UPDATE, October 13, 2010: After a commenter raised questions about the originality and authenticity of this interview, I found many similarities between the interview and the subtitled interviews included as DVD extras on the Criterion Collection DVD of “The 400 Blows” and its Antoine Doinel box set. This post has a detailed discussion of my investigation and conversations with Bert Cardullo, who presented this text as Truffaut’s last interview.
Below, I have annotated the Cardullo’s text, pointing out passages that are nearly identical or very similar to these recorded interviews, some of which are also available on YouTube. Although Cardullo’s “last interview” seems to have been pieced together rather than conducted as a conversation, many of these answers are indeed Truffaut’s and may lead some readers back to these video interviews.
First the sources:
- “Cinéastes de Notre Temps, François Truffaut ou L’Esprit Critique,” December 2, 1965 (on the “400 Blows” disk from Criterion): [CDNT65]
- “Cinépanorama,” February 20, 1960 (on the “400 Blows” disk from Criterion): [CP60]
- “Cinéastes de Notre Temps: François Truffaut, dix ans, dix films,” 1970 (on the “Stolen Kisses” disk from Criterion, available on YouTube): [SK70]
- “Cinéastes de Notre Temps: François Truffaut, dix ans, dix films,” 1970 (on the “Bed and Board” disk from Criterion): [CDNTBB70]
- “Approches du cinema: François Truffaut ou la nouvelle vague,” 1972 (on the “Bed and Board” disk from Criterion): [AC72]
- “Bed and Board,” Midi magazine, March 23, 1970 (on the “Bed and Board” disk from Criterion, available on YouTube): [BB70]
- “Les Rendez-vous du dimanche” (1979) (on the “Love on the Run” disk from Criterion, available on YouTube): [RDD79]
- “Cinescope,” 1980 (on the “Love on the Run” disk from Criterion, available on YouTube): [CS80]
- “Champ contre champ,” January 31, 1981 (on the Criterion “400 Blows” supplemental disk “Les Salades de l’amour,” available on YouTube): [CC81]
And now the interview, as it appeared when we published it on August 16th, but with the passages in question in bold type, followed by the source references [in brackets].
_______________
It’s a privilege to present the last interview with François Truffaut, who died in 1984. The interview was done (and extremely well) by Bert Cardullo, and previously appeared only in the (utterly engaging) book “Action! Interviews with Directors from Classical Hollywood to Contemporary Iran,” a wide-ranging and exemplary collection, edited by Gary Morris (who is also the publisher and editor of Bright Lights Film Journal). I’m deeply grateful to Gary Morris and Bert Cardullo for their permission to reprint the discussion here; it’s a major contribution to our understanding of Truffaut’s life and work. Cardullo centers the conversation around Truffaut’s first feature film, “The 400 Blows,” the overwhelming success of which, in 1959, was a key moment in the launching of the French New Wave. As such, he gets Truffaut to talk about what went into the beginning of his career and how his filmmaking process was influenced by his years of work as a film critic and his lifelong obsession with watching movies. In another post, I look a little more closely at what Truffaut says here and what it means for his movies. (I also posted recently to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Truffaut’s death, and to link to an online retrospective of his work.)
Alter Ego, Autobiography, and Auteurism: François Truffaut’s Last Interview
by Bert Cardullo
This interview was conducted both in English and French (translated by me) in late May of 1984 in François Truffaut’s private office at Les Films du Carrosse, the production company in Paris he founded and ran. His last public appearance had been in a television interview on April 13, 1984, for the “Apostrophes” series hosted by Bernard Pivot. When Truffaut generously agreed to meet with me for what was intended to be a print interview (which did not materialize at the time), he was clearly weak but unquestionably lucid. He died from brain cancer on October 21, 1984.
Bert Cardullo: I’d like to focus our discussion today on the Antoine Doinel cycle, M. Truffaut—though perhaps we’ll have time to treat some other films of yours as well. Could we begin by talking about your life prior to becoming a movie director?
François Truffaut: Yes, of course. During the war, I saw many films that made me fall in love with the cinema. I’d skip school regularly to see movies—even in the morning, in the small Parisian theaters that opened early. At first, I wasn’t sure whether I’d be a critic or a filmmaker, but I knew it would be something like that. I had thought of writing, actually, and that later on I’d be a novelist. Next I decided I’d be a film critic. Then I gradually started thinking I should make movies. And I think seeing all those films during the war was a sort of apprenticeship.
The New Wave filmmakers, you know, were often criticized for their lack of experience. This movement was made up of people with all kinds of backgrounds—including people like me who had done nothing more than write for Cahiers du cinéma and see thousands of movies. I saw some pictures fourteen or fifteen times, like Jean Renoir’s “The Rules of the Game” [1939] and “The Golden Coach” [1953]. There is a way to see films that can teach you more than working as an assistant director, without the viewing process becoming tedious or academic. Basically, the assistant director is a guy who wants to see how movies are made, but who is constantly prevented from doing just that because he gets sent on errands while the important stuff is taking place in front of the camera. In other words, he is always required to do things that take him away from the set. But in the movie theatre, when you see a film for the tenth time or so, a film whose dialogue and music you know by heart, you start to look at how it’s made, and you learn much more than you could as an assistant director.
Which films first struck your attention when, as a boy, you began frequenting the cinema?
