Trivia / The Artist

• Actor Allusion: This is not the first time Dujardin and Béjo lead a movie together.
• Alan Smithee: One of Peppy's film posters gives a director's credit to Alan Smithee.
• Cast the Runner-Up: Malcolm McDowell was originally meant to play Clifton, but couldn't due to a scheduling conflict. He got a cameo though and very good billing.
• Fake American: French-Argentine Bérénice Bejo as Peppy Miller. Averted by George Valentin, however, as revealed by the very last line (although his name gives away his nationality).
• Font Anachronism: The movie features an array of anachronistic and stylistically questionable type treatments. Some of these are deliberate to evoke the silent film era rather than copy it. Whether intentional or by oversight, all of the typefaces do their aesthetic and evocative duty.
• Playing Against Type: Dujardin, a comedian by trade, portrays George as happy-go-lucky in the beginning. But it gets progressively darker.
• Production Posse: Dujardin and Hazanavicius previously teamed up to make the spy satires OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies and OSS 117: Lost in Rio, and Bejo also starred in Nest of Spies.
• Starring a Star as a Star: Jean Dujardin, best known for spy parody films, plays silent film star George Valentin.
• What Could Have Been: The original script was much darker, being an homage to Metropolis, Fritz Lang, and German Expressionism. The advent of talkies would have paralleled the rise of Nazism, culminating with the main character committing suicide for real.

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