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When
I was in film school at Boston's Emerson College, I wrote indiscriminately to
my moviemaking heroes, requesting interviews for my film journal Grand
Illusions. I batted about .600 with responses, with letters back from
Federico Fellini, Henry Fonda, Arthur Penn, Robert Wise, and many more. One of
my favorite responses was from Steven Spielberg, to whom I put forth the
question, "Who are your influences as a filmmaker?"
His
voluminous reply is a pantheon of great filmmakers, and I frequently pass it
along to aspiring directors who ask me what moviemakers they should study. This
is who Mr. Spielberg cited:
"These are not in any special order:
Buzz Feitshans (editor and producer)
David Lean
Preston Sturges
John Sturges
George Lucas
Francois Truffaut
Ingmar Bergman
Rouben Mamoulian
King Vidor
Clarence Brown
John Frankenheimer
Vincente Minnelli
George Stevens
Fred Zinnemann
Bernardo Bertolucci
Akira Kurosawa
Stanley Kubrick
Howard Hawks
George Seaton
Alfred Hitchcock
Francis Ford Coppola
John Schlesinger
Don Siegel
Orson Welles
Henry Hathaway
Arthur Penn
Fritz Lang
John Cassavetes
Billy Wilder
Federico Fellini
William Wyler
Frank Capra
John Ford
George Cukor
Walt Disney
John Huston
Jean Renoir
Elia Kazan
Milos Forman
William Wellman
Sergei Eisenstein
Tay Garnett
Samuel Fuller
and Costa Gavras."
Not a bad list. I also wrote a letter to Francois Truffaut
in Paris, asking if I could send over a cassette tape and a list of questions.
A couple of months later, a letter came in the mail from Les Films du Carrosse
… Francois Truffaut's production company, named after Jean Renoir's THE GOLDEN
COACH (1953). I tore open the envelope and there it was, a letter signed by
Truffaut himself … in French. I ran down Beacon Street, asking strangers if
they spoke French. I found a willing translator who informed me that M.
Truffaut would not consent to an interview-by-mail … but he was coming to
America for the New York Film Festival to show his new film, THE MAN WHO LOVED
WOMEN. If I contacted Helen Scott at the French Film Office, she'd make the
arrangements. I was thrilled – I knew Helen Scott as the translator for
Truffaut's ground-breaking interview book Hitchcock/Truffaut.
Francois Truffaut loved cinema. He was the quintessential
filmmaker, writing and directing his pictures with a consistency of quality and
artistic conviction that placed him among the great auteurs of
international cinema. He was a national institution in his native France,
celebrating life in his films with a poetic and often romantic realism.
During an unhappy childhood Truffaut found himself drawn to
the movies, as well as to trouble. Rescued from delinquency by the influential
critic Andre Bazin, Truffaut cultivated his love of film by viewing thousands
of movies, interviewing directors, and writing brilliant articles for Cahiers
du Cinema. It was only a matter of time before he turned to making films
himself, and after serving a brief apprenticeship with Roberto Rossellini, he
directed several shorts including LES MISTONS (1957), and developed the story for
BREATHLESS (1959) with Jean-Luc Godard. His first feature, THE 400 BLOWS
(1959), helped spearhead the New Wave of French filmmaking, and introduced his
cinematic alter ego Jean Pierre Leaud as Antoine Doinel. It is a remarkable
series of films in which Leaud progresses from the troubled youth of THE 400
BLOWS to the young man of LOVE AT TWENTY (1962), STOLEN KISSES (1969), BED AND
BOARD (1970 and LOVE ON THE RUN (1979), recently restored and collected on a
five-disc DVD set from Criterion.
