Volta™ – Irish Independent Film Online

On being demobbed, Miller worked as an assistant director and script supervisor for the leading lights in the French New Wave, including Robert Bresson and Jean-Luc Godard. His mentor Francois Truffaut acted as producer on Miller's first three dramatic short films and his first feature, 1976s sensitive coming-of-age drama The Best Way to Walk.

Miller was to write and direct five films in the decade to follow, among them 1981s Garde à Vue and 1985s An Impudent Girl. When Truffaut died in 1984 midway through production on The Little Thief, Miller took over the project, completing the film in 1988 before taking a four year sabbatical from filmmaking. His next film, The Accompanist was released in 1992 and told the story of a young pianist eking out a living in Nazi occupied Paris. Nominated for three Césars, the film won the FIPRESCI prize and the Jury Prize at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival. Miller followed-up with the claustrophobic sexual drama Le Sourire in 1994 and the compendium film Les Enfants de Lumière in 1995, a collection of short, silent films from the early days of French cinema.

Miller was also one of 40 international directors to contribute a short film of under a minute’s duration to the portmanteau film Lumière and Company, released in 1995. Three years later, his psychological horror film Class Trip again won the Jury Prize at Cannes and was nominated for the Palme d’Or. Following another short sabbatical, during which he directed television episodes and commercials, Miller returned to feature filmmaking in 2001 with Betty Fisher and Other Stories, based on the Ruth Rendell novel about a woman who overcomes the grief of losing a child by kidnapping another woman’s baby.

In 2007, Miller returned to the era of the Second World War for Un Secret, a story of a man slowly uncovering a family secret that had remained hidden for fifty years. Based on a true story, the film was nominated for 11 Césars. In 2009, Miller travelled to the United States to film his first documentary, Marching Band, exploring the uniquely American tradition of High School marching bands, set against the election of Barack Obama. He has recently completed two feature films: 2009s I’m Glad My Mother is Alive (co-directed with his son Nathan) and 2011s See How They Dance, based on a novel by Roy Parvin.

Key Films: The Best Way To Walk (1976), Garde à Vue (1981), The Accompanist (1992), Betty Fisher and Other Stories (2001), Little Lili (2003) Un Secret (2007)