Michel Seydoux

Production

Michel Seydoux

Born 1947-09-11 · Paris, France

Michel Seydoux (born 11 September 1947) is a French businessman and film producer. He also serves as the president and chairman of the French association football club Lille OSC. In 1975-1976, Seydoux worked with director Alejandro Jodorowsky on a film adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune. The movie was never made due to lack of financing; the story of the project is told in Jodorowsky's Dune, which prominently features Seydoux. In 1997 he was a member of the jury at the 20th Moscow International Film Festival. Seydoux is the grandson of scientist Marcel Schlumberger and has two brothers; Jérôme and Nicolas. Jérôme is a shareholder on football club Olympique Lyonnais. Seydoux is the grand-uncle of actress Léa Seydoux. Source: Article "Michel Seydoux" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Acting credits

Behind the camera

The Sense of Wonder poster
6.8

Louise, a widow with two children, almost crushes a stranger with her car. She takes care of him, even if he's not really wounded. It turns out that he has mental disorders and that they can help each other much more than they thought.

The Sense of Wonder

2015

Leaving poster
6.0

A bourgeois housewife, planning to go back to work as a physiotherapist after having devoted 20 years to her husband and two children, has her comfortable, elegant life turned upside down when she falls for a Spanish builder and begins a runaway affair.

Leaving

2009

Cyrano de Bergerac poster
7.3

Famed swordsman and poet Cyrano de Bergerac is in love with his cousin Roxane. He has never expressed his love for her as he his large nose undermines his self-confidence. Then he finds a way to express his love to her, indirectly.

Cyrano de Bergerac

1990

The Barber of Siberia poster
7.0

Douglas is a foreign entrepreneur, who ventures to Russia in 1885 with dreams of selling a new, experimental steam-driven timber harvester in the wilds of Siberia. Jane is his assistant. On her travels, she meets two men who would change her life forever: a handsome young cadet Andrej Tolstoy with whom she shares a fondness for opera, and the powerful General Radlov who is entranced by her beauty and wants to marry her.

The Barber of Siberia

1998

Burnt by the Sun poster
6.9

Russia, 1936: revolutionary hero Colonel Kotov is spending an idyllic summer in his dacha with his young wife and six-year-old daughter Nadia and other assorted family and friends. Things change dramatically with the unheralded arrival of Cousin Dmitri from Moscow, who charms the women and little Nadia with his games and pianistic bravura. But Kotov isn't fooled: this is the time of Stalin's repression, with telephone calls in the middle of the night spelling doom - and he knows that Dmitri isn't paying a social call...

Burnt by the Sun

1994

L'Amitié poster
6.8

“I have on occasion experienced filmmaking as an intensely shared activity. Lively friendships result and remain. Filming that affection today is no act of nostalgia. Paths once crossed make things simple. People who have been behind the camera, or in front of it, giving the movie their all, are without illusion.” (Alain Cavalier)

L'Amitié

2023

De Charles de Gaulle à Emmanuel Macron, les gardiens de l'empire poster
7.0

No synopsis available yet.

De Charles de Gaulle à Emmanuel Macron, les gardiens de l'empire

2022

A Man in Love poster
4.5

An American film-star and an unknown British actress meet on set in Rome. She is angry when he refuses to speak to her journalist father, but later they have a passionate relationship.

A Man in Love

1987

The Dance of Reality poster
7.2

'Having broken away from my illusory self, I was desperately seeking a path and a meaning to life.' This phrase perfectly sums up Alejandro Jodorowsky’s biographical project: reconstituting the incredible adventure of his life. He was born in 1929 Tocopilla, a coastal town on edge of the Chilean desert, where he discovered the fundamentals of reality, as he underwent an unhappy and alienated childhood as part of an uprooted family.

The Dance of Reality

2013

Heart of an Oak poster
7.5

Once upon a time, there was a pedunculate oak (Quercus robur), born in 1810, 210 years old and a pillar in its kingdom. This spectacular adventure features an extraordinary cast: squirrels, barnacles, jays, ants, field mice... This vibrant, whirring, marvelous little world seals its destiny around the majestic tree that welcomes them, feeds them and protects them from its roots to its crown. A poetic ode to life, in which nature alone expresses itself.

Heart of an Oak

2022

Heart of an Oak poster
7.5

Once upon a time, there was a pedunculate oak (Quercus robur), born in 1810, 210 years old and a pillar in its kingdom. This spectacular adventure features an extraordinary cast: squirrels, barnacles, jays, ants, field mice... This vibrant, whirring, marvelous little world seals its destiny around the majestic tree that welcomes them, feeds them and protects them from its roots to its crown. A poetic ode to life, in which nature alone expresses itself.

Heart of an Oak

2022

Heart of an Oak poster
7.5

Once upon a time, there was a pedunculate oak (Quercus robur), born in 1810, 210 years old and a pillar in its kingdom. This spectacular adventure features an extraordinary cast: squirrels, barnacles, jays, ants, field mice... This vibrant, whirring, marvelous little world seals its destiny around the majestic tree that welcomes them, feeds them and protects them from its roots to its crown. A poetic ode to life, in which nature alone expresses itself.

