Francois Truffaut: Day For Night

Day For Night (Directed by Francois Truffaut)

Francois Truffaut’s Academy Award-winning Day For Night (1973) celebrates the pleasures and creative tribulations inherent in filmmaking, and is one of Truffaut’s most admired works. Truffaut himself stars as the director of a frivolous melodrama whose production is hampered by the whims of a neurotic actor (Jean-Pierre Léaud), an ageing but still powerful Italian diva (Valentina Cortese), and a British newcomer tormented by personal scandal (Jacqueline Bisset). Day for Night is an irreverent ode to the art of filmmaking as well as a charming comedy about the perils of love and passion, supported by strong performances and an evocative score by Georges Delerue.

Truffaut revels in the series of mishaps that often create the spark for enhancements to the film: a phrase, a screenplay alteration, a new approach to a scene. Ultimately, this loose, lighthearted narrative serves as the backdrop for an affectionate portrayal of the artists both in front of, and behind the camera, who come together on a shoot via friendships, personal troubles, and love affairs, to form a joyful filmmaking family.

Even as the craft behind the smallest aspects of a feature film is exposed, nothing about it feels like the product of meticulous design. Day for Night appears effortless, as if this was the film Truffaut had been preparing for his entire life. 

The “story” revolves around impulsive young actor Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Leaud, evoking a decade of roles in French New Wave films) who wanders around the set asking “Are women magic?” While Truffaut orchestrates his actors around the magic of the film making process. Truffaut appears to be exploring that question by exposing the layers of performance and craft, the offscreen dramas, the plans gone awry, that still leave behind a sense of wonder.

Day For Night has the feel of a mock documentary in many respects. The renowned opening image, an extravagant crane shot floating through a town square, is more than just a typical twist in which the activity seen turns out to be a scene from a movie. Truffaut begins to make us aware of the artifice involved in every cinematic scenario by showing another take with the assistant director's voice bellowing over the top. The film also establishes its documentary style, with a behind-the-scenes film team obtaining quotes from key players, the stars discussing the plot from the perspective of their own characters.

Ferrand does not appear to be making a particularly good or profound picture, despite his earnest devotion to filmmaking. Due to the constraints imposed by the death of a celebrity, he is obliged to eliminate a key moment in the film, an elaborate costume ball. “Meet Pamela”, a melodrama with an international cast and sunny locations has the feel of a commercial obligation, perhaps Truffaut recalling some of his more lightweight endeavours.

Day For Night, appropriately called after a technical term for night scenes shot in daylight with a specific filter, provides a fascinating glimpse into the reality behind the artifice of filmmaking. Soap suds substitute for snow, electric lights for candles, and balconies dangle precariously in the air. Truffaut reveals the tricks of the filmmaker’s trade, much like a conjuror disclosing the secrets behind his magic, but rather than ruining the illusion, it actually adds to the pleasure as the audience get to see and participate in the filmmaking process. 

The characters and the actors who play them, as in most Truffaut pictures, are more important than the plot. Ferrand strives to maintain his composure while struggling to keep the production on track and under budget. But he’s dealing with a never-ending stream of catastrophes brought on by his emotionally fragile performers. Ferrand himself remains a mystery, and we never learn what troubles him personally, giving him an air of superiority, as if he is beyond his players’ mundane concerns. 

Perhaps the key lies in the fact that Truffaut was a noted film critic and passionate cinephile. His character says at one point, “People like us are only happy in our work.” A statement that certainly applies to Truffaut (one of the more memorable scenes in the film is a dream in which Ferrand recalls himself as a child stealing a publicity still of Citizen Kane from a cinema). 

Day for Night is a dense, self-reflexive film, replete with inside jokes and allusions to other films and filmmakers, full of humour and charm, it creates the impression that one has witnessed something much deeper and more realistic than the film’s lightweight tone would suggest.

The following edited excerpt is transcribed from a rare and extensive interview with Truffaut published in the December 1973 edition of Filmmakers Newsletter with journalist Suni Mallow. 

SUNI MALLOW: Why did you decide to make a film about filmmaking? 

FRANCOIS TRUFFAUT: I had every reason in the world to make a film like that. But I think your question should be, “Why did you, Francois Truffaut, wait thirteen years to make a film on filmmaking?" I cannot answer your first question the way I would for any ordinary film publication because your readers are filmmakers and they should know. To the readers of "Filmmakcrs Newsletter" it is obvious why I made this picture; so the only question is, why did I wait so long to do it. 

