mix of influences. His biggest popular hit, Amelie, also had its detractors, who tasted in it an excess of saccharine nostalgia, but his new film, Micmacs, marries the director's trademark retro sensibility to a sharper, more contemporary story premise. Dany Boon (pictured right) plays the main character, a man whose father dies in a land mine explosion and then himself ends up with a bullet in his brain after a freak drive-by shooting. Homeless and jobless, he falls in with the Micmacs, a rag-tag band of seven comical eccentrics - a female contortionist, an African ethnographer, an ex-con, a human cannonball and so on. With them he plans an elaborate revenge on the two nefarious arms manufacturers who are the authors of his misfortune.

Jeunet now reveals some of his secrets in the second of our series of masterclasses, following Jacques Audiard's dissection of A Prophet last month. In the first extract under discussion, Boon enters the Micmacs' extraordinary underground lair, a cornucopia of bric-à-brac that's a visual summation of Jeunet's own magpie working methods, and meets the gang for the first time.

Jeunet: "Rather than have these people living in a house, it seemed funnier to me that they would build a sort of cave apart from the rest of the world. They're on the fringes of society, a bit vulnerable, and so they've created a surrogate family in this cocoon hollowed out inside a heap of scrap metal. It was a crazy idea because it was very expensive to put together and I risked alienating some of the audience who might have been expecting something more realistic. The little moving sculptures are by Gilbert Peyre, an artist whose work I'd discovered at the Halle Saint Pierre in Montmartre. I contacted him and he agreed to lend us four of his works for the film.

"I always start by drawing up a storyboard - it's a very useful tool for exploring ideas. Picasso did 150 sketches before he painted Guernica - and I'm not a genius like Picasso. A lot of directors say that a storyboard freezes you into a certain concept, but I tell you: the people who say that are lazy. I believe in a lot of preparatory work - which doesn't stop me from changing everything if at the last minute something comes up or an actor suggests something. I've got no problem with that; on the contrary I adore it.

"Then I do something I think is quite unusual: I spend a weekend filming that storyboard on locations with doubles on my little camcorder. I do a sort of rough edit and see what works and what doesn't. On Micmacs I did something else for the first time on location: I had a guy editing the footage on his computer as we went along. We watched it every evening and I could see then what was missing - for the first time I didn't have to go back later. On previous films I usually had to have a couple of days of re-takes.

"My previous cinematographer, Bruno Delbonnel, was busy on Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - he's just been nominated for an Oscar for it. So I hired Tetsuo Nagata, with whom I'd just shot the Chanel No 5 commercials. with Audrey Tautou. He's my third Director of Photography [Jeunet previously worked with Darius Khondji]. But I have a very clear idea of how I want my films to look and so the result is essentially the same.

"I got my love of wide-angle lenses from Sergio Leone, and also a bit from Stanley Kubrick. I'll never stop using them. The short focal-length lens has more personality, style, movement. It brings a energy in front of the camera: all the perspectives are constantly shifting, you can see the whole set in the background and there's a greater depth of field. In fact I can't stand normal or long focal-length lenses now; I'm deeply bored by them. The long focal-length lens to me means a non-style à l'américaine, although Ridley Scott uses it very well indeed."

In the second clip, two cars bearing the sundry bad guys roar through an northern arrondissement of Paris along the historic Canal de L'Ourcq while the Micmacs prepare an elaborate ambush.

Jeunet: "It was very difficult not to lose sight of the action in this sequence, and I made one major mistake: the cars are both the same colour. I should have made them different colours so that the viewer could tell them apart more easily. But these kinds of characters always have either black or grey cars, so it would looked a bit silly to make one of them yellow.

"I had real trouble finding a spot in Paris with two bridges and everything I needed for this sequence. I almost shot it on the motorway, which would have been hideous, ghastly. I do a lot of scouting for my locations myself, on my scooter, and I found this area one weekend. I was very proud, because it's where Marcel Carné filmed Gates of the Night [in 1946]. Jacques Prévert was photographed there by Robert Doisneau, both of whom were points of reference for me and Marc Caro when we made Delicatessen.

"It made me happy to use these locations again and, what's more, we shot right opposite the Ecole Marcel Carné. There's a barge moored there named Arletty [the radiant star of Carné's best-known film, Les Enfants du Paradis] - at least it used to be called that, but I was told by someone at the school that Carné, who was rather odd, convinced the then-mayor of Paris to rebaptise the barge after him. He said that Arletty owed everything to him so the barge should bear his name.

"The success of Amelie was so effective in promoting Paris that both the mayor and the chief of police helped us enormously on A Very Long Engagement and Micmacs. We got the extraordinary permission to shoot in this area all day for a whole week and a half. It was a nightmare for the people who lived there. A newspaper called Le Parisien ran a story under the headline: ‘Jean-Pierre Jeunet holds the 19th arrondissement to ransom'. And it was a bit true because we blocked off the whole area and tried to empty it of people and cars as much as possible as though it were the early morning. Everything we couldn't keep out, like the assistant directors in yellow jackets, we removed afterwards digitally in post-production.

"A poster of Micmacs (pictured right) is featured in the scene - there are five of them at different points in the story. It's like a game: you have to find them. There's no special reason for them. With this film I just felt like indulging myself."

• Micmacs opens tomorrow. Official website.