Heart of an Oak

2022

Smoking poster
7.7

Two actors play eighteen different roles in a story that asks the question: would my life have been different if I had lit a cigarette?

Smoking

1993

Vaudou poster
7.0

It was from Dahomey (now Benin, Africa) that the cult of the deads was exported - through the slave trade - to Brazil, and Haiti. The film narrates the modern story of this ethnographical, religious culture. A team of initiates could film troubling images documenting initiation ceremonies and the sacred lethargy that can take as much as seven, or even eleven days, and in which the body started decomposing itself. Then, the resuscitation happens.

Vaudou

1973

René poster
6.8

René, a children's theater performer, has a problem : he is a hearty eater and he weighs no less than 155 kilos. After being abandoned by his girlfriend, René decides to go on a diet, notably to reconquer her. It is also an opportunity for him to question his former lifestyle and to define new values...

René

2002

Pater poster
5.4

During a year, they would meet and film each other. The filmmaker and the actor, the President and his prime minister, Alain Cavalier and Vincent Lindon. In Pater, you will see them in real life and in the fiction that they invented together.

Pater

2011

Close to Eden poster
6.7

A farmer and his wife live in a rural part of Inner Mongolia with their three children. Chinese population control policies prevent them from having any more. The farmer sets out for the nearest town to obtain birth control. He comes upon a Russian truck driver who has ended up in a lake. The farmer takes the man back to his farm, and after initially being appalled, the Russian becomes enchanted with the peaceful life of the countryside and decides to stay. But his presence presages big changes for the peasants.

Close to Eden

1991

Six portraits XL : 1 Léon et Guillaume poster
7.9

Léon : This morning, Léon the shoe-repairer puts up a sign in his store that he's managed for forty-six years : "Closing down in two months." Panic sets in among the neighborhood inhabitants, who adore this big-hearted Armenian with an amazing face. Is there some way to make stay longer ? Guillaume : Four o'clock in the morning, Guillaume arrives at work first, ahead of his team. At the end of the day, he will have sold all his cakes and bread, that's how good they are. In the evening, he and his wife Jasmine dream of buying a bigger and better located pastry store.

Six portraits XL : 1 Léon et Guillaume

2018

Toxic Affair poster
4.8

In this erstwhile comedy, Penelope is already sufficiently unsettled by the fact that she is no longer a top model, and must cast around for another occupation. When her boyfriend leaves her, she becomes quite hysterical, conjuring up schemes for revenge, contemplating suicide, and so on. These dramatics eventually exasperate her best friend Sophie so much that she contemplates killing Penelope, her ex-boyfriend, or the two of them together, just to stop the whining.

Toxic Affair

1993

Thanks for Coming poster
10.0

Alain is getting older. For years he has been filming his daily life: his partner Françoise, the people he meets, nature and animals, and life in all its splendour and cruelty. Having devoted his entire life to filmmaking, with the camera as an extension of his arm, he has observed the world with a poetic sense of authenticity and simplicity. Otherness, the approach of death, the power of life and the importance of others intertwine as he looks back on his life as a filmmaker and as a man, concealing nothing, and offering a vision of the universality of the human experience.

Thanks for Coming

2026

Shadow of the Castles poster
7.2

In the north of France, the life of a nice family of marginalized.

Shadow of the Castles

1977

Paradise poster
5.9

"Since childhood, I've had the good fortune of going through two mini depressions of happiness, and I'm serenely awaiting the third. This alone is enough for me to believe in a certain beauty to life and to have the pleasure of attempting to film it in all its forms (trees, animals, gods, humans...) and to do so when love is intense. The filmmaker has lost a part of innocence. It's so difficult to spot it around you, so difficult not to lose it during a film shoot. I'm grateful to those who you look at on screen. To stand up to time, I've a tactic, which is to dig into my stock of emotions and old images. Not so as to find what will never come back, but to discover the signs of spring in winter. This allows me to begin another day with an easy, light step." (Alain Cavalier)

Paradise

2014

Lily, aime-moi poster
5.7

Everything starts when a journalist François decides to investigate the world of working class people. He gets into the lives of Claude, a worker and his wife Lily who has left him.

Lily, aime-moi

1975

Living and Knowing You Are Alive poster
6.1

Novelist and screenwriter Emmanuèle Bernheim and filmmaker Alain Cavalier have been friends for 30 years. They are preparing a film based on the former’s autobiography, “Tout s’est bien passé” (Everything Went Fine). In it, she tells how her father asked her to “end it” in the wake of a heart attack. Cavalier suggests that she plays herself, and that he plays her father. One winter morning, Emmanuèle calls Alain; they will have to postpone the shoot until the spring, as she needs an urgent operation.

Living and Knowing You Are Alive

2019