In my films I have always carefully avoided making any allusions to films and filmmaking, or at best made very indirect allusions to the cinema which could never really bother tne viewing public because they look at the films very naively. But I have thought about making a movie about filmmaking for many years. For instance, each time I make a film I think to myself that I must make a film about filmmaking, and I take notes in a little book I keep in my pocket. I especially took notes while I was shooting Two English Girls and Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me. 

SM: Then why did you finally find it necessary to let the audience in on the mystique of filmmaking? 

FT: Because I thought that, although it is a job just like any other, filmmaking is visually much more interesting than most other occupations. In French films they really do not know how to depict somcone's occupation; American directors are far better at that. For instance, when you have a scene with someone working in, for instance, a garage, you see the person working just the way it is in real life. On the other hand, in France they would have a shot of him just coming up from under a car and wiping his hands on a rag, throwing it down, and then the dialogue starts. 

You could say that I made Day For Night just as some American directors have made films about hunting or fishing. For instance, a film I like very much is Howard Hawks' HATARI. In that film there are many views of hunting, and although I saw it many times, each time I had the impression that it was exactly like a film about filmmaking. And I am quite convinced that Hawks felt the same way too. You would watch John Wayne leading the expedition into Kenya with his group around him, and in the evening they would stop and have a meal and there would be a little bit of dancing and they would discuss their plan for the next day — which was just like the working schedule for a film. For instance, they would say, "Tomorrow we will hunt giraffe," and then the next day there would be a scene of hunting a giraffe. So although it was indirect, I think that consciously it was very much a film about filmmaking. 

SM: When you conceive of a film, do you work initially from a visual concept or from a dialogue/situation one? 

FT: That depends very much on the particular scene in the film. When I am writing a script for a film there are some scenes which I can see immediately and which arc very clear in the mind's eye, while other scenes are less clear and just come about as I am shooting them. 

It has been my experience in films that when I have had something visual I very strongly worked out beforehand, it's really been a disappointment. Whereas quite often the things that haven't been worked out visually beforehand, and which aren't fixed in my mind's eye, turn out to be some of the more interesting shots. 

SM: Do you ever work out shots or scenes very carefully and very precisely beforehand, the way Hitchcock does? 

FT: The only time I ever really worked out anything in great detail like that was in Fahrenheit 451. But I don't work like that for my French films. Obviously the form of the film and the script are there beforehand, but I like to work things out as I go. Or, for instance, I like to spend a Sunday working on the script for the next week's shooting. 

SM: Then how do you handle your actors? Do you allow them great freedom for portrayal and improvisation, or do you control their every move, perhaps even use them almost as props? 

FT: The treatment varies with each actor. For example, Valentina Cortese in Day For Night did some improvisation, but there was none at all with Jean Pierre Aumont. On the other hand, Jacqucline Bissett was the first actress I'd worked with that I hadn't met before. So in her case I kept her role very vague because I had to find out the kinds of words she could use and what she could sav correctly in French before I could put into her lines words which I felt she could use everyday as part of her vocabulary. 

SM: What about the scene where you make a dialogue change for her based on something she has said off the set of the film-within-a-film, "Meet Pamela"? Is that typical of your style as a director? That is, you change actors' dialogue as you get to know them better off the set — as, I believe, Rohmer does with his actors? 

FT: Yes, it happens sometimes. Particularly, for example, with Jeanne Moreau. 

SM: Why did you use Miss Bisset - that is, put yourself in a position of using an actress you didn't know, with whom you had never worked, and of whose French you were uncertain? 

FT: But there was really no problem, Had I fed all the details of what I wanted in the lead actress in Day For Night into a computer, the computer would have told me to take Jacqueline Bisset. For instance, I wanted her to be English and yet famous for having done films in America; she has members of her family who were French; and she has something mysterious about her face. So for all those reasons, I could not have used anyone but Jacqueline Bisset. 

In fact, I was so set on having her that I sent her a cable asking her to be in the film more than a year before I began shooting just to ensure that I could have her and she would be free. She brings Hollywood to the film: she brings that aspect of America into the film because she has made films here and people have associations of her with America in films and such actors as Steve McQuccn in Bullitt.