Internationally acclaimed after his first feature, Truffaut
went on to astound filmgoers with his virtuosity on SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER
(1960) and JULES AND JIM (1961), films that reveal the influence, respectively,
of Alfred Hitchcock and Jean Renoir. The manipulative suspense of Hitchcock and
the poetic lyricism of Renoir merged with Truffaut's personal style to create
some of the finest pictures of the Sixties: SOFT SKIN (1964), FAHRENHEIT 451
(1966), THE BRIDE WORE BLACK (1968), MISSISSIPPI MERMAID (!969) and THE WILD
CHILD (1970). After a brief hiatus from filmmaking to read and write, Truffaut
returned triumphantly with DAY FOR NIGHT (1973), his study of the making of a
film, in which he played a director. It won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language
Film, and it's still the best movie ever made about filmmaking.
His talent matured with the intimate character study THE
STORY OF ADELE H (1975), SMALL CHANGE (1976), a passionate tribute to
adolescence, THE MAN WHO LOVED WOMEN (1977), an homage to love, THE LAST METRO
(1980), the drama of a theatrical troupe surviving in Nazi-occupied Paris, and
his final film, CONFIDENTIALLY YOURS, a return to Hitchcockian milieu starring
his wife Fanny Ardant. He accepted Steven Spielberg's invitation to star in
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1978), which is ironically how mainstream
audiences probably know him best today. It was a shock to cineastes everywhere
when Francois Truffaut died of a brain tumor in 1984 at the age of 52.
When I met him at the Sherry Netherlands Hotel in New York,
my colleague Sam Sarowitz and I were greeted by a warm, friendly man, charming
and intense, with soulful eyes and the ability to put a couple of nervous
students instantly at ease. As a gift, we brought M. Truffaut a Photoplay
edition of D.W. Griffith's THE BIRTH OF A NATION (1915), starring Lillian and
Dorothy Gish – Truffaut had dedicated DAY FOR NIGHT to the Gish sisters. His
hotel suite was full of American books on cinema that he had just purchased,
including a copy of Herman Weinberg's recently revised The Lubitsch Touch.
While Truffaut spoke English, he preferred to answer our questions in French,
and Helen Scott was on hand to translate.
JOHN GALLAGHER: How do you develop your scripts?
FRANCOIS TRUFFAUT: I make a picture a year, and almost all
of my projects are projects that I've had in mind for a very long time. I
undertake them after having thought of them for many years. They're not overnight
projects. Occasionally I only think of them once a week but essentially, I
compile notes into a file and one day the time comes when you feel that this
file might become a film. It often happens when I find that there are two ideas
that can be blended, which at first I didn't know could make one film. There is
a coincidence. For example, in the case of THE MAN WHO LOVED WOMEN, I wanted to
tell a story which visually presented one man and many women. I undertook it on
the day I realized that I could embody an idea which appealed to me, to film
the idea of the manufacture of a book from the moment of its writing until the
time it is published and in the bookstores. That was the case of this picture;
I combined both in the film.
JG: Growing up in France, what attracted you to the
Hollywood films of the Thirties and Forties when they were being taken for
granted in this country?
FT: I don't really know the filmmaking of the Thirties. I
saw the first American films shown at the time of the liberation in '45. These
were new films and old films but no older than 1938. For instance, I hardly
know the first talking pictures of Frank Capra, who is a very important
director. But obviously in this period I mention, I adored American pictures.
They were more professional than they are today. Their scripts were more
childish but the care and execution of the films turn them into more coherent
objects than are turned out today, in general. The Hollywood system didn't work
out as well with important personalities like Erich Von Stroheim and Orson Welles.
For the others, it enabled to give the best of themselves. There were many
directors whom we admired and whose work was inferior when they became free and
independent. So finally the system worked. This became obvious to us from 1955
on. Today they speak a great deal of Thalberg, particularly because of The
Last Tycoon, but if you look at the list of
his pictures, there is no masterpiece within his credits. There are rather good
pictures, and his work must have consisted of improving them. But aside from that,
he crushed Von Stroheim and he may have crushed other Von Stroheims that we
don't know of.
JG: How do you feel in retrospect about the Doinel films,
particularly THE 400 BLOWS?
