Curiosidades

Biography in John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume Two, 1945-1985," pp. 715-719. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1988.

Since 2013 Marcel Ophüls is a member of the 'Documentary Branch' of the 'Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' (AMPAS).

Son of Max Ophüls and Hildegard Wall.

In 2014, Ophuls began crowd-sourcing funds for his new film Unpleasant Truths, about the continuing Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, to be co-directed with Israeli filmmaker Eyal Sivan. In part, the film seeks to focus on possible links between the 2014 Israeli war on Gaza and the rise in anti-Semitism in Europe as well as whether "Islamophobia is the new anti-Semitism." It was originally intended as a collaboration with Jean-Luc Godard, who backed out early in the process; Godard makes an appearance as himself in the film. As of 2017, the film had not yet been completed due to unspecified financial and legal troubles, and may not be finished ever.

Returning from the USA to France in 1950, he started out as an assistant director, working on his father's last film "Lola Montes" in 1955.

Ophuls, like his father Max, preferred not to use the German umlaut in his name ("Ophüls"). Ophuls senior removed the umlaut when he took French citizenship, and the younger Ophuls adopted the same spelling.

He made an unsuccessful entry into fiction with "Banana Skin" in 1963, starring the star duo of Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jeanne Moreau, before shifting to documentary when hired by French public television.

Ophuls rocked France with 1969's "The Sorrow and the Pity", about the occupied French provincial city of Clermont Ferrand during the time of the collaborationist Vichy regime.

"Hotel Terminus - The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie" won him an Oscar for best documentary in 1989, but his 1994 documentary "The Troubles We've Seen", about war reporting in Bosnia, was a commercial flop. He then spent several years afterwards holed up in southern France not working. His return with "Un voyageur", a travelogue, in 2013, packed the cinema at the Cannes Film Festival.

Ophuls became a naturalized citizen of France in 1938, and of the United States in 1950.

When his family returned to Paris in 1950 Marcel became an assistant to Julien Duvivier and Anatole Litvak, and worked on John Huston's Moulin Rouge (1952) and his father's Lola Montès (1955). Through François Truffaut, Ophuls got to direct an episode of the portmanteau film Love at Twenty (1962).

Marcel attended Hollywood High School, then Occidental College, Los Angeles.

Ophüls was philosophical about the influence of his father.

He grew up in Hollywood, going on to serve as a GI in Japan in 1946.

He fled for France with his father and the film directors Billy Wilder and Fritz Lang, before escaping across the Pyrenees mountains and arriving in the United States in 1941.