TORONTO—Jean-Pierre Jeunet is that rare European filmmaker who has a track record of appealing to mainstream North American audiences. The I-hate-reading-subtitles crowd helped put two of his four previous French-language features, Amélie and Academy Award nominee A Very Long Engagement, on the list of top-40 box-office earners among all foreign-language films screened in American theatres. Amélie, the film he returned to France to make after directing the franchise film Alien: Resurrection, is the second-highest-grossing European film in U.S. box-office history, with US$33 million in ticket sales.

Jeunet doesn’t make a lot of movies. Amélie, A Very Long Engagement, and his latest movie, Micmacs, are the only films he’s directed in the new millennium.

According to Box Office Mojo, Micmacs posted very strong figures during the U.S.’s Memorial Day weekend. It opens in Vancouver on Friday (June 4) as part of the Vancouver French Film Festival and stars Dany Boon (Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis) as Bazil, a video-store employee who loses his job after being hit by a stray bullet. Penniless, he meets a kindly ex-convict who shelters some eccentrics in a scrap-metal dump. Eventually, he concludes that they could help him avenge his shooting as well as his father’s death from a roadside bomb. The targets: two competing French arms dealers.

Jeunet’s ability to sell tickets worldwide allowed him to raise $42 million for the film, an exceptional amount for a European movie. The investment meant that the comedy would have to find another large audience. In a Toronto hotel room, Jeunet said that any comedy about vengeance set against a backdrop of tragedy must tread a thin line if it hopes to sell tickets.

“It was a preoccupation,” he said. “We needed something dark at the beginning in order to justify revenge. Sometimes the script is very slapstick. I was a little bit concerned about that. And also for the characters of the weapon sellers, we had to find the right balance, because it was very delicate. I suppose it works for us, but it wasn’t easy. I was just concerned about the dark scenes at the beginning and the transition that would be needed to get to the very funny scenes. Sometimes the movie is very funny and almost for kids, like a cartoon or a Pixar movie, but then you are also dealing with things that are very dark. So it was a risk.”

Part of the solution came with casting. Jeunet wanted the people who live in the shelter to look the part. He auditioned actors who would be able to develop their characters quickly and would be comic foils for the film. He said that the camera had to love the faces.

“I like the cinema after the war in France because they had so many interesting faces, and this is the kind of casting that I was looking for. I did some tests with everyone, and it was kind of hard because it was a mix of [acting] styles. We had people coming from one-man shows or TV, or [veteran actor] Jean-Pierre Marielle from the old cinema, and they were all thrown together. It had to work, so the only way to do that was to have some [screen] tests. It was like a family. It was a pleasure to have so many actors on the set every day.”

Boon was Jeunet’s first choice to play Bazil, who is in almost every scene. However, Boon read the script and was unsure whether he could do the role. “This was an unusual character,” Boon said in the Toronto hotel room. “Jean-Pierre was very passionate about the character. I felt that the most interesting point of view was Jean-Pierre’s opinion that the best way to show emotion was to use my face like a mime. Eventually, I was playing with my whole body, which was a neat thing.”

Jeunet said that even during the readings and rehearsals, he could see that becoming the odd Bazil would be difficult, even for Boon. He recalled that it wasn’t until he was shooting the movie that he felt Boon had captured the character.

“Dany is perfect for the role,” Jeunet declared. “But when we were rehearsing and he was getting prepared to play the role, it was very difficult to imagine it. It was a very tough role. But he is so good at the physical work and the character worked for him. I said, ”˜Make it tacky, but not too tacky,’ because he is not tacky, but his character is tacky. His personality is very balanced. He’s not like he is in the movie. He did a wonderful job here, and it was never going to be very easy.”