Pierre Morel

Pierre Morel is a veteran cinematographer/cameraman/Steadicam operator/second unit cameraman who became a director with District 13 (2004), a Paris-based action movie from the EuropaCorp stable of producer-writer Luc Besson.

Morel then worked as a cinematographer for four subsequent years on a string of mostly action vehicles, including Unleashed (2005), with Jet Li, Morgan Freeman, Bob Hoskins, and Kerry Condon; the Besson-writer and producer sequel, Taxi 4 (2007), with Samy Naceri; and War (2007), starring Li, Jason Statham, and John Lone; as well as director/writer/producer Alek Keshishian’s rom-com, Love and Other Disasters (2006), starring Brittany Murphy. Producer Besson then tapped Morel as director of the hit revenge thriller, Taken (2008), starring Liam Neeson, Maggie Grace, Famke Janssen, and Xander Berkeley, and grossing nearly ten times ($227 million) the $25 million budget.

At this point, Pierre Morel no longer worked on the camera unit side of production after 18 years, starting as a second-unit cameraman on Race for Glory (1989) and as a Steadycam operator on Bertrand Tavernier’s La fille de D’Artagnan (1994) and director-writer Herve Palud’s hit movie, Un Indien dans la ville (1994)). Morel continued as a director with producer Besson on the English-language thriller, From Paris with Love (2010), starring John Travolta and Jonathan Rhys Meyers, but failed at the box office. Morel partnered as a director with Sean Penn (as star, co-writer, and co-producer) on The Gunman (2015), with Javier Bardem, Idris Elba, Ray Winstone, and Mark Rylance, but which was a critical and commercial bomb.

Pierre Morel took a break from directing to produce the French-funded, English-language thriller, Overdrive (2017), starring Scott Eastwood, Freddie Thorp, and Ana de Armas, and directed by Antonio Negret, but which failed at the box office internationally. Morel’s directing specialty of revenge thrillers continued with Peppermint (2018), starring Jennifer Garner, John Ortiz, and Tyson Ritter, and earning $53 million globally.

Morel next directed Al Kameen/The Ambush (2021), the Abu Dhabi-backed war movie about the United Arab Emirates armed units in the Yemen war in 2018 and the biggest-budgeted and highest-grossing Arabic-language feature produced inside the Emirati zone known as the Gulf Cooperation Council.

Morel stayed in action mode, directing the $40-million-budgeted action comedy, Freelance (2023), starring John Cena, Alison Brie, Juan Pablo Raba, and Christian Slater, and released by Relativity Media. True to form, Morel then directed the U.K.-U.S. spy thriller, Canary Black (date to be announced), starring Kate Beckinsale, filming in Zagreb, Croatia.