Heads or Tails

Director, Producer, Screenwriter, Cinematographer, Composer
(b. July 23, 1931 Waterloo, Quebec)

One of the most prolific and durable filmmakers of his generation, the multi-talented Claude Fournier has had a curiously eclectic career, from contributing to direct cinema at the National Film Board (i.e. La Lutte, À Saint-Henri le cinq septembre) and directing Quebec’s most commercially successful feature (Deux femmes en or), to directing for television and composing the music for the award-winning short film L’Âme soeur (1990).

Originally a journalist, Fournier joined Radio-Canada as a news cameraman before he turned to writing drama. He joined the NFB in 1956 as a writer, left to spend a year in Europe, and returned in 1958 as a writer-director, working on several early direct-cinema films. Having decided to become a cinematographer, he left the NFB and spent eighteen months in the United States working with Richard Leacock and D.A. Pennebaker, photographing such films as Eddie Sachs: On the Pole (1960) and Playboy Bunnies. He returned to Montreal in 1963 and formed his own company, Les Films Claude Fournier, which in five years produced more than one hundred short films for television, many of them directed and/or photographed by Fournier himself.

In 1968 he merged his company with Onyx Films, becoming its vice-president, and directed his first feature, the documentary Le Dossier Nelligan (1969), followed by three fiction features, including Deux femmes en or (1970), which cost $218,000 and went on to gross $4 million at the box office. He founded Rose Films in 1973 and worked largely in television until his return to features on the comedy Hot Dogs (1980), followed by an adaptation of Gabrielle Roy’s classic Quebec novel Bonheur d’occasion/The Tin Flute (1983).

Fournier, who is also a published poet, novelist and essayist, continues to work in film and television in Quebec. He is the twin brother of screenwriter Guy Fournier. —Canadian Film Encyclopedia