Written Interview: Francois Truffaut
Today is a real treat: The last interview given by Francois Truffaut before his untimely death of a brain tumor in 1983. Truffaut’s movie credits include Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows — 1959), À bout de souffle (Breathless — 1960), Tirez sur le pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player — 1960), Jules et Jim (Jules and Jim — 1962), L’enfant sauvage (The Wild Child — 1970), La nuit américaine (Day for Night — 1973), and Le dernier métro (The Last Metro — 1980) .
The interview appears in the “New Yorker” (8/16/10), presented noted film critic Richard Brody. Here is his introduction:
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.
Here are some excerpts from this extraordinary interview:
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.
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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. 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, as you know far better than I.
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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.”
There’s so much of interest in the interview, but two quick things from the excerpts:
* “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.” Only swine write scripts. Such a reflection of the mindset back then, grounded in so-called ‘reality.’ Of course, a screenwriter traffics in ‘facts,’ too, those based in the story universe they create.
* “Talk about what interests you, but make sure it interests others, too.” An excellent and concise way of parsing through the variety of story concepts you come up with while brainstorming.
For the rest of the interview, go here. And for more background on Truffaut, Brody has more for you:
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.)
Later today, some previous GITS posts re Truffaut including actual video interviews with the famed filmmaker.