SM: What about the scene in Stolen Kisses where Leaud is in front of the mirror and he repeats names over and over and over. Did you plan that out very carefully for Leaud, or was that his own creation? 

FT: That was completely improvised during shooting. You see, I needed the scene because the character has nobody in the film in whom he can confide, yet there was a point in the film where he had to confide in somebody because he didn't know with whom he was in love. So this was his way of showing that he was torn between the two women. 

SM: In Day For Night did you use different filmic techniques to distinguish the film-within-the-film from the rest of the film? For instance, old-style Hollywood techniques when you were doing "Meet Pamela" and perhaps modern cinema-verite-type techniques for the rest of the film? 

FT: Very much so. For instance, part of the film is done with the camera handheld, whereas for "Meet Pamela" I never show this; that is, I never show a scene which is shot with a hand-held camera. 

SM: Was the fixed camera on that crane we see so often? 

FT: No, I rarely used the crane. 

SM: A 35mm camera is a heavy piece of equipment to put on a shoulder. What system did you use? FT: Well, first of all the cameraman was excellent and you could hardly see it move. And then we used the Panavision system, which I think is very fine. 

SM: How much direct involvement do you personally have in the technical aspects of a production? 

FT: I don't look at what I am shooting through the camera very much, however I do talk things over with the cameraman and discuss the lighting and the framing. But I would much rather keep my eye on the acting and the actors than deal with the camera. And I never cover myself when I shoot. I take it only from one angle and don't make extra shots from, say, the sides. I believe that every shot has only one angle, one lens. 

SM: Do you feel the same way about the editing? That there is only one way a scene can be edited? 

FT: There are often things that can be changed, and as you work you discover good ideas from what you see in the cutting room. 

SM: How closely do you supervise the cutting of a picture? 

FT: I work very closely with the editor and look at it continually with him until the end. 

SM: For some people the film is made in the camera, in the shooting; for others it is almost entirely worked out in the editing. In your work, do you emphasize one over the other? 

FT: No. I like every stage of the filmmaking process. But while I like to do the script, I detest all the pre-production work because it is full of anxiety. I love the actual shooting, and the cutting and the mixing are fascinating. 

SM: In the case of Day For Night you were working with your own script. When you use someone else's material as the basis for a film — say, the novel for Jules and Jim or Two English Girls — how true to the original do you feel you must be? 

FT: I am always changing as I go along. But sometimes I like the words or phrases too much and will stick too faithfully to the original. However, I definitely prefer to work on my own material, and I hope that in the future I will not do any more adaptations and will work only from my original screenplays. 

SM: What are your favorite shots in Day For Night? 

FT: I find particularly entertaining the scene in the film where Alexander (Aumont) and I are going up the stairs to the cutting room and as we are going up the crane is coming up at the same time. Then as we go behind the Moviola the camera zooms in on us and frames us very tightly. This pleased and amused me very much because the way it turns out shows how it was done and how Hollywood would do that sort of thing - with the crane coming up and then zooming dramatically in on this crummy little cutting room at the top of these rickety old stairs.

SM: Are there any scenes which are not in the final version of the film? And if so, why were they cut? For budget reasons? Length? They simply didn't work visually? 

FT: Yes. there are one or two scenes that are not there, but it was because I felt they weren't well enough acted. 

SM: What is your overall opinion of Day For Night? Does it match up to your expectations? 

FT: I think the film is twenty minutes too short because there was a lot to say. I was 90 per cent satisfied with the dialogue and probably 60 per cent satisfied with the visual. In the visual, I had the sun in certain scenes, and I hate bright sunlight in color films and have disliked it for several years now. But I didn't have the means to do the scene over another day. And there are probably some other faults here and there throughout the picture. 

SM: Is that usual with your pictures — that only 60 per cent pleases you? 

FT: Yes, about that. But in Fahrenheit 451 I think it was maybe better visually. 

SM: In the film the ending of "Meet Pamela" is changed because of the death of a member of the cast but also because of financial pressures from the backers. To what degree must you, Francois Truffaut, as a well-known artist and director, bend the content of your films to financial pressures? 

