A newspaper article from The News in Brief ran in November 1952 about a man named Michel Portail who stole a car to visit his sick mother. He ended up killing a motorcycle cop named Grimberg during the escape. François Truffaut read this story and wrote a treatment with Claude Chabrol, but they could not agree on how to structure the narrative. Jean-Luc Godard worked as a press agent at 20th Century Fox when he met producer Georges de Beauregard. He pitched the idea for Breathless because he liked the earlier treatment. Chabrol and Truffaut were already famous directors by May 1959. They attended the Cannes Film Festival that month and sent a letter to Beauregard endorsing Godard as the director. Their names helped get the film approved, though both would only appear in small roles later. The final screenplay followed Truffaut's original ideas closely except for one major change to the ending. Godard told Truffaut that the subject was the story of a boy who thinks of death and a girl who does not. Truffaut believed Godard chose a violent end because he was sadder than him.
Visual Style And Editing
Cinematographer Raoul Coutard used Ilford HP5 film stock which was designed for still cameras rather than motion pictures. He spliced eighteen-meter lengths into one-hundred-twenty-meter rolls to shoot under low-light conditions. The camera equipment included an Eclair Cameflex model that had sprocket holes different from standard film formats. Nearly the entire movie required dubbing in post-production because the camera made too much noise for synchronized sound. Godard envisioned the project as a documentary and tasked Coutard with using a handheld camera throughout. There was next to no lighting on set during filming. The editing process happened at GTC Labs in Joinville by Cécile Decugis and her assistant Lila Herman. Pierre Rissient stated that jump cuts were not planned during shooting or initial editing stages. Coutard noted there was a panache in how it was edited that did not match the way it was shot. Andrew Sarris analyzed these edits as existentially representing the meaninglessness of time intervals between moral decisions. The film earned a pre-release reputation as the worst picture of the year before its public showing.