Jacques Audiard, the son of the screenplay-writer Michel Audiard, started out in the film industry on the editing of Bons baisers à lundi (1974) directed by his father and then began his career as a screenplay-writer. Until 1991, he wrote at a rate of one screenplay per year, including Mortelle Randonnée (Deadly Circuit/Deadly Run) directed by Claude Miller (1983) and Baxter (1988) by Jérôme Boivin.

In 1994, his first feature film, Regarde les hommes tomber (See how they fall), was released. It tells the story of an unlikely friendship between Jean-Louis Trintignant, a gangster in trouble and Mathieu Kassovitz, a young, virtually simple-minded boy, in a pseudo-thriller which has a twisted timeline, but a distinct dark quality.

We meet Kassovitz again in 1995 in Un héros très discret (A Self-made Hero), based on the novel by Jean-François Deniaux, where reality is distorted, this time by the image of the Resistance that a bogus hero creates for himself. Audiard was awarded the prize for the best scenario at Cannes in 1996. Then in 2002, he won the best screenplay Cesar for Sur mes lèvres (Read my lips), a romantic thriller between two outsiders: a young deaf girl who can lip-read (Emmanuelle Devos) and an ex-con (Vincent Cassel).

Audiard received eight Cesars, including best French film and best director (2006), for De battre mon cœur s'est arrêté, the redemption of a young gangster (Romain Duris) by the piano. He was awarded the Cannes Grand Jury Prize, as well as nine Cesars (2010), for Un prophète, which deals with violence in prison.

His new film De Rouille et d'os (Rust & Bone) is competing at the 2012 Cannes Festival.