Jean-François Richet

French filmmaker Jean-François Richet merged social consciousness with intense action in such high-intensity features as "Inner City" (1996), "Mesrine" (2008) and "Blood Father" (2016). Born in the Parisian suburb of Meaux, France, he was raised in a housing project that provided him with a keen interest in social and political issues that would inform much of his subsequent work as a director. Richet's past also informed his feature debut with "État des lieux" ("State of Play"/"Inner City," 1996), a gritty drama about the French housing projects that earned him a Cesar nomination for Best First Work. He continued to mine the urban landscape for his next film, the controversial "Ma 6-T va crack-er" (1997), about aimless teenagers driven to violence by the social inequalities of their living conditions, and "All About Love" (2001), with Virginie Ledoyen as a factory worker whose life takes a turn for the worse after she is caught shoplifting. The attention afforded to all three films, especially "Crack-er," which was rejected by many theatrical distributors for fear of inciting the sort of youth violence depicted in the film, attracted the attention of French producer Pascal Caucheteux, who in 2005 tapped Richet to helm an American-French remake of John Carpenter's siege drama "Assault on Precinct 13" (1976). The mixed responses from critics and audiences to the film sent Richet back to France, where he directed the sprawling "Mesrine" (2008), a two-part biopic about the infamous French gangster Jacques Mesrine (played by Vincent Cassel) and his transition from soldier to the most wanted criminal in his country. Both Richet and Cassel won Cesars for their work on the film, which would be followed by a lengthy period of silence from the director, save for a producer's credit on "WTF" (2014), a comedy starring French Internet comedian Rémi Gaillard. The following year, he returned to features with "One Wild Moment" (2015), a remake of the 1977 film of the same name by Claude Berri, with Cassel as a father who is seduced by the daughter (Lola Le Lann) of his friend (François Cluzet). In 2016, he reteamed with Caucheteux for "Blood Father," a violent crime drama starring Mel Gibson as an ex-con fighting drug dealers with designs on his daughters.