The first films I truly admired were French ones, like Henri-Georges Clouzot’s “The Raven” [1943] and Marcel Carné’s “The Devil’s Envoys” [1942]. These are movies I quickly wanted to see more than once. This habit of multiple viewing happened by accident, because first I would see some picture on the sly, and then my parents would say, “Let’s go to the movies tonight,” so then I’d see the same movie again, since I couldn’t say I’d already seen it. But this made me want to see films again and again—so much so that three years after the Liberation, I’d seen “The Raven” maybe nine or ten times. [CDNT65 2:50-3:25] But after I wound up working at Cahiers du cinéma, I turned away from French film. Friends at the magazine, like Jacques Rivette, thought it absurd that I could recite all of “The Raven” ’s dialogue and had seen Carné’s “The Children of Paradise” [1945] fourteen times. [CDNT65 3:26-3:45]
A little while ago, you mentioned two Renoir films that you had also seen a dozen or more times. Could you say something about Renoir’s impact on you?
I think Renoir is the only filmmaker who’s practically infallible, who has never made a mistake on film. And I think if he never made mistakes, it’s because he always found solutions based on simplicity—human solutions. He’s one film director who never pretended. He never tried to have a style, and if you know his work—which is very comprehensive, since he dealt with all sorts of subjects—when you get stuck, especially as a young filmmaker, you can think of how Renoir would have handled the situation, and you generally find a solution.
Roberto Rossellini, for example, is quite different. His strength was to completely ignore the mechanical and technical aspects of making a film. They just didn’t exist for him. When he made notes in his scripts, he said all kinds of extravagant things, such as “The English army enters Orléans.” So you think, “O.K., he’ll need lots of extras.” And then you see “Joan of Arc at the Stake” [1955], where there are only ten cardboard soldiers jammed onto a small set. When Rossellini achieves serenity or even casualness in a film, like the one he did about India, it’s phenomenal yet at the same time inexplicable. Such a film’s minimalism, its humility before its subject, is in the end what makes it such a magnificent work. My favorite Rossellini film is “Germany Year Zero” [1947], probably because I have a weakness for movies that take childhood, or children, as their subject. Also because Rossellini was the first to depict children truthfully, almost documentary-style, on film. He shows them as serious and pensive—more so than the adults around them—not like picturesque little figures or animals. The child in Germany Year Zero is quite extraordinary in his restraint and simplicity. **This was the first time in the cinema that children were portrayed as the center of gravity, while the atmosphere around them is the one that’s frivolous.
Rossellini reinforced a trait already evident in Renoir: the desire to stay as close to life as possible in a fiction film. Rossellini even said that you shouldn’t write scripts—only swine write scripts—that the conflict in a film should simply emerge from the facts. A character from a given place at a given time is confronted by another character from a very different place: and voilá, there exists a natural conflict between them and you start from that. There’s no need to invent anything. [CDNT65 8:25-9:10] I’m very influenced by men like Rossellini—and Renoir—who managed to free themselves of any complex about the cinema, for whom the character, story, or theme is more important than anything else.
What about the influence on you of American cinema?
You know, we owe so much, here in France, to American cinema, which Americans themselves don’t know very well. Especially early American cinema, which Americans hardly know at all and even scorn. As for influential Americans around the time of the French New Wave, I’m thinking of Sidney Lumet, Robert Mulligan, Frank Tashlin, and Arthur Penn. They represented a total renewal of American cinema, a little like some of the New Wave directors in France. They were extremely alive, the first films of these men, like early, primitive American cinema, and at the same time they were quite intellectual. Their movies managed to unite the best of both qualities. At the time, Americans scorned these filmmakers because they didn’t know them very well and because they weren’t commercially successful. Success is everything in America [CP60 1:49-2:38], as you know far better than I.
Why was the French New Wave an artistic success?
**At the start of the New Wave, people opposed to the young filmmakers’ new films said, “All in all, what they’re doing is not very different from what was done before.” I don’t know if there was actually a plan behind the New Wave, but as far as I was concerned, it never occurred to me to revolutionize the cinema or to express myself differently from previous filmmakers. I always thought that the cinema was just fine, except for the fact that it lacked sincerity. I’d do the same thing others were doing, but better.
There’s a famous quote by André Malraux: “A masterpiece isn’t better rubbish.” Still, I thought that good films were just bad movies made better. In other words, I don’t see much difference between a film like Anatole Litvak’s “Goodbye Again” [1961] and my picture “The Soft Skin” [1964]. It’s the same thing, the same film, except that in “The Soft Skin” the actors suit the roles they play. We made things ring true, or at least we tried to. But in the other picture, nothing rang true because it wasn’t the right film for Ingrid Bergman or Anthony Perkins or Yves Montand. So “Goodbye Again” was based on a lie right from the start. The idea isn’t to create some new and different cinema, but to make the existing one more true. That’s what I had in mind when I began making films. There isn’t a huge difference between Jean Delannoy’s “The Little Rebels” [1955] and “The 400 Blows” [1959], either. They’re the same, or in any event very close. I just wanted to make mine because I didn’t like the other one’s artificiality—that’s all. [CDNT65 6:42-8:08]
We know you were a film critic before you became a director. What film was your first article about?
Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times” [1936], an old print of which I saw in a film club. It was seized afterwards by the police because it was a stolen copy! Then I started writing for Cahiers du cinéma, thanks to André Bazin. I did an incendiary piece in Cahiers against French films as typified by the screenwriters Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, the fossils of French cinema. That article got me a job at the weekly Arts and Entertainments, where I wrote the film column for four years.
