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60 free Jean Renoir trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Jean Renoir trivia quiz covers the whole career of the French director many critics call the greatest of all: the painter's son from Montmartre, the wounded pilot who fell for cinema, the silent films made for Catherine Hessling, and the 1930s masterpieces — Boudu, Toni, Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, La Grande Illusion, La Bête Humaine and The Rules of the Game. It follows him into Hollywood exile with Swamp Water, This Land Is Mine and The Southerner, then to India for The River and back to Europe for The Golden Coach, French Cancan and Elena and Her Men, ending with his honorary Oscar and burial at Essoyes. Along the way you will meet Gabin, Stroheim, Michel Simon, Anna Magnani, Ingrid Bergman, Goebbels's ban and the negative that was bombed. Questions run from easy to expert with the difficulty shown on each one. Every answer has been checked against a primary reference and each question carries its citation. Fans of classic cinema may also enjoy our French Cinema and Film Directors quizzes.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Impressionist painter was the director's father?
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Jean and his brothers posed for many of their father's canvases, and he later sold inherited paintings to fund his silent films.
Q 02In which Paris district was Jean Renoir born in 1894?
Montmartre
His nanny Gabrielle took him to the Guignol puppet shows there, an influence he credited for teaching him to detest cliché.
Q 03Which two Renoir films are most often cited as among the greatest films ever made?
La Grande Illusion and The Rules of the Game
He was ranked fourth greatest director in the BFI's 2002 Sight & Sound poll.
Q 04Who raised the young Renoir and introduced him to puppet shows and early cinema?
Gabrielle Renard, his nanny
He ended his 1974 memoir with the words he had often spoken as a child: 'Wait for me, Gabrielle.'
Q 05What role did Renoir take on in World War I after being wounded in the leg?
Reconnaissance pilot
Recuperating with his leg raised, he watched Chaplin and Griffith films and fell for the cinema; the injury left him a permanent limp.
Q 06What craft did Renoir try after the war, at his father's suggestion?
Ceramics
Some of his ceramics were bought by Albert Barnes and sit beneath his father's paintings at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.
Q 07Renoir claimed he took up filmmaking to make a star of whom?
His first wife, Catherine Hessling
Hessling had been his father's last model; she starred in most of his nine silent films.
Q 08Which director's work particularly inspired the young Renoir?
Erich von Stroheim
He later cast his hero as the German commandant von Rauffenstein in La Grande Illusion.
Q 09How many silent films did Renoir direct, beginning with Catherine in 1924?
Nine
They lost money, and he gradually sold paintings inherited from his father to finance them.
Q 10Renoir's 1926 silent film Nana was based on a novel by which author?
Émile Zola
He returned to the same novelist in 1938 for La Bête Humaine.
Q 11What were Renoir's first two sound films, both released in 1931?
On purge bébé and La Chienne
La Chienne was later remade in Hollywood by Fritz Lang as Scarlet Street.
Q 12Which actor played the tramp Boudu in Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932)?
Michel Simon
Renoir changed the play's ending so Boudu escapes marriage and floats off to vagrant freedom, angering the playwright René Fauchois.
Q 13From which Paris bridge does Boudu leap into the Seine?
Pont des Arts
A bourgeois bookseller fishes him out and tries to reform him with disastrous results.
Q 21What is the setting of La Grande Illusion?
German POW camps in World War I
It is a war film with no battle scenes; the aristocrats Boëldieu and Rauffenstein bond across enemy lines.
Q 22What did La Grande Illusion achieve at the 1939 Academy Awards?
First foreign-language Best Picture nominee
It lost to You Can't Take It with You, but the nomination was unprecedented.
Q 23Which Nazi minister branded La Grande Illusion 'Cinematic Public Enemy No. 1'?
Joseph Goebbels
Q 14Which 1986 American comedy remade Boudu Saved from Drowning?
Down and Out in Beverly Hills
Paul Mazursky directed it; a French remake with Gérard Depardieu followed in 2005.
Q 15Renoir's 1935 film Toni was notable for what practice that later influenced the New Wave?
Non-professional cast and location shooting
Some accounts claim Luchino Visconti worked as an assistant on it, though that is disputed.
Q 16Which political movement were Renoir's mid-1930s films associated with?
The Popular Front
The Crime of Monsieur Lange, Life Belongs to Us and La Marseillaise all reflect its politics.
Q 17The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936) centres on what kind of workplace?
A publishing cooperative
Lange writes Western stories about Arizona Jim; when the crooked owner returns, Lange shoots him to save the cooperative.
Q 18Renoir's The Lower Depths (1936) was based on a play by which Russian writer?
Maxim Gorky
It won the very first Louis Delluc Prize in 1937; Kurosawa filmed the same play in 1957.
Q 19Which award did The Lower Depths win in 1937, the first ever given?
Louis Delluc Prize
The National Board of Review also placed it among its top ten foreign films that year.
Q 20Which two stars headline La Grande Illusion (1937)?
Erich von Stroheim and Jean Gabin
Stroheim, though Vienna-born, had lived in the US since 1909 and needed a dialect coach for his German lines.
He ordered prints seized, and Vichy France banned the film in 1940 'for the duration of hostilities'.
Q 24The title La Grande Illusion comes from a 1909 book by which British journalist?
Norman Angell
The Great Illusion argued that war was futile because Europe's economies were so intertwined.
Q 25Which Alsace castle stood in for the mountain fortress Wintersborn in La Grande Illusion?
Haut-Koenigsbourg
Other exteriors used the artillery barracks at Colmar and Neuf-Brisach on the Upper Rhine.
Q 26Which real WWI pilot, who saved Renoir's life in 1915, inspired La Grande Illusion?
Armand Pinsard
Pinsard was shot down, captured and escaped from German camps seven times each, as he told Renoir during the making of Toni.
Q 27Renoir's La Bête Humaine (1938) starred Jean Gabin alongside which actress?
Simone Simon
The film is often seen as a forerunner of film noir; Fritz Lang remade the story as Human Desire in 1954.
Q 28What is Gabin's character Lantier's job in La Bête Humaine?
Railway engine driver
The train itself is treated almost as a main character; the story unfolds around Le Havre station.
Q 29Which character did Renoir himself play in The Rules of the Game (1939)?
Octave
His Octave delivers the famous line that 'everyone has his reasons'.
Q 30How was The Rules of the Game received at its 1939 Paris premiere?
With derision; his greatest commercial flop
He cut it from 113 to 85 minutes without success, and the government banned it weeks after war broke out.