Francois Truffaut

Hello readers,

Last but not least is the great french director Francois Truffaut. You can read about his life and they way he impacted movies forever:

Elements of Biography

It is very important, to understand the character, his work and even more his beginnings, to know that he was an undesired child, born outside marriage in the 30’s and that he has never known his real father.

Truffaut had a difficult childhood (never feeling loved by his parents) and took refuge in cinema where he used to go a lot in the Pigalle neighborhood in Paris. That’s where he developed his first critic sense. Truffaut had difficult time an went to jail twice: the first time, they had tried to screen a movie with a friend, had made paid the spectators and finally got a problem; his father said he didn’t know him after he had been arrested by the police and the second time because he had deserted army after having entered it on a whim. Both times, a very important man in his life helped him to get out: André Bazin – a cinema critic, he’s also the one who got him hired to one of the most famous movie magazine “Les Cahiers du Cinéma”, thanks to which Truffaut made his first contacts in the cinema industry.

It it said about Truffaut that he was suspicious about directors having other hobbies than cinema (like directors who liked playing tennis or have other activities), that's because he couldn't understand how you could share you life between cinema and other things. As one observer said: "Truffaut ate, slept and lived cinema"

He had a very productive career as he made 33 movies in a 33 year career as a director and 4 or 5 of his movies are considered by most of his peers as master pieces.

His life in movies

From movie to another, Truffaut recreated, maybe to better understand it, his own life. For him, movies reflect life but also replace it. He has lived through cinema still pursuing the ideal of the construction of a “movie-novel”. His biography can be red as a whole, but novelized and edited as a novel. This is first the familial story of Truffaut, which guided its work as much as his rebellious and marginal temperament guided him to direct his first movie.

As said before Truffaut always felt an affective lack coming from his family, shooting films was his life, his films team was his family and the cinema his roots

The young François Truffaut found used to first find refuge in books and movies, the adult one found, to balance its hardships and disappointments, a safe place in his perpetual project, to keep going on with his movie-novel.

Truffaut had a theory that a director says most of what he has to say in his first three movies, it was the same for him – some considered. Not to say that he didn’t make good movies afterwards but just that the theme evoked where more linked to each others when his films were “a reaction to the previous one”.

A very special relationship with his actors (but not only)

For his first movie: “The 400 blows”, Truffaut discovered who was about to become one of his favorite actors: Jeand Pierre Léaud, and he had him working with almost as unknown actors. His bet actually paid as both the public and the critics concurred with his vision and to this unlikely casting. From then, François Truffaut, amazing actors’ discoverer and director will make of his castings his “trademark”. He will launch the career of a lot of French actors such as Nathalie Bay, Fanny Ardant or Bernadette Laffont. Really loyal to his actors, Truffaut will constitute a sort of  troupe we’ll see movie after movie: Léaud, Denner, Jeanne Moreaun Claude Jade or Maurice Garrel give to Truffaut’s movie the “New Wave tone” that generations of film makers will adopt. Truffaut and his “Cahiers du Cinéma” ‘s friends know how impose a phrasing and gestures devoid of too much emphasis, always on the edge of clumsiness but revealing all the charm of an accent or the grace of young actors. The influence of Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio on Truffaut and his actors was obvious as much as the influence of actors as Marlon Brando, Montgomery Cliff or Paul Newman.

Finally, Truffaut’s relationships with his actress is strongly correlated to his sentimental life, he has been emotionally engaged and felt in love with a lot of them including Jeanne Moreau, Catherine Deneuve, Nathalie Baye or Fanny Ardant.

Truffaut: one of the founders of the new wave

Truffaut and some of his contemporaries (most of them were also critics) definitely revolutionized the post-war film industry. Besides the “Star system” and the “giants” of the movie industry which used to put a strain on budgets, the leading roles were held by almost unknown and the director as an “author” took a predominant role he didn’t enjoy before. A new way of producing, shooting, making and editing movies appear, in reaction to traditions and corporatism. The invention of the Nagra, the 16mm video camera (light and quiet), the predominance of outside shootings impose a new esthetic closer to the real. This break between “studio cinema” and “outdoor cinema” is perfectly illustrated in Truffaut’s Day For Night (La nuit américaine): Truffaut creates a mise en abyme showing us a team making a movie (him acting as a director) with the famous “Nuit Américaine” which corresponds to the shooting of a night scene in daylight.

Still, Truffaut didn’t deny some influence and used to say he had three “masters”: Rossellini for the 400 Blows, for the rhythm and the vitality of the Italian cinema; Hitchcock for The Soft Skin, an author which used to focus on situations rather than on actors and finally Jean Renoir for Jules et Jim, in which, at the opposite, Truffaut gives the priority to actors who, as Renoir, he deeply loved.