I think being a critic helped me because it’s not enough to love films or see lots of films. Having to write about films helps you to understand them better. It forces you to exercise your intellect. When you summarize a script in ten sentences, you see both its strengths and its weaknesses. Criticism is a good exercise, but you shouldn’t do it for too long. In retrospect, my reviews seem more negative than not, as I found it more stimulating to damn rather than praise; I was better at attacking than defending. And I regret that. I’m much less dogmatic now, and I prefer critical nuance. [CDNT65 5:05]
You were a film critic for four years, but all the while you were looking for an opportunity to make a film, right?
Oh yes, absolutely. I started making little movies in 16mm that weren’t worth showing. They had all the same flaws as most amateur films: they were extremely pretentious; and they didn’t even have a storyline, which is the height of conceit for an amateur. I probably learned something from this work, like how to suggest rather than show. But in the first of these shorts, there was nothing but doors opening and closing—what a waste!
My first real film, in 1957, was “Les Mistons”—“The Mischief Makers” in English. It had the advantage of telling a story, which was not common practice for short films in those days! It also gave me the opportunity to start working with actors. But “Les Mistons” also had commentary interspersed with its dialogue, so that made making it much simpler. The film met with quite a bit of luck. It was awarded a prize at a festival in Brussels, I believe. “Les Mistons” is based on a story by Maurice Pons; it’s not my original script. I saw it as the first of a series of sketches. It was easier at the time, and would be even now, to find money for three or four different short films than to find enough financial support for a feature film. So I planned to do a series of sketches with the common thread of childhood. I had five or six stories from which I could choose. I started with “Les Mistons” because it was the easiest to shoot.
When it was finished, I wasn’t completely satisfied because the film was a little too literary. Let me explain: “Les Mistons” is the story of five children who spy on young lovers. And I noticed, in directing these children, that they had no interest in the girl, who was played by Gérard Blain’s wife, Bernadette Lafont; the boys weren’t jealous of Blain himself, either. So I had them do contrived things to make them appear jealous, and later this annoyed me. I told myself that I’d film with children again, but next time I would have them be truer to life and use as little fiction as possible.
_**Is it awkward for a writer-director to have been a critic first? When you start a scene, does the critic in you tap you on the shoulder and say, “I don’t think so!”
It is indeed rather awkward, because not only was I a critic, I have also seen nearly three thousand films. So I always tend to think, “But that was done in such-and-such a film,” “Compared to X’s movie, this is no good,” etc. Plus, however necessary they may be, I’m very skeptical of storylines. So much so that I turn a script’s narrative over in my head endlessly, to the point that often, at the last minute, I want to cancel the filming of it.
How, then, do you ever manage to complete a film?
Because the advantage of cinema over novels, for instance, is that you can’t just drop it. The machine’s in gear, contracts are signed. And besides, I like actors a lot, at least some of them—those I choose! There are promises to be kept, there is motivation to keep your word. But once you’ve begun, that type of problem falls away, that doubt of a general nature. Then there are just the daily problems of moviemaking, which are strictly technical and can be solved amid all the noise and laughter—it’s really quite exhilarating. When the filming is over, though, the doubts come back. [CP60 4:01-5:15]
What was the provenance of “The 400 Blows”?
When I was shooting “Les Mistons,” “The 400 Blows” already existed in my mind in the form of a short film, which was titled “Antoine Runs Away.”
What caused you to lengthen Antoine’s story and make “The 400 Blows” longer?
It was because I was disappointed by “Les Mistons,” or at least by its brevity. You see, I had come to reject the sort of film made up of several skits or sketches. So I preferred to leave “Les Mistons” as a short and to take my chances with a full-length film by spinning out the story of “Antoine Runs Away.” Of the five or six stories I had already outlined, this was my favorite, and it became “The 400 Blows.”
“Antoine Runs Away” was a twenty-minute sketch about a boy who plays hooky and, having no note to hand in as an excuse, makes up the story that his mother has died. His lie having been discovered, he does not dare go home and spends the night outdoors. I decided to develop this story with the help of Marcel Moussy, at the time a television writer whose shows for a program called “If It Was You” were very realistic and very successful. They always dealt with family or social problems. Moussy and I added to the beginning and the end of Antoine’s story until it became a kind of chronicle of a boy’s thirteenth year—of the awkward early teenaged years.
In fact, “The 400 Blows” became a rather pessimistic film. I can’t really say what the theme is—there is none, perhaps—but one central idea was to depict early adolescence as a difficult time of passage and not to fall into the usual nostalgia about “the good old days,” the salad days of youth. Because, for me in any event, childhood is a series of painful memories. Now, when I feel blue, I tell myself, “I’m an adult. I do as I please,” and that cheers me up right away. But then, childhood seemed like such a hard phase of life; you’re not allowed to make any mistakes. Making a mistake is a crime: you break a plate by mistake and it’s a real offense. That was my approach in “The 400 Blows,” using a relatively flexible script to leave room for improvisation, mostly provided by the actors. I was very happy in this respect with Jean-Pierre Léaud as Antoine, who was quite different from the original character I had imagined. And as we improvised more, the film became more pessimistic, then—in brief spurts, as a contrary reaction—so high-spirited that it almost became optimistic.
Does the screenplay of “The 400 Blows” constitute in some ways your autobiography?
Yes, but only partially. All I can say is that nothing in it is invented. What didn’t happen to me personally happened to people I know, to boys my age and even to people that I had read about in the papers. Nothing in “The 400 Blows” is pure fiction, then, but neither is the film a wholly autobiographical work.
Let me put my question another way: it has often been said that Antoine Doinel was you, a sort of projection of yourself. Could you define that projection, that character?