FT: There is no problem with THE 400 BLOWS; it's a coherent
picture. I think the same of LOVE AT TWENTY. I began to have some problems with
STOLEN KISSES, because I had this marginal character outside of life, and I had
to bring him into life. It was even more difficult with BED AND BOARD. It's
difficult to discuss it.
JG: Could you tell us about working with composer Bernard
Herrmann on FAHRENHEIT 451?
FT: It went off very well. On occasion I was a little
concerned because I thought the music was more lyrical than the picture itself.
The spirit of the film was very ambiguous and I think that even the people who
worked with me didn't really understand the story of the film probably because
I was working instinctively and I didn't take the trouble to clearly explain
what I was trying to do. I didn't really want it to be a picture that would be
an homage to books in general, in the generic term. The result was not what I
hoped for, but the music was extraordinary. It was almost music that should
have been for another picture, for a picture that would have been more serious.
JG: How was your experience acting in Spielberg's CLOSE
ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND?
FT: It was very slow shooting even for a big American
production. On occasion we only did two shots in a day. We were on call at
eight o'clock in the morning even if we didn't start shooting until five in the
afternoon. But I feel that I didn't waste my time because I wrote the script of
THE MAN WHO LOVED WOMEN during the shooting, and the shooting was very
interesting to observe. I always dreamed of being able to watch the shooting of
a film without being in the way. Directors don't dare to go to another
director's shooting; it's not done. But here I had a perfectly rational reason
for being there, to be sitting on a chair with nobody paying attention to me.
JG: Do you have any desire to do a Hollywood film?
FT: Not yet.
JG: Is it true that you were offered BONNIE AND CLYDE to
direct?
FT: Yes, yes.
JG: Did you refuse for any special reason?
FT: At that time my mind was full of FAHRENHEIT 451, at the
same time, THE DAY OF THE LOCUST, but I had my mind set on FAHRENHEIT. BONNIE AND CLYDE was an excellent script but it was 100% American
material. There was no reason to ask a Frenchman to do it.
JG: What appeals to you about working with children, which
you've done so successfully?
FT: The principal reason is that in working with children
you have many more surprises than in working with adults. You go through more
violent emotions. There are certain days where the whole day is wasted because
what you've done can't be embodied into the picture. But the next day, what you
do may be far superior to the screen play. It is very exciting and very
stimulating.
JG: Then it's more improvisation.
FT: On the part of the children. There are certain things
they can't do that are in the script but other things they do much better. To
use a formula, I would say that with adult actors, you film the screen play.
Certain days it's better than the screen play and other days it's not as good.
With the children, the screen play loses its importance. You have to constantly
change it, improvise. You have the impression that you are being more creative
when working with children.
JG: In DAY FOR NIGHT, why did your character wear a hearing
aid?
F:T: Because I have a great deal of sympathy for the deaf
mutes and also because that was the only character in the whole film who had no
private life. That's because I had a lot of work. I didn't have time to go into
the makeup room and yet I didn't want to be completely myself. I wanted some
difference with Francois Truffaut, some distinction.
JG: How have your attitudes about filmmaking changed over
the years?
FT: To sum it up abruptly, I would l would say at the moment
of the birth of the New Wave we felt that it was necessary to give a great deal
of reality and we had to shoot in real places, real decors. For the pictures to
be made cheaply, we made them with cameras that were very noisy and we didn't
take sound. We did it in the dubbing afterwards. I did my first four pictures
that way, and most of my friends worked the same way, Godard, Chabrol, Rivette.
From '64-'65 on, we finally understood what Jean Renoir had been trying to make
us understand for five or six years, that is, that our pictures would be better
with direct sound and that the dubbing, particularly in exterior scenes in the
country side, was really a cheap process. From that time on our pictures were
made with direct sound. Two or three years later Technicolor arrived and
initially I made very ugly picture with Technicolor because we didn't care
about color. We went into real places as we had before, and we weren't aware
that color not only made the picture uglier, but even detracted from the
meaning of the picture by providing a great deal of useless information. At
that time a sort of awareness set in that realistic subjects shot in real
places with direct sound and color, without changing it, added up to very bad