Arnaud de Moléron

Arnaud de Moleron is a successful French production designer, best known for his recurring collaborations with Claire Denis and his work on François Ozon's "8 Women" (2002), for which he earned a César nomination for Best Production Design. De Moleron effectively "fell" into production design work as a 22-year-old trainee on Jean-Pierre Vergne's "The Telephone Always Rings Twice" (1985). He first took command of production design on Claire Denis' "I Can't Sleep" (1994), the beginning of a long and fruitful collaboration that included "Nénette et Boni" (1996), "Beau travail" (1999), "The Intruder" (2004) and "35 Shots of Rum" (2008). De Moleron also made a run of films with Laetitia Mason: "To Have (or Not)" (1995), "For Sale" (1998) and "The Repentant" (2002). But it was his relationship with François Ozon that brought de Moleron his greatest acclaim, with a pair of pictures whose kitschy aesthetic was entirely based on their production design: "Water Drops on Burning Rocks" (2000), based on a Rainer Werner Fassbinder play, and the lively retro musical "8 Women." Recreating the past in exacting detail became de Moleron's metier, as seen in disparate projects like Michel Deville's "Almost Peaceful" (2002), a comedy about Jews in 1940s post-war Paris, Lucille Hadzihalilovic's elliptical portrait of a mythical turn-of-the-20th-century boarding school, "Innocence" (2004), Gilles Legrand's World War I drama, "The Maiden and the Wolves" (2008) and Stijn Coninx's 1960s biography, "Sister Smile" (2009).