There is indeed something anachronistic or composite-like about Antoine Doinel, but it’s difficult for me to define. I don’t really know who he is, except that he is a kind of mixture of Jean-Pierre Léaud and myself. He is a solitary type, a kind of loner who can make you laugh or smile about his misfortunes, and that allows me, through him, to touch on sad matters—but always with a light hand, without melodrama or sentimentality, because Doinel has a kind of courage about him. Yet he is the opposite of an exceptional or extraordinary character; what does differentiate him from average people, however, is that he never settles down into average situations. Doinel is only at ease in extreme situations: of profound disappointment and misery on the one hand, and total exhilaration and enthusiasm on the other. He also preserves a great deal of the childlike in his character, which means that you forget his real age. If he is twenty-eight, as Léaud was in 1972, you look at Doinel as if he were eighteen: a naïf, as it were, but a well-meaning one for all that. [AC72]
_A related question: **Is it because Montmartre holds personal childhood memories for you that you came back to it in at least two of your Antoine Doinel films—the first two, as a matter of fact—“The 400 Blows” and “Love at Twenty” (1962)?
Yes, most likely. It’s easier to orient myself when I shoot on familiar streets. Also, when you’re writing, you tend to think of people and places you know. So you wind up coming back to these familiar places and people. [CDNT65 0:51-1:15] As for my method of writing, I started making “script sheets” when I began work on “The 400 Blows.” School: various gags at school. Home: some gags at home. Street: a few gags in the street. I think everyone works in this way, at least on some films. You certainly do it for comedies, and you can even do it for dramas. And this material, in my case, was often based on memories. I realized that you can really exercise your memory where the past is concerned. I had found a class photo, for example, one in the classic pose with all the pupils lined up. The first time I looked at that picture, I could remember the names of only two friends. But by looking at it for an hour each morning over a period of several days, I remembered all my classmates’ names, their parents’ jobs, and where everybody lived.
It was around this time that I met Moussy and asked him if he’d like to work with me on the script of “The 400 Blows.” Since I myself had played hooky quite a bit, all of Antoine’s problems with fake notes, forged signatures, bad report cards—all of these I knew by heart, of course. The movies to which we truants went started at around ten in the morning; there were several theaters in Paris that opened at such an early hour. And their clientele was made up almost exclusively of schoolchildren! But you couldn’t go with your schoolbag, because it would make you look suspicious. So we hid our bags behind the door of the theater. Two of these movie houses faced each other: the Cinéac-Italiens and the New York. Each morning around nine-forty-five, there would be fifty or sixty children waiting outside to get in. And the first theater to open would get all the business because we were anxious to hide. We felt awfully exposed out there in the middle of all that… [CDNT65 9:10-10:55]
As a former critic, if you had had to talk about “The 400 Blows,” would you have spoken about it in the glowing terms used by most critics?
No, I don’t think so. I honestly think I’d have liked it, because I like the ideas in the picture—they’re good ideas—but I wouldn’t have gone so far in praising “The 400 Blows” as the critics did. I couldn’t have called it a masterpiece or a great work of art, because I can see too clearly what’s experimental or clumsy about it. [CP60 3:32-4:10]
Was the film received well in every country outside France?
No, it flopped in Italy, for one, maybe because it’s too similar to Italian neorealist films, and they always flopped there, too! “The 400 Blows” didn’t go over very well in Germany, either; and the Spanish didn’t even want to distribute it despite the Catholic prize it won at Cannes. [CP60 5:48-5:55] But the film worked in Japan, in Holland, in America, and of course elsewhere, too.
**“The 400 Blows” drew some reaction from French censors, didn’t it? [CP60 6:19-6:21]
Yes, because of the situations in the film: adultery, a child seeing his mother with another man, escaping from reform school, things like that. Initially, the French censors rated “The 400 Blows” for sixteen-year-olds and over. But after the film was awarded not only the Catholic prize but also the prize for best director at Cannes, the 16+ rating was rescinded.
Were the censors afraid they’d look like idiots?
I think that’s it, yes. [CP60 6:06-6:49]
I’d like to get back for a moment to the matter of Renoir’s, as well as other filmmakers’, influence on you—particularly in the instance of “The 400 Blows.”
Well, Jean Vigo’s influence is obvious in “The 400 Blows.” [CDNT65 8:25] But certainly “The 400 Blows” is also, if less obviously, influenced by Renoir’s work, be it in a simple gesture or in some solution to an artistic or technical problem. For example, Renoir’s secret is his casual style, yet that “styleless style” never prevents him from handling larger-than-life scenes. I had the problem of such a larger-than-life scene in “The 400 Blows.” The boy Antoine—who told the teacher that his mother had died to avoid having to hand in a note for his absence, and who is found out in the afternoon when his mother comes to the school—decides never to return home. And after school, he talks with his young friend about his plans. This was quite difficult dialogue to do, because it wasn’t natural. These words weren’t something a child would normally say; I’m very realistic, and such moments, as originally written, went against the—or my—grain. It was hard, therefore, to find the right stance with which to direct Jean-Pierre Léaud in this scene. For some reason, the situation reminded me of a scene in “The Human Beast” [1938], where Jean Gabin, as Jacques Lantier, returns at the very end of the movie. He comes back to his locomotive the morning after killing Simone Simon’s character, and he has to explain to the other conductor, played by Julien Carette, that he killed this woman. Renoir directed Gabin marvelously here, precisely by using the hallmark of his cinematic style: its utter casualness or offhandedness. Gabin says, “It’s horrible. I killed her. I loved her. [CDNT65 17:50-18:20] I’ll never see her again. I’ll never be by her side.” He said all this very softly, very simply. And I used my memory of Gabin’s performance to direct Léaud, who did his own scene exactly like Gabin’s.
