For most of his working career, Olivier Schneider‘s task was to take what a director envisioned and make it real in a body. The sequence existed on the page, the filmmaker had a sense of what it needed to accomplish dramatically, and Schneider worked out how those goals would be met in practice, inside the physical limits of what people can actually do and survive. He spent years doing that. Then he moved to the director’s chair and found that the discipline had given him a clear position of his own.
The most instructive collaborations were not the biggest productions. Jacques Audiard, whose films are organized around psychology and interior damage rather than spectacle, brought Schneider in for A Prophet, Rust and Bone, and The Sisters Brothers. The violence in those films has to do emotional work. It reveals something about the people experiencing it rather than creating a general sensation of danger. That is a different demand from most action productions, and the distinction left a mark on Schneider’s thinking. The Audiard collaborations reinforced an idea he has carried into his directing work: that action earns its place in a story only when it serves character and emotion.
The larger commercial productions came alongside and after. Schneider’s credit list from this period runs from Taken, the Liam Neeson film released in 2008 that opened American studios to his work, through Safe House, Unknown, and Fast and Furious 6. Then the Bond franchise: fight coordination on Spectre, and supervising stunt coordination on No Time to Die alongside Lee Morrison. Moon Knight, the Marvel series for Disney+, followed in 2022.
Several of those productions brought recognition from industry bodies. No Time to Die earned the stunt team a Taurus World Stunt Award for Best Stunt Coordinator and/or 2nd Unit Director, shared between Schneider and Morrison, along with wins from the Online Film Critics Society and the Houston Film Critics Society for Best Stunt Coordination, credited to the full crew. Schneider shared a 2022 Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Stunt Coordination for a Drama Series, Limited or Anthology Series or Movie for Moon Knight with Yves Girard.
The turn toward directing came in stages. In 2015, Schneider worked as second unit director on Child 44, shaping material from the director’s side for the first time on a sustained basis. The following year, alongside Pascal Sid, he co-directed Playground, a 10-episode English-language series built from an original concept by Luc Besson for Blackpills, a French startup focused on mobile-native content. Variety covered the project at launch in March 2017, distributed through a deal with Vice Media.
GTMAX, released on Netflix in November 2024, was his first solo feature as director. The France-Belgium co-production centers on a gang using modified motorcycles to outrun law enforcement through Paris. Schneider contributed to the screenplay. The film’s action sequences follow the principle he had developed across two decades of work: movement is most effective when it comes from character logic.
The Orphans represents a broader dramatic ambition. Produced by Inoxy Films and Gaumont, the film opened in French cinemas on August 20, 2025, and reached Netflix globally on February 20, 2026. Two men who grew up together in an orphanage end up on opposite sides of the law in adulthood, one as a police officer within France’s internal affairs division and the other as a fixer for criminal networks. When a woman from their shared past dies under suspicious circumstances, her teenage daughter takes a weapon and disappears into the same criminal world that separates them. The men are forced back together despite every reason not to trust each other.
Schneider co-wrote the screenplay with Nicolas Peufaillit, Alban Lenoir, and Jean-André Yerlès. Lenoir stars alongside Dali Benssalah. Sonia Faïdi, Suzanne Clément, and Anouk Grinberg appear in supporting roles.
The film routes its action through the history between the two men rather than treating physical confrontation as a separate register. What characters feel and what their bodies do are kept in the same conversation throughout. It is the same principle that shaped the Audiard work, applied now to a film Schneider constructed from the start. Gaumont, one of the oldest distributors in French cinema, backing the production reflects a judgment about where that approach has arrived.