FT: Personally I do not often worry myself with this aspect… In the ending of Day For Night what I hoped to show was that the director of a film is not unhappy with accidents. The accident which occurs at the end and changes the shooting is a good thing; it is stimulating. The scene in the projection room where they are discussing Alexander's death in the picture begins on a sad note because of his death in real life, but as it progresses you can see that the director is excited — he realizes he doesn't need the scene that he had originally intended. When he comes up with the idea of shooting Alexander in the back, he is very excited about the idea and says, "Yes, we'll shoot him in the back. It will be even better that way because it's more cruel!" And the script girl, who is used to working with this director and who knows his character and what he likes in his films, says, "Yes, and we could shoot the scene in the snow!" And I think this excitement and pleasure comes over in the film. 

So on the one hand there is the anxiety of the director. For example, on weekends I am very afraid and I don’t like the actors to go skiing because they could break their legs. But on the other hand, when something happens which was not planned I simply accept it because the world just keeps going around and the film must keep going forward as if it were something alive. Accidents should be transformed into something good, something favorable and positive for the film, and I hope that I showed this. So it is for this reason that I don't like to make plans on the financial side because it is not in my character. One just has to adapt to all these problems. And I think that is the truest aspect of Day For Night because it shows how I react in the face of these sort of things. 

SM: Many directors enjoy that moment when something unaccounted for happens and they have to change the script, but it's different when you have to change it because the distributors or the backers feel that it will be more viable commercially if it is changed. 

FT: No, I don't like that either. But it so happens that this has never happened to me.

Transcribed and edited from A Portrait of Francois Truffaut. An Interview With Francois Truffaut by Suni Mallow. Filmmakers Newsletter, December 1973. 

Nicolas Roeg: On Truffaut, Words and Images

Fahrenheit 451 (Directed by Francois Truffaut)

There are things that Truffaut did in those early movies that left a lasting impression: the opening expository section of ‘Jules and Jim’, where time and space is abolished and the images flow like music across the screen; the series of shots from ‘Fahrenheit 451’ (another underrated picture) where the camera moves in close-closer-closest on a character in imminent danger, which I admit I've duplicated many times in my own films. And the character played by Charles Aznavour in ‘Shoot the Piano Player’ who keeps almost acting but never does until it’s too late, had a profound effect on me, and on many other filmmakers – Martin Scorsese.

Francois Truffaut’s underrated adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966), was regarded by the director as his ‘saddest and most difficult’ filmmaking experience, mainly due to tension in the relationship between Truffaut and leading man Oskar Werner. 

Truffaut wrote the English-language script in collaboration with Jean-Louis Richard. Critics have assumed that Truffaut’s limited grasp of English accounts for the film’s awkwardness – its dialogue is often clumsy and its performances weirdly stilted. It’s a curious film, lively and surreal in tone, filmed in a pointedly modernist style that only underlines how uncomfortable the viewing experience is. Despite its flaws it’s a strangely compelling film that vividly engages with Bradbury’s themes of knowledge, control and the media.

The film’s cinematographer was Nicolas Roeg who went on to become a distinguished director in his own right. Roeg had previously worked on Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death (1964) and later Richard Lester’s Petulia (1968) before moving into direction in 1968 in collaboration with the painter and writer Donald Cammell on Performance.

The glacial, futuristic surface of Fahrenheit 451 later re-emerges in Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) which starred David Bowie, with its harsh, alien vision of the barrenness of modern life.

Shortly after Francois Truffaut died in 1984, Nicolas Roeg spoke to Richard Combs about working with Truffaut on Fahrenheit 451, for an article published in Sight & Sound magazine:

I’ve always felt that, although Truffaut was greatly revered and admired, at the same time, in terms of film and how much he loved film, he was underestimated. Because he was known to be a literary man, someone who was enormously fond of literature, he was adopted by a very literary set. But in fact his love of literature was separate from his love of film. I think that’s why, many times, he has been underestimated as an essentially visual person. I enjoyed working with him tremendously on Fahrenheit 451, which was a film very much to be ‘read’ in terms of images. I suppose he was the first director, the first film person, with whom I’d enjoyed having a conversation about film, or the hope of film. There weren’t many about in those days.

I remember there was a lot of criticism of Fahrenheit to do with François’ knowledge of English. The critics complained that it was so stilted. But that had all been quite deliberate. He hadn’t even wanted to place it as an English film, or to suggest that the language was necessarily English. The script was written first in French, deliberately, so that it could be translated into English, then translated back into French, because he wanted to lose the English idiom completely, then finally translated back into English. He wanted it set - and I thought this was a marvellously futuristic idea – in a time when people had lost the use of language. After all, the whole premise of the film was to do with losing a literary background. And that was completely missed by the critics.