That was a tough scene. It was easier to coach Léaud in the scene where he goes to school without a note after a three-day absence and decides to say his mother died. In this instance there wasn’t any question of someone’s directorial influence on me but only of my own directorial instinct. We don’t know that Antoine has decided to tell this lie, only that he’ll say something big. Of course, he could use a number of ways to say his mother had died. He could be shifty or sad or whatever. I decided the boy should give the impression that he doesn’t want to tell the lie. That he doesn’t dare say it but that the teacher pushes him to do so. The teacher asks, “Where’s your note?” and the child replies, “It’s my mother, sir.” The teacher inquires, “Your mother? What about her?” It’s only because the teacher badgers him that Antoine suddenly decides to fight back and say, “She’s dead!” I told Léaud, “You say, ‘She’s dead!’ but you think in your head, ‘She’s dead! What do you say to that?’ ” He doesn’t say this but he thinks it, and that gives him the exact look and tone of voice I wanted—even the upturned head. [CDNT65 13:08-14:08] There’s a lie you can use only once! [CDNT65 15:05]
Let me give you another example, returning once again to the issue of directorial influence—this time of someone other than Renoir. If in “The 400 Blows,” I had filmed the father coming to the classroom and slapping his son after the boy returned to school and said his mother was dead, then I’d have had problems editing because I would have wanted fast action here and could have gotten that only with a lot of cutting. But the rest of the film was just a matter of capturing a lot of situations without an excessive amount of cutting. So I knew I’d have to create the drama in this scene within the frame itself, with little or no cutting, and I thought of Alfred Hitchcock. Otherwise I had no point of reference; I had no idea how to edit the scene in order to create the intensity I wanted. I knew now that I had to show the headmaster, then there’s a knock on the door, the boy senses it’s about him, and next you see the mother. I told the actress Claire Maurier that, instead of scanning the classroom for her son, as might be natural since she had never been to the school before, she was to look right away in the direction of Antoine’s desk. I knew that this would create the dramatic effect I was looking for, and not the reality of her searching for her son’s face [CDNT65 15:25-16:25] amidst a sea of other young faces.
“The 400 Blows” was filmed on location but without direct sound, right?
Yes to your first question: we filmed in real locations. We found a tiny apartment on Rue Caulaincourt in Paris, but I was afraid that my cameraman, Henri Decaë, wouldn’t want to film there. I showed it to him and he nonetheless accepted, knowing the numerous problems he would face. For example, when we wanted to show the father, the mother, and the boy around the dinner table, Decaë had to sit on the windowsill, on the sixth floor, with the whole crew waiting outside on the stairs. Things like that happened all the time.
I don’t like studios, I have to say; I overwhelmingly prefer to shoot on location. And I’ve shot all my pictures on location, with the exception of “Fahrenheit 451” [1966], where we had to burn the set in the end! It’s a simple question of reality. On location, there may be the necessity of going indoors from the outdoors, but even if that weren’t an issue, what happens inside is truly different depending on whether you’re in a studio or a real apartment. A real apartment would cost a fortune to create in a studio: the thickness of the wood in a door, say, the lock or set of locks, the way the door closes. You don’t get these things in a studio, where everything’s made of plywood. [CDNTBB70 4:00-4:43]
As for your second question, yes again: “The 400 Blows” was shot almost entirely without sound. It was dubbed afterwards, except for one scene, where the psychologist questions Antoine. If this scene got so much notice, it’s not just because Léaud’s performance was so realistic; it’s also because this was the only scene we shot with live sound. The shooting of such a scene, as you might guess, is heavily influenced by television. Although I believe TV is misguided when it attempts to compete with the cinema by trying to handle poetry or fantasy, it’s in its element when it questions someone and lets him explain himself. This scene from “The 400 Blows” was definitely done with television in mind. Jean-Pierre didn’t have a script. I gave him an idea of the questions and a basic sense of the answers so that they would match the storyline, but he used his own words, his own language—and, of course, it was much more interesting this way.
Aside from this scene with the psychologist, the dubbing worked rather well, because children are easily dubbed, and Jean-Pierre Léaud is dubbed so well you can’t tell. With the parents in the film, the post-synchronization is not so good.
Why did you shoot “The 400 Blows” in CinemaScope?
Because I had the naïve feeling that it would make the film look more “professional,” more stylized, and less naturalistic. CinemaScope has this strange quality of being an oblong window that hides many details, so that when a character moves through a room, he moves almost abstractly, as if he were in an aquarium. I shot “Shoot the Piano Player” [1960] and “Jules and Jim” [1962] in CinemaScope as well, and perhaps such stylization works better in these two “stylized” films.
Could you say something about the relationship, in your career, of “Shoot the Piano Player” to “The 400 Blows”?
“Shoot the Piano Player,” my second feature film, was made in reaction to “The 400 Blows,” which was so French. I felt that I needed to show that I had also been influenced by the American cinema. Also, after the exaggerated reception and publicity for “The 400 Blows”—its disproportionate success—I became quite agitated. So I touched on the notions of celebrity and obscurity in “Shoot the Piano Player”—reversed them, in fact, since here it is a famous person who becomes unknown. There are glimpses in this film, then, of the feeling that troubled me at the time.
