François Truffaut

• 1. Introduction

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  François Truffaut was once called "The Gravedigger of French Cinema." In 1958, he was the only French critic not invited to the Cannes Film Festival. His reviews were brutal and unforgiving. A year later, the same Cannes festival handed him its Best Director award. The man who buried French cinema had just helped reinvent it. Truffaut, who lived from 1932 to 1984, became one of the founders of the French New Wave. How does a critic notorious for savaging films become the warmest filmmaker of his generation? How did a boy who skipped school to sneak into theaters come to sit across a table from Alfred Hitchcock for a book-length interview? And why would a man like David Thomson call him the most accessible and engaging crest of an entire movement?

• 2. The Stolen Childhood

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  Truffaut was registered as "a child born to an unknown father" in hospital records. Born in Paris in February 1932, he came into a world where his birth had to remain a secret because of the stigma of illegitimacy. His mother was Janine de Montferrand. Her future husband, Roland Truffaut, accepted the boy as an adopted son and gave him his surname.

  A private detective agency, hired in 1968, traced the question of his biological father to a Roland Levy, a Jewish dentist from Bayonne. His mother's family disputed the finding. Truffaut himself believed and embraced it. The uncertainty of his origins shadowed him from the start.

  His grandmother raised him through much of his early childhood, passing along her love of books and music. He lived with her until she died, when he was eight years old. Only after her death did he move in with his parents, a household he found unsatisfying enough that he stayed away as much as he could.

  Robert Lachenay, a friend from childhood, became Truffaut's lifelong best friend. Lachenay later inspired the character René Bigey in The 400 Blows and worked as an assistant on some of Truffaut's films. That bond, formed in a difficult youth, outlasted everything else.

• 3. Three Movies A Day

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  At eight years old, Truffaut saw his first movie, Abel Gance's Paradis Perdu, released in 1939. It began an obsession. He frequently skipped school and sneaked into theaters because he lacked the money for admission. Cinema offered the greatest escape from a home life he could not stand.

  At age eleven, he read Émile Zola's Thérèse Raquin, published in 1868, and decided he wanted to become a novelist. Books and films competed for his devotion. After being expelled from several schools, at age fourteen he chose to teach himself instead. He set two goals: watch three movies a day and read three books a week.

  "What switched me to films was the flood of American pictures into Paris after the Liberation," Truffaut said. He haunted Henri Langlois's Cinémathèque Française, soaking up foreign films. There he discovered American directors like John Ford, Howard Hawks and Nicholas Ray, along with the British director Alfred Hitchcock, whose work would follow him for the rest of his life.

• 4. The Gravedigger's Pen

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  André Bazin changed the course of Truffaut's life. After Truffaut started his own film club in 1948, he met Bazin, a critic who ran a film society and soon became a personal friend. Bazin helped pull Truffaut out of financial and criminal trouble during his formative years.

  In 1950, at eighteen, Truffaut joined the French Army and then spent two years trying to escape it. He was arrested for attempting to desert and locked in military prison. Bazin used his political contacts to get him released, then set him up with a job at his new magazine, Cahiers du Cinéma.

  At Cahiers, Truffaut became a critic and later an editor, building a reputation for savage reviews. In 1954 he published "Une Certaine Tendance du Cinéma Français," an article attacking the state of French films. He named eight directors he considered incapable of creating worthy characters, among them Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson and Jean Cocteau. The article caused a storm of controversy.

  That controversy opened a door. Truffaut was offered a place at the cultural weekly Arts-Lettres-Spectacles, where he wrote more than 500 film articles over the next four years. He also developed the auteur theory, the idea that the director is the true author of a film. American critic Andrew Sarris would champion the theory in the 1960s.

• 5. Antoine Doinel

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  Jean-Pierre Léaud was an ordinary boy of fourteen who answered a flyer and auditioned for a role. He became Antoine Doinel, the alter ego at the heart of The 400 Blows in 1959. After seeing Orson Welles's Touch of Evil at the Expo 58, Truffaut made the film as his directorial debut, and it won him the Best Director award at Cannes.

  The film was highly autobiographical. Both Truffaut and Doinel were only children of loveless marriages. Both committed petty crimes of theft and truancy. Interviews after the film revealed Léaud's natural sophistication and instinctive understanding of acting for the camera. The collaboration would last for years.

