Jean Dujardin & Berenice Bejo

Jean Dujardin (left) and Berenice Bejo star as silent film-era stars in French director Michel Hazanavicius' The Artist. The film has generated buzz well ahead of its U.S. premiere, including a best actor award at Cannes for star Jean Dujardin, and $12 million at the French box office. As a result, it is the first silent movie being talked about as a Best Picture contender since Wings in 1927.

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Berenice Bejo as Peppy Miller

Berenice Bejo's Peppy Miller dances in The Artist's film-within-a-film.

Throughout filming, Bejo had to work without written dialogue. Says Bejo: "The challenge was to try and focus on the body language, but the rest of it was finding a way of being an American actress. I think of American actors — they take up a lot of space, they talk really loud, they talk with their hands. So I had to find that, since being a French actor, everything is more petite."

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Jean Dujardin as George Valentin

Jean Dujardin had a real rapport with Uggie, a scene-stealing 9-year-old Jack Russell terrier.

To render the character's decline, director Hazanavicius borrowed a trick he learned from watching F.W. Murnau's 1927 film Sunrise, dressing Dujardin in suits slightly too big for him. Says Hazanavicius: "He's not as perfect as he was in the first act." (Murnau made his star wear heavy boots after he fell on hard times.)

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On the Set: Jean Dujardin & Michel Hazanavicius

Jean Dujardin and director Michel Hazanavicius on the set. Hazanavicius kept the music of the era — George Gershwin, Cole Porter — in constant rotation during shooting, and took them to see movies at the Silent Movie Theatre on Fairfax.

"The fact that Michel and Jean had worked together helped," says costume designer Mark Bridges. "I came away thinking he is my kind of director — focused, and a visual artist." Bridges' resume includes work on all of Paul Thomas Anderson's films, including Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood.

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On the Set

Director of photography Guillaume Schiffman shot the film on color film stock because today's black and white is too sharp and lacks enough grain. He used unusual filters to diffuse the whites and mute the blacks slightly — and as the film went on, with its main characters losing some of their sheen, the light got grayer.

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’20s Inspiration: Gloria Swanson

Berenice Bejo read actress Gloria Swanson's biography while researching her role. "To me, she represents the American way of life," she says. Unlike Fairbanks, the model for Dujardin's character, Swanson excelled after the advent of sound. Says Bejo: "She started in the silent period and then went to the talkies and then to TV. I got a sense of the atmosphere of the period."

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’20s Inspiration: Cecil B. DeMille

John Goodman plays a cigar-chomping studio boss resembling the legendary Cecil B. DeMille.

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’20s Inspiration: Douglas Fairbanks

"He is like Douglas Fairbanks, with a Gene Kelly smile," says Jean Dujardin of the model for the character Georg Valentin. "And me — I wasn't born in the '20s, so this was a fantasy of myself as a star." Fairbanks started making films in 1915 but saw his career fade as talkies ascended. Says Dujardin: "He's like my character George Valentin: He can be arrogant, but he has integrity. He believes in his art. He fights for it."

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MGM Studios

During the '20s and '30s, MGM employed Buster Keaton and Clark Gable. Producer Thomas Langmann moved the production to Hollywood to tap realistic locations, but by doing so had to forgo French government subsidies, which raised the stakes on a film whose budget was almost $20 million.

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Kinograph Studios

In the film, Valentin's Kinograph Studios is actually RED Studios, where "High Noon" was shot.

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Pickford Residence

"When Jean [Dujardin] wakes up in my bed, it's Mary Pickford's real bed," says Berenice Bejo. In addition to the Hancock Park mansion, The Artist filmed at the Ebell Theatre (where Judy Garland was discovered), the Orpheum Theatre, the Los Angeles Theatre (where Charlie Chaplin's City Lights premiered in 1931) and the Bradbury Building in downtown Los Angeles (made famous much later in Blade Runner).

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