I had made “The 400 Blows” in a state of anxiety, because I was afraid that the film would never be released and that, if it did come out, people would say, “After having insulted everyone as a critic, Truffaut should have stayed home!” “Shoot the Piano Player,” by contrast, was made in a state of euphoria, thanks to the success of “The 400 Blows.” I took great pleasure in filming it, far more than in “The 400 Blows,” where I was concerned about Jean-Pierre Léaud. I was wondering whether he would show up each day, or, if he did, whether he had had a fight the night before and would appear on the set with marks all over his face. With children, we directors worry more, because they do not have the same self-interest or self-regard as adults.
**Is it true that you placed an ad in the newspaper France Soir to recruit the boy who would play the hero of “The 400 Blows”?
Yes. I didn’t like the idea of finding a kid on the street and asking his parents, “Would you let him make a movie with me?” For this first feature film of mine about children, I wanted the children to be willing—both the children and their parents. [CC81 0:10-0:38] So I used the ad to get them **to come to a studio near the Champs-Elysées, where I was doing 16-mm. screen tests every Thursday. [CS80 0:30-0:34] I saw a number of boys, one of whom was Jean-Pierre Léaud. [CC81 0:38-0:43] He was more interesting than all the rest, more intense, more frantic even. He really, really wanted the part, and I think that touched me. I could feel during the shoot that the story improved, that the film became better than the screenplay, thanks to him. [CS80 0:34-0:56]
_Léaud’s work gave birth not only to “The 400 Blows” but to the whole Antoine Doinel saga, [CC81 0:46-0:53] which I think is unique in the history of cinema: starting in 1959, to follow a character for twenty years, watching him grow older over the course of five films. [CS80 0:01-0:15] Let’s talk now about the other films in the cycle: “Love at Twenty,” “Stolen Kisses” [1968], “Bed and Board” [1970], and “Love on the Run” [1979]. **At the end of “The 400 Blows,” we left Jean-Pierre Léaud on the beach. He had just escaped from a reform school, where he had been up to some mischief and had suffered various misfortunes.
When I brought him back, in “Love at Twenty”—which was really just a sketch, called “Antoine and Colette,” as part of an anthology film—he was eighteen and perhaps living on his own. In any case, you no longer see his family in this film. Antoine is starting his professional life, working in a record company, and we see his first love affairs a few months before he must go into the army. “Stolen Kisses” is simply the continuation of the adventures of Antoine Doinel. It is the same character: like me but not me; like Jean-Pierre Léaud but not Léaud.
I must say that I like to start with more solid material than this. I like having two or three reasons to make a movie: say, the coming together of a book I want to adapt or an atmosphere I want to depict with an actor that I want to film. In “Stolen Kisses,” I admit, I just wanted to work with Jean-Pierre Léaud again; I more or less set a specific date by which I wanted to begin making a film with him. And with my screenwriters Claude de Givray and Bernanrd Revon, I sat down and said, “What are we going to do with Léaud?” For his professional life, we adopted a perfectly simple solution. Leafing through a phone book, we found an ad for private detectives. We thought, “Here’s a job you don’t see in French films, usually only in American movies about a famous detective named Marlowe.” But it should prove funny in France. For Doinel’s romantic life, I suggested putting him opposite a girl his own age, even younger. We’d even suppose that he wrote her when he was in the army and therefore already knows her. We would then have him live what I think is every young man’s fantasy: an affair with a married woman. I thought right away of Delphine Seyrig for the part of the married woman, because I didn’t want this affair to be sordid but instead a bit dreamlike or idealized.
Well, Seyrig was the perfect actress to achieve that end.
Exactly. We know that Jean-Pierre is in love with Delphine, but we also know that she knows, and that Léaud doesn’t know that she knows, so the game goes three ways. The scene of their having coffee **is thus not just between Jean-Pierre and Delphine. It’s between Jean-Pierre, Delphine and the audience. It’s much stronger with three players, much more intense, which means in filmic terms that you can take your time. The long silences make you expect something unusual: perhaps he’ll lunge at her for a kiss. We don’t know what to expect, but we expect something. My only direction to the both of them was, “Stir the sugar not once but six times. Don’t sip the coffee right away. We have all the time in the world in a scene like this, where the situation is so fraught with tension.”
The anticipation comes to a climax when Léaud responds, “Yes, sir,” to Delphine’s question, “Do you like music, Antoine?” The wrong way to do the scene at this point would have been to fade to the next scene. But this “Yes, sir” is like a moving locomotive. And to keep it on track, you have to keep up the momentum. As a director, your only salvation is flight, and flee Léaud does as the music becomes very frenzied. I asked Antoine Duhamel for something like the music you find in chase scenes in American movies—music, that is, that would sustain the tension and not dissolve or break it. And this music mustn’t stop, even when there is dialogue. It’s a total frenzy. Plus the camera is constantly moving.
This scene, or sequence, illustrates **another lesson I learned from Hitchcock, who said: “You work hard to create an emotion, and once the emotion is created, you should work even harder to maintain it.” [SK70]
Why did the Antoine Doinel cycle come to an end?
I guess because the ideas I get about Antoine Doinel, and the way Léaud plays him, are closely tied to adolescence [BB70 2:10-2:19]; there’s something in the character that refuses to grow up. [CC81 1:04-1:07] I’m like the silly father who continues to treat his twenty-three-year-old son like a child: “Blow your nose”; “Say hello to the nice lady.” That’s the problem with parents who won’t allow their children to grow up. People who do comic strips have the same problem: they create a character who will be the same age forever. [CC81 1:19-1:44] But starting with “Bed and Board,” the character of Antoine had actually reached adulthood, so there was no reason to go on much beyond that. [BB70 2:20-2:28] That’s why the cycle had to come to an end with “Love on the Run.” It has a deliberately, boldly, even desperately happy ending, unlike the endings of the previous four films in the cycle, all of which were open-ended.