  Doinel's story continued across a series of films known as the Antoine Doinel Cycle. Stolen Kisses in 1968 introduced Claude Jade as Antoine's fiancée and later wife, Christine Darbon. Bed and Board followed in 1970, then Love on the Run in 1979 closed the cycle, with Léaud and Jade returning one last time.

  The 400 Blows marked the beginning of the French New Wave, a movement led by directors like Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and Jacques Rivette. Truffaut had been writing about rejecting traditional cinema structure for years. He soon provided the premise for another landmark New Wave film, Godard's Breathless, released in 1960.

• 6. Range And Restlessness

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  Charles Aznavour starred in Shoot the Piano Player in 1960, a film of disjunctive editing and random voiceovers. Truffaut later said that midway through filming he realized he hated gangsters, so he played up the comedy of the characters. Critics admired the film, but it performed poorly at the box office. Truffaut never again experimented so heavily.

  Jules and Jim, in 1962, told the story of a ménage à trois with Oskar Werner, Henri Serre and Jeanne Moreau. The critic Pauline Kael defended it against charges of immorality, calling it one of the most beautiful films ever made and, viewed as a work of art, exquisitely and impeccably moral. The film grew from Truffaut's collaboration with novelist Henri-Pierre Roché.

  In 1963, Truffaut was approached to direct Bonnie and Clyde, with a treatment meant to bring the New Wave to Hollywood. He helped develop the script but ultimately declined. Before stepping away, he interested both Godard and actor Warren Beatty, who carried the project forward with director Arthur Penn.

  Fahrenheit 451, in 1966, was Truffaut's first non-French film and his only English-speaking one, adapted from Ray Bradbury's novel. He barely spoke English and worked on a larger scale than ever before. A conflict with Oskar Werner grew so bad that Werner stormed off set, forcing Truffaut to shoot scenes using a body double from behind. The film was a commercial failure, and Truffaut never worked outside France again.

• 7. Hitchcock And Godard

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  In 1966, Truffaut published Hitchcock/Truffaut, a book-length interview with the director he idolized. It tied for second on Sight and Sound's list of the greatest books on film. He paid tribute to Hitchcock again in The Bride Wore Black and Mississippi Mermaid, and in his final film, Confidentially Yours, in 1983. That last film was black and white, a bookend to a career that touched Hitchcockian themes of private guilt and public innocence.

  Day for Night, in 1973, won Truffaut the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and the BAFTA Award for Best Film. He played Ferrand, the director of the film-within-the-film, called Meet Pamela. The movie wove in scenes from his earlier work and is considered his most reflective.

  That film fractured one of his closest relationships. Godard, his old colleague from Cahiers, wrote Truffaut a raucous private letter in 1973 calling him a liar. After May 1968, Godard had wanted a more political, Marxist cinema, while Truffaut resisted making films for political purposes. Truffaut fired back with an angry twenty-page reply, calling Godard a radical-chic hypocrite.

  Godard later tried to reconcile, but the two never spoke or saw each other again. After Truffaut's death, Godard wrote the introduction to a selection of his correspondence and included his own 1973 letter. He also offered a long tribute in his film Histoire(s) du cinéma.

• 8. The Last Metro

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  The Last Metro, in 1980, gave Truffaut an international revival. It garnered twelve César Award nominations and won ten of them, including Best Director. He had once played the eighteenth-century physician Jean Marc Gaspard Itard in The Wild Child in 1970, and acted as scientist Claude Lacombe in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977.

  His personal life ran alongside his work. He was married to Madeleine Morgenstern from 1957, and they had two daughters, Laura and Eva. Madeleine was the daughter of Ignace Morgenstern, managing director of the distribution company Cocinor, and she helped secure funding for Truffaut's first films. He later lived with Fanny Ardant from 1981 to 1984, and they had a daughter, Joséphine, born in September 1983.

  Truffaut held some unusual habits. Unusually for a Frenchman, he took no particular interest in food. He kept what was described as a fetishistic collection of Eiffel Towers. An atheist, he nonetheless respected the Catholic Church and requested a Requiem Mass for his funeral.

  In July 1983, after a first stroke and a brain tumour diagnosis, he rented a house outside Honfleur in Normandy. He was expected to attend the premiere of his friend Miloš Forman's Amadeus. Instead he died on the 21st of October 1984, aged fifty-two, at the American Hospital of Paris. He was buried in Montmartre Cemetery, said to have numerous further films still in preparation.