When The Orphans arrived on Netflix in February 2026, it came with a filmmaking credit that carries more than the usual weight. The French thriller directed by Olivier Schneider follows two men raised in the same orphanage who have since ended up on opposite sides of the law: one a police inspector, the other a fixer for criminals. A suspicious accident pulls them back into proximity, and the film uses every collision between them to say something about what growing up with nothing does to the people who survive it. The fights carry the story. That is a harder thing to achieve than it sounds, and it is the kind of problem Schneider has been solving, in one form or another, for most of his professional life.
He grew up watching Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean-Claude Van Damme, and the 007 films his father let him see, and somewhere around age ten decided this was the work he wanted to do. He spent time working out action sequences in his bedroom and then made the more practical choices: martial arts training, acting lessons, and eventually an apprenticeship under French stunt coordinator Philippe Guégan. The career started below the line. According to his film industry biography, he performed stunt work on more than 100 productions before moving to fight choreography.
The turning point arrived in 2007 when he joined the production of Taken as its fight choreographer. The Liam Neeson thriller performed far beyond initial expectations, and as its international profile grew, so did the demand for Schneider’s work. American productions started calling: Unknown in 2011, then Safe House, then Fast & Furious 6 in 2013. The reach of a career built on French productions extended into American studios.
Safe House gave him something beyond a credit. On that set he met Greg Powell, whose brother Gary Powell oversaw stunts for the James Bond franchise. Gary Powell needed a fight coordinator for Spectre. The introduction made the job possible.
The Bond work became a study in solving problems inside very specific limits. For the opening helicopter sequence in Spectre, shot above Mexico City during the Day of the Dead celebrations, rehearsing inside the actual aircraft was not a workable option. Schneider arranged for a cage to be constructed at the helicopter’s exact interior dimensions, and the team spent weeks inside it figuring out what two people could physically accomplish in that space. When they had the interior settled, he added the idea of fighting on the landing skid, outside the aircraft in the air. According to his account published on the official 007 website, the sequence was shot partly over Mexico City with more than 1,500 people in full Day of the Dead costume in the square below.
On No Time to Die, his role expanded to supervising stunt coordinator for Daniel Craig’s final Bond film. The staircase sequence, in which Craig’s character fights upward through a series of opponents in what was designed to read as a continuous shot, originated as Schneider’s own proposal: Craig, stairs, more than a dozen men, one unbroken-feeling take. In a 2024 feature published on the official 007 website, Schneider recalled that producer Barbara Broccoli initially questioned whether the sequence was achievable. It made the film.
His time on the Bond productions clarified something specific about what screen violence is actually for. As Schneider told the 007 website, he understood Bond as a character who is superhuman rather than supernatural. That distinction has practical consequences: every physical confrontation has to feel earned by the situation and by what is at stake. Action built without that dramatic grounding is just activity.
The move toward directing developed in stages. He began second unit directing on Child 44 in 2015, then co-directed the English-language mini-series Playground in 2016. In 2023, he served as supervising stunt coordinator on Fast X. Then came GTMax, a motorcycle-world thriller produced by Inoxy Films and released by Netflix in November 2024, and his first solo feature: a former motocross champion, a criminal threat to her family, a film that moved at the speed of the subject.
The Orphans followed. Produced by Inoxy Films and Gaumont, it was co-written by Schneider with Nicolas Peufaillit, Alban Lenoir, and Jean-André Yerlès. The film opened in French cinemas on August 20, 2025. Schneider had also worked with director Jacques Audiard on A Prophet, Rust and Bone, and The Sisters Brothers, as stunt coordinator and fight choreographer across productions that ran from 2009 to 2018. The Audiard collaboration stretched across nearly a decade of French cinema that took physical conflict seriously as dramatic language.
The Orphans asked Schneider to run three things at once: the action sequences, the story those sequences are required to carry, and the direction of two actors through all of it. None of that was new to him in isolation. Alban Lenoir and Dali Benssalah play men whose entire shared history lives in how they move against each other. Getting that right required every part of what Schneider had spent decades building.