There was even one little clue which Truffaut put inside the film, because he didn’t want this to be mistaken. There was a scene where Montag and Clarisse are sitting talking; they can see the fire station, and a man comes up and puts a note through the letter box. Montag explains why that is, people reporting on each other. Clarisse says, oh, he’s just a common informer; and Montag says, informant. Stilted things, stilted phrases: that was absolutely putting the dot on the ‘i’. We’ve even seen that sort of thing come to pass. Language is flattened slightly. You see it in films: in the 1930s and 40s in America they used words in films that they wouldn’t put in a script today. I don’t know whether it’s an apocryphal story, but apparently when George Cukor did a remake of Old Acquaintance as Rich and Famous, they did research into the title, and hardly anyone in America knew what an acquaintance was.

François was aware of that, and he realised that images were things to be read. Like the scene where Montag is sitting in bed with comics. Those comics were very carefully designed; they were a form of shorthand, so that the news could be read in pictures. The beauty of the language wasn’t what was important. It was like a rather intimate film where language means a lot, but we no longer have the language. So you virtually have to read the pictures. It implies there will come a time when people will still have all those emotions, but you have to read through other indications, other signs. It was a sign language once, and maybe we’ll go back to that.

François thought the stranglehold of the written word was going to be equalled, if not superseded, by the idea of images. I guess it takes a long time; he thought it was coming quicker. But in some ways one forgets how quickly things have changed. For instance, he wanted no written signs, and in the fire station there was nothing written. It was very difficult to work those signs out. But think about how road signs have changed. Once when you drove down the road you’d have to read dozens of things – road bears to the left, school ahead – but now they’re just children with a stripe through them, so we can drive anywhere in Europe. At the same time that was a very filmic thought: the essence of film. I’m sure that was why he was attracted to the story.

I’d hate it to be forgotten just how much of that kind of a filmmaker he was. Not just charming stories and enchanting acting. For instance, he wanted to make a film with small children, babies, just to get their expression at the point when words aren’t quite understandable. We had a scene in Fahrenheit with a baby lying in his pram in the park, and the fire chief turns him over and finds a book underneath. Another aspect of that is the scene at the end with the book people – who are all wrong. The veneration of literature – which he loved – is all wrong. The boy who is reciting from Stevenson, reciting after the old man, has got it wrong. And there are twins who announce themselves as Pride and Prejudice, Part One and Part Two, but of course there isn’t a Part One and Part Two in Pride and Prejudice. All these things were missed by the very people who had revered him as a literary filmmaker.

It’s the same thing with acting. Oskar Werner – who tragically also died a few weeks ago – was at the time, as I remember, just starting to enter a successful, commercial stage of his life. And he was rather concerned about his image. It appeared to be, or I surmise, that Oskar thought this was a film he was doing for François, because he owed him something or he liked him. But at that stage of his career he just wanted to get it over with. To play the part of Montag, you have to be completely dedicated to the thing. So he didn’t enter fully into the film. But François won in the end; he had to, again by the use of film, by juxtaposing one thing with another. Whatever meaning you tell me you are putting into that performance, I shall change it by making you look at a rubber duck. If you look seriously at this man when I want you to be smiling, because I want you not to understand what is happening, I shall use that serious look. I shall make you be looking at a rubber duck while he is talking. So that you will look seriously as if you don’t understand.

Every single piece in the construction of the film was visual. I remember when the art department brought a beautifully made model of a fire engine into the office of Cyril Cusack, who played the fire chief. It was like the model that a ship’s captain would traditionally have had in his cabin. But François said, no, no, go to a toy shop and get me a toy. Because that sort of skill is already gone from the world. It was a toy world in which all the skills had been lost. When we discussed the look of the film, he said, I don’t want it to have a reality, I want it as a Doris Day film, with little shining colours. We had great trouble, because at that time people were going for a tremendous realism. I was ordering huge brutes, to make it high key, glossy, like Technicolor.

