A fight scene, stripped back, is a problem of information design. Whoever choreographs it decides what the audience learns about each person in the room, in what order, and through what movement. Those are a director’s decisions. Olivier Schneider spent roughly 20 years making them for other directors before he started making films under his own name.
GTMAX, his first solo feature, reached Netflix on November 20, 2024. The Orphans, his second, became his first to receive a theatrical release, opening in French cinemas on August 20, 2025, before arriving on Netflix on February 20, 2026. The two films, one a motocross action thriller set in Paris, the other a drama about two estranged childhood friends pulled together by a suspicious death, appeared in quick succession and from a career that had been building toward them for a long time.
According to his IMDb biography, Schneider began as a stuntman, working across more than 100 productions before moving into fight choreography and stunt coordination. The sequence had a logic to it. Fight choreography required him to structure physical action as narrative, to determine what a body moving under pressure could communicate that dialogue could not. Stunt coordination and second unit directing expanded that scope to complete sequences rather than individual exchanges, placing him in charge of how a scene looked, moved, and cut from start to finish. Each stage carried demands the previous one did not fully prepare for.
The international breakthrough in the choreography work came with Taken. Schneider signed on to design the fights for the 2008 Pierre Morel film, and the finished sequences drew specific attention. Liam Neeson’s Bryan Mills dispatched opponents with a compact efficiency that felt unlike much of the mainstream action of that era. The film grossed over $226 million against a $25 million budget. As the production’s stunt coordinator Mark Vanselow later described in Men’s Journal, weeks of careful work between Schneider, Vanselow, and Neeson had gone into making those sequences read as immediate and economical. American productions took notice. Unknown came in 2011, Safe House followed. Fast and Furious 6 brought Schneider in as fight choreographer in 2013.
In parallel, his work with Jacques Audiard was providing a different kind of training. A Prophet and Rust and Bone both carry Schneider’s fight work, per his biography. Audiard’s films operate at a different register from franchise action, grounding the physical in character and consequence, so that how someone hits, or takes a hit, says something about who they are. Repeated collaboration with the same director in that mode was a sustained education in how action functions when the story is the point.
According to Variety, Schneider served as fight coordinator on Spectre. No Time to Die, the final Daniel Craig Bond, brought him in as supervising stunt coordinator alongside Lee Morrison in 2021. The stunt work on that film won the Taurus World Stunt Award for Best Stunt Coordinator and/or 2nd Unit Director, shared between Schneider and Morrison, along with the Online Film Critics Society Award for Best Stunt Coordination. The London Critics Circle nominated it for Technical Achievement of the Year. The Houston Film Critics Society Award for Best Stunt Coordination went to the full team. No Time to Die grossed $774 million worldwide. Moon Knight followed in 2022: the Television Academy nominated Schneider’s stunt coordination on the Disney Plus series starring Oscar Isaac for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Stunt Coordination for a Drama Series, Limited or Anthology Series or Movie, shared with Yves Girard. The full record is on his awards page.
His first directing credits arrived before those later franchise titles. In 2016, Schneider co-directed Playground, a 10-episode series created by Luc Besson for the digital platform Blackpills, shooting in English with an international cast. Variety covered the March 2017 release, and his co-director was Pascal Sid. The project gave Schneider his first full-narrative directing experience outside of second unit work.
GTMAX was the step that required him to do it alone. Written by Jean-André Yerlès, Rémi Leautier, Rachid Santaki, and Jordan Pavlik, the film follows Soélie, a former motocross prodigy whose career ended in an accident, now coaching her younger brother while an illegal street-racing and heist network pulls them both in. Produced by Inoxy Films, it reached Netflix on November 20, 2024. AlloCiné reported that the film drew 10.8 million views in its first seven days on the platform.
The Orphans, produced by Inoxy Films and Gaumont, works at a larger scale. The screenplay carries four names: Schneider, Nicolas Peufaillit, who wrote A Prophet; Alban Lenoir, who stars alongside Dali Benssalah; and Yerlès. Gabriel and Idriss grew up together in an orphanage before their lives divided entirely, one becoming a police inspector, the other a fixer for criminals. The death of a woman they both knew, ruled an accident, brings her teenage daughter into danger and the two men back into each other’s path.
Shot around Saint-Jean-de-Luz and Biarritz, the film gave Schneider a theatrical canvas for the first time. As Cineuropa noted in its production coverage, the physical sequences read as grounded: car chases on coastal roads, hand-to-hand work that functions as argument, a final confrontation inside an abandoned building.
The two films taken together make a case that does not need to be stated: that the person who spent two decades deciding how action works on screen has particular things to say when given control of the whole frame.