**In “Bed and Board” you were examining the problems of romantic relationships. How did you approach them?
Not really as problems. More as a chronicle, with some happy scenes and some serious or dramatic scenes. [BB70 2:52-3:07]
“Shoot the Piano Player” has similar changes of tone.
It does. They were planned in that film, since they were also in the American David Goodis’s source novel—a Série noire from 1956 called “Down There”—but the changes of tone were reinforced during the shooting because I realized I was faced with a film without a theme. The same thing happened spontaneously in “Stolen Kisses” and “Bed and Board,” themselves movies without clear subjects: some days during the shooting I stressed the comical side, other days the dramatic side. Compared to what I did in “Stolen Kisses,” though, in “Bed and Board” I tried to be much funnier when something was funny, and much more dramatic when something was dramatic. It’s the same mixture in both films, but in “Bed and Board” I just tried, so to speak, to increase the dosage. [BB70 3:07-3:21] And I did this in part by showing Antoine Doinel as a married man.
It was around ten years later that I made “Love on the Run,” which included flashback sequences from the earlier Doinel films and had the feeling of a conclusion for me. When the characters in “Love on the Run” talk about a memory, I was able to show that memory, while still telling a story happening in the present and with new characters. There is a summing up in this film, since I had already decided that, once it was finished, I would no longer use the character of Antoine Doinel.
I’d like to press you a bit more on why did you used so much flashback material in “Love on the Run.” In some instances in this film it almost seems like padding.
Well, to begin with, there are only eighteen minutes—in a film of ninety-five minutes—borrowed from the earlier works in the Doinel cycle. In using these flashbacks, I felt I had to take advantage of an opportunity never afforded any previous movie director. When filming a story that involves the past, you always have the problem of finding a young actor who looks like the adult protagonist. When I made “The Man Who Loved Women” [1977], for example, I found, on the streets of Montpelier, and by sheer luck, a little boy who looked just like Charles Denner. We jumped at the opportunity to use him and included in the film two or three flashbacks of the Denner character as a child. But when you have the good fortune, as I did in the Antoine Doinel cycle, to shoot someone at the ages of fourteen, eighteen, twenty-four, and twenty-six, then to pick him up again at thirty-five, you have in your hands material that is precious. And I wanted to take advantage of having filmed this same boy at different stages of his life: by placing him in a new story that allowed him to be seen—simultaneously, as it were— as a man, an adolescent, and a child.
The editing of “Love on the Run” must have presented its share of continuity problems.
Yes, it is obviously a film in which editing is much more important than it was in such linear narratives of mine as “The Green Room” [1978] and “The Story of Adele H.” [1975]. This must be the film where I spent the most time—sixteen weeks, in fact—in the editing room since “Fahrenheit 451,” where all the book-burning scenes were played as flashbacks. The problem in “Love on the Run” was to homogenize very unrelated materials, to retain the train of thought when we came back to the present after a flashback. And the more the visual material is unrelated, the more unity you have to preserve on the soundtrack: the sound bridges the gaps. Let’s just say that when the image changes, the sound cannot change, or has to change as little as possible.
So, in the end, you were happy with this film?
**To tell the truth, I wasn’t happy with “Love on the Run.” This picture was, and still is, troubling for me. People may well enjoy it, but I’m not happy with it. It didn’t seem like a real film to me. For one thing, the experimental elements in it are too pronounced. A movie often has an experimental feel in the beginning, but by the end you hope it feels like a real object, a real film, so that you forget it’s an experiment.
But in defense of your own movie, it’s a kind of diary on film. You watch a character through his evolution.
Yes, but did he really evolve? I felt that the cycle as a whole wasn’t successful in making him evolve. The character started out somewhat autobiographical, but over time it drew further and further away from me. I never wanted to give him ambition, for example. I wonder if he’s not too frozen in the end, like a cartoon character. You know, Mickey Mouse can’t grow old. Perhaps the Doinel cycle is the story of a failure, even if each film on its own is enjoyable and a lot of fun to watch. [CS80 2:10-3:16]
That said, Antoine Doinel’s life is just a life—not an exhilarating or prodigious one, but the life of a person with his own contradictions and faults. When I have a man like this as the main character on screen, I focus on his weaknesses. I also did this outside the Doinel cycle: Charles Aznavour in “Shoot the Piano Player,” Jean Desailly in “The Soft Skin,” and Charles Denner in “The Man Who Loved Women” are not heroes, either. American cinema is great at depicting “heroes,” but the vocation of European cinema may be to express the truth about people, which means to show their weaknesses, their contradictions, and even their lies.
_The character of Antoine Doinel aside, **it must have been an advantage to work with the same actor on five different occasions.
Yes, that’s true. It’s always nice to work with an actor more than once, because shooting goes by so fast that you really only get to know the actors in the editing room, after they’ve gone off to work on other films. There you watch them in slow motion, backwards and forwards, taking your time to look closely at everything. I think a first film is like being introduced to an actor. It’s only later that you get to know the actor better and enjoy writing for him. [RDD79 2:20-2:43]
Jean-Pierre Léaud is certainly the actor you know best. You’ve watched him grow, into a man as well as a film artist.
Yes, but I don’t want him to be too closely linked with me or Antoine Doinel. As you know, he’s made other films, like Jean-Luc Godard’s “Masculine-Feminine” [1966]. [RDD79 5:30-6:02] And he has worked not only with me and Godard, but also with Julien Duvivier, Jean Eustache, Jean Cocteau, Jerzy Skolimowski, and many other directors. I used him myself outside the Doinel cycle, in “Two English Girls” [1971] and “Day for Night” [1973]. **But, obviously, the character of Antoine Doinel fit Léaud like a glove, because I wrote the character with him in mind. Indeed, I created some scenes just because I knew he would be funny in them—at least I laughed during the writing as I thought of him. [RDD79 6:02-6:22]
The problem is, I got a kick out of putting him in situations that were, if not degrading, then not to his advantage. The characters around him look strong, and Antoine therefore looks too weak. It’s a high price to pay for the fun I had when writing or filming the cycle, and that Léaud had while acting in it—because he loved to play the part. But sometimes the public gets confused. They forget it’s fiction and can form an inaccurate opinion of the actor. [CC81 1:50-2:20] That happened in “Day for Night,” which is about shooting a film. I had this fabulous Italian actress, Valentina Cortese, who portrays an alcoholic prone to dramatic outbursts because her son is dying or for whatever reason. Now, no one thought that Valentina Cortese was an alcoholic in real life. Léaud himself plays a young actor in “Day for Night.” At some point he jeopardizes the whole shoot because of a romantic problem he is having. And do you know what? People thought from this that Jean-Pierre Léaud was capable of walking off the set, of abandoning a film before the shooting is completed. This hurt Léaud a bit, this public reaction: he told me so.
There was a process of identification of the man with his character, going all the way back to “The 400 Blows.”
Yes, more with him than with Jacqueline Bisset or Valentina Cortese or Jean-Pierre Aumont in the same film: a director’s perverse triumph, you could call it.
_**You once told a tale about going into a café the day after they showed one of the Antoine Doinel films on television. The waiter in the bistro said to you, “I saw you on TV last night.” He had identified you with the character of Doinel.
He came to pour my coffee and said, “You must have made that picture some time ago.” He saw the age discrepancy, at least.
But he saw a resemblance, too. When you think about it, is this amazing, disconcerting, or both?
There was a scene in “Day for Night” where Léaud and I were face-to-face, together for the first time in front of the camera. That was a strange feeling, for both of us, and for more than just a moment.
In 1957 you wrote the following: “The films of the future will be more personal than autobiography, like a confession or diary. Young filmmakers will speak in the first person in order to tell what happened to them: their first love, a political awakening, a trip, an illness, and so on. Tomorrow’s film will be an act of love.” If someone wanted to make movies today, would you tell that person, “Tell us about your life. There’s nothing more important or more interesting.” Or would you say, “The industry is tougher now. Conform to it and don’t listen to what I said.”
Very tactfully put, M. Cardullo. **Yes, well done. My prediction was fulfilled beyond my wildest dreams—you know that. So I wouldn’t say the opposite today. But I would say, “Talk about what interests you, but make sure it interests others, too.”
What does that mean? How can you know your film will interest others?
I know the type of film I was reacting against when I wrote those sentences in 1957. I was thinking of films like—no, I don’t really want to give negative examples. I’m not a critic anymore. Suffice it to say that I was thinking of films where you could put the following in the opening credits: “Any resemblance to real life is purely coincidental.” These are films where everything is false: male/female relationships, the way people meet, everything. I’m not talking about Robert Bresson, Jacques Becker, and Max Ophüls. There were some filmmakers, like these, that we liked. But I am talking about the kind of movie in which the script was written by five or six people, who had been given the royal treatment for a month at the Trianon in Versailles.
Or during filming on the Côte d’Azur.
Yes. This process produced really awful movies, which we still occasionally see on television. Time has lent them a sort of harmless homogeneity that they did not have at the time they were made. So back then it was only natural to call for more personal films. Films like “Bonjour Tristesse” [1958], from the novel by Françoise Sagan, who was a teen-ager when she wrote this book. Basically we wanted films like that, or at least closer to that, and I think this is what happened, but to such a point that films eventually became more than personal: they became narcissistic. The makers of such films spoke very personally, but sometimes they could have benefitted from having had a friend read their scripts first.
Many such films, for example, followed a single, often autobiographical character. In the Antoine Doinel cycle, of course, I followed just such a character. But at some point I felt that I had evolved—when I made “Stolen Kisses,” to be exact—because there I made myself add several substantial supporting roles. So I, and others, were gradually returning to a narrative tradition based more on observation and synthesis than subjectivity and self-exploration. Now we have both kinds of films. It’s true there are no more powerful producers who send writers to St-Paul-de-Vence or the Trianon in Versailles, and this is probably a good thing. Nowadays you write a script all by yourself, in your own little apartment [CC81 2:30-7:05]—and this is perhaps not so good a thing as one might at first think.
Thank you so much for your time today, M. Truffaut. I know this was not easy for you. You have been a most gracious and giving host.
You’re quite welcome; I enjoyed our talk. And I wish you luck in your own critical career. Do you want to remain a critic?
For now, yes.
Then at least stay as close to filmmaking as you can, if you do not become a director yourself. I mean through set visits, script advising, television commentary, and interviews like this one—which was nothing like the academic kind I am often called upon to give. Such activity will make you a better, or more complete, critic, and, especially if others follow your lead, it could ultimately make the cinema less self-directed, which is to say more honest. Plût á Dieu!
From “Action! Interviews with Directors from Classical Hollywood to Contemporary Iran,” edited by Gary Morris (London: Anthem Press). Reprinted with permission of Bert Cardullo and the publisher.
Photograph: Truffaut at home, 1983. Unimedia/Getty Images.