He also wanted a certain sense of awkwardness in behaviour patterns. After all, things change subtly. I’ve always noticed that films set in any sort of future very rarely draw on the present. But just imagine someone a hundred years ago trying to predict the present. I live in a house that’s a hundred years old. Its internal functions are different, the carriages outside are different – but it’s a mixture. Things don’t all go away. That’s why we began Fahrenheit with those aerials and things on top of suburban houses, although inside the houses are sliding doors – which don’t work… Changes are so subtle: relationships, manners, our behaviour. I thought it was quite a frightening film in that respect. But it’s very difficult to read that. It’s easier to see something you can be totally in awe of. Something which is part of your life and has taken on another aspect is much more difficult to believe in.

François was rather sanguine about the failure of Fahrenheit, critically and commercially. One time when we were having dinner he said, it must have been a bad film. I asked why? He said, nobody went to see it. In terms of his filmmaking, I don’t think he pulled back after that at all. But Fahrenheit might have been a stretch which he was not given the chance to do again. And he wasn’t a man to explain himself. He’d rather go on: a futuristic present-day person. He was wonderful about the past. He told me how he hated costume pictures where they tell you these were the clothes they wore from 1490 to 1498, and then these clothes were worn from 1498 to 1502. He said, I like to have a lot of clothes, sort of turn of the century, and just put them in a basket and have the artists try some of them on. After all, the jacket I am wearing is 15 years old. I am not always in fashion.

– ‘Looking at the rubber duck: Nic Roeg on Truffaut and the making of Fahrenheit 451’ (Sight & Sound, Winter 1984/85). For original article go here

Francois Truffaut: Autobiography and Alter Ego

The 400 Blows (Directed by Francois Truffaut)

A cinephile from a young age, François Truffaut first made his cinematic mark as an outspoken critic for Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s, opposing the French film industry’s established form and techniques and urging for the director to be regarded as the ‘auteur’, or author, of the film. 

Truffaut then became an auteur himself, beginning  with The 400 Blows, which won him the best director award at Cannes and introduced the French new-wave to an international audience. 

While still a young film critic, Truffaut had made his first film, Une visite, in 1954, an eight-minute short with Jacques Rivette as cinematographer and Robert Lachenay as assistant about a man who moves into an apartment with a woman and unsuccessfully tries to seduce her. Truffaut treated the picture as an exercise and did not believe it worthy of release. 

Francois Truffaut's subsequent foray into filmmaking was an adaptation of a Maurice Pons novella titled Les Mistons. Filmed in 1957 in Nimes with a small crew and a low budget, Gerard Blain and Bernadette Lafont starred in the film. The novel, set in rural France, follows a gang of young guys ("mistons," which translates approximately as "brats") who get obsessed with a beautiful young woman. They cause mayhem for the two of them, jealous of her intense romance with her partner. 

Although it was barely twenty minutes long, Les Mistons touched on a number of topics that Truffaut would revisit in subsequent films: love, children, writing, and death. While the premise is straightforward, Truffaut's ability as a filmmaker is immediately obvious. His use of composition, lighting, music, and location all contribute to the creation of a charming story whose episodic structure expresses the underlying ideas and emotions well. 

The film was well received and gave Truffaut a measure of confidence in his directing aspirations. Truffaut attended the Cannes Film Festival as a critic in May 1958, having penned an especially strident attack on the French cinema business the previous year, accusing it of making "too many poor pictures" and describing Cannes as a "failure”. Barred from entry to Cannes by the organisers, Truffaut still  managed to attend. Truffaut had written in the same article that “The film of tomorrow will not be directed by civil servants of the camera, but by artists for whom shooting a film constitutes a wonderful and thrilling adventure.”  Truffaut's would soon get the opportunity to put his ideas into reality. He had nurtured a semi-autobiographical screenplay, The 400 Blows.  The success of Les Mistons had elevated Truffsut’s status, and funds for a feature were now available.

The 400 Blows remains one of Truffaut’s most popular and seminal works. It was followed by two key films of the French new wave, Shoot the Piano Player – adapted from the David Goodis’ thriller Down There – and Jules and Jim – the story of a love triangle set in pre-war Paris. 

Truffaut also continued to follow the exploits of The 400 Blows main character Antoine Doinel — played by Jean-Pierre Léaud — through the 1970s (Stolen Kisses, Bed and Board, Love on the Run), while directing such classics as Day for Night and The Last Metro, which displayed his passion for art and life. 

Shortly before his untimely death in 1983 Truffaut was interviewed by Bert Cardullo. The discussion mainly centered around the making of The 400 Blows. In this extract Truffaut talks about his early career and how his filmmaking process was influenced by his work as a film critic and his lifelong obsession with watching movies. 

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.

The 400 Blows (Directed by Francois Truffaut)

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…

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.

The 400 Blows (Directed by Francois Truffaut)

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.

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.’ ‘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 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...

The 400 Blows (Directed by Francois Truffaut)

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.

The 400 Blows (Directed by Francois Truffaut)

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 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!

The 400 Blows (Directed by Francois Truffaut)

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.

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 – 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.

Shoot the Piano Player (Directed by Francois Truffaut)

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.

Léaud’s work gave birth not only to ‘The 400 Blows’, but to the whole Antoine Doinel saga, 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. 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.

Stolen Kisses (Directed by Francois Truffaut)

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.

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.

Bed and Board  (Directed by Francois Truffaut)

‘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 – 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. 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.

Bed and Board  (Directed by Francois Truffaut)

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.

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...

Love on the Run (Directed by Francois Truffaut)

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... 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.’

– From ‘Action! Interviews with Directors from Classical Hollywood to Contemporary Iran,’ edited by Gary Morris (London: Anthem Press).

Truffaut: The Whiteness of Carl Dreyer

Vampyr (Directed by Carl Dreyer)

“Consciously, I do nothing to please the public”, noted Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer. The singular calmness of Dreyer's approach may account for his reputation as a serious and uncompromising artist. In contrast to many other contemporary filmmakers, Dreyer's work appears to come from a different era, they have a monumental timeless quality that eschew contemporary “relevance”. 

Dreyer believed that realism was not a goal to strive towards — it was simply not art. In contrast, Dreyer sought for what he dubbed “psychological realism,” an approach that sought to represent the reality that lies behind the world that people see. Dreyer cut out anything that was redundant to his purpose, and so a minimalist, abstract style evolved. Initially alienating to those unfamiliar with his austere approach, it is however perfectly in character with his work. 

Dreyer's spiritual asceticism however is defined by a rather humanist approach. Dreyer's feature films frequently deal with issues related to discrimination and the role of women living in a patriarchal culture. In these films, Dreyer places emphasis on character above plot, especially when it comes to showing his concerns about human suffering. 

The picture that critics have most consistently ranked as Dreyer's greatest achievement, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), is an excellent way to see the major themes of his work. Because it has come to be regarded as one of the real masterpieces of the pre-sound era, the picture is justifiably believed to be the apotheosis of Dreyer's silent cinema technique. 

This picture was produced in France, and the Société Générale des Films, who were finishing work on Abel Gance's Napoleon, were involved in the process (1927). The Society of Genuérale offered Dreyer complete creative power and an unrestricted budget. While Gance delivered a decades-long spectacle featuring epic battle scenes, Dreyer went in a more straightforward direction, centering his film solely on Joan's trial and execution. Instead of telling the storey of how Joan led an army into battle in an attempt to drive the English out of 15th-century France, Dreyer made an effort to solely focus on her trial and execution. Dreyer condensed the events of Joan's trial into a single day, resulting in a film with a unity of time, place, and action which illustrates Dreyer's desire to explore inner conflicts, especially those involving the inner workings of a locale. 

Dreyer's shots throughout the film focus on Joan and her assailants, mainly in close-ups. They bring the players' faces closer, so increasing our understanding of their internal feelings, but this also reduces the space surrounding them to insignificance. Joan's sense of confusion is heightened by Dreyer's sparing use of cinematic style. And the picture shifts focus to Joan's inner spiritual dimension. Dreyer always maintained that the artist should focus on the internal aspects of a subject, rather than the surface aspects, and there is no better illustration of this concept than in Dreyer's masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc. 

The Passion of Joan of Arc confirms Dreyer's previous demonstration of his skills in silent film, but Dreyer's later work demonstrates even more mastery in terms of dealing with sound. He made his first attempt into the new media by creating a dream-like mood of gothic dread in his film Vampyr (1932). Also contributing to its otherworldly aspects was the fact that Vampyr was created utilising experimental sound technology, which carried over numerous methods and artistic flourishes from the silent period. But with the film "Day of Wrath," Dreyer was firmly on the route to his mature style, which was characterised by an austere and languid pace. 

Dreyer used a pioneering arc-and-pan camera movement in addition to lengthy takes to allow him to remain at a distance from the players in Ordet (1955). An in-depth look at faith and family that leads to a thrilling, heart-wrenching climax. 

Dreyer’s career spanned four decades from the silent era to sound and included comedies and melodramas to the great chamber dramas for which he is best known.

Francois Truffaut wrote this famous article on the work of Carl Theodor Dreyer shortly after the great Danish director’s death in 1968:

When I think of Carl Dreyer, what comes to mind first are those pale white images, the splendid voiceless closeups in La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc) that play back exactly the acerbic dialogue at Rouen between Jeanne and her judges.

Then I think of the whiteness of Vampyr, though this time it is accompanied by sounds, the cries and horrible groans of the Doctor (Jean Hieromniko), whose gnarled shadow disappears into the flour bin in the impregnable mill that no one will approach to save him. In the same way that Dreyer’s camera is clever in Jeanne d’Arc, in Vampyr it frees itself and becomes a young man’s pen as it follows, darts ahead of, prophesies the vampire’s movements along the gray walls.

Unhappily, after the commercial failure of these masterpieces, Dreyer had to wait eleven years, eleven years out of his life, before shouting ‘Camera! Action!’ when at last he made Vredens Dag (Day of Wrath), a movie that deals with sorcery and religion, and is a synthesis of the other two films. Here we see the most beautiful image of female nudity in the history of cinema – the least erotic and most carnal nakedness – the white body of Marthe Herloff, the old woman burned as a witch.

Day of Wrath (Directed by Carl Dreyer)

Ten years after Day of Wrath, at the end of the summer of 1956, Ordet overwhelmed the audience at the Lido Biennale. Never in the history of the Venice Festival had a Golden Lion been more justly awarded than to Ordet, a drama of faith, more exactly, a metaphysical fable about the aberrations dogmatic rivalries lead to.

The film’s hero, Johannes, is a visionary who thinks he is Jesus Christ; but only when he comes to recognize his delusion does he ‘receive’ spiritual power.

Each image in Ordet possesses a forrnal perfection that touches the sublime, but we recognize Dreyer for more than a ‘cosmetician.’ The rhythm is leisurely, the interplay of the actors stylized, but they are utterly controlled. Not a frame escapes Dreyer’s vigilance; he is certainly the most demanding director of all since Eisenstein, and his finished films resemble exactly what they were in his mind as he conceived them. 

There is no active mimicry from the actors in Ordet; they simply set their faces in a particular manner, and from the outset of each scene adopt a static attitude. The important actions take place in the living room of a rich farmer. The sequential shots are highly mobile and seem to have been inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s The Rope. (In a number of interviews, Dreyer has mentioned his admira­tion for the director of Rear Window). And in Ordet, white predomi­nates again, this time a milky whiteness, the whiteness of sun-drenched curtains, something we have never seen before or since. The sound is also splendid. Toward the end of the film, the center screen is occupied by a coffin in which the heroine, Inger, is laid out. Johannes, the madman who takes himself for Christ, has promised to raise her from the dead. The silence of the house in mourning is broken only by the sound of the master’s steps on the wooden floors, an ordinary sound, the sound of new shoes, Sunday shoes....

Ordet (Directed by Carl Dreyer)

Dreyer had a difficult career; he was able to pursue his art only because of the income he had from the Dagmar, the movie theater he managed in Copenhagen. This profoundly religious artist, filled with a passion for the cinema, chased two dreams all his life, both of which eluded him: to make a film on the life of Christ, Jesus, and to work in Hollywood like his master, D. W. Griffith.

I only met Carl Dreyer three times, but it pleases me to write these few lines as I sit in the leather-and-wood chair that belonged to him during his working life and was given to me after his death. He was a small man, soft-spoken, terribly stubborn, who gave an impression of severity although he was truly sensitive and warm. His last public act was to gather the eight most important men involved in Danish cinema to write a letter protesting the dismissal of Henri Langlois from the Cinematheque Francaise.

Now he is dead; he has joined Griffith, Stroheim, Murnau, Eisen­stein, Lubitsch, the kings of the First generation of cinema, the genera­tion that mastered, first, silence, and then sound. We have much to learn from them, and much from Dreyer’s images of whiteness.

– ‘The Whiteness of Carl Dreyer’ in ‘Francois Truffaut: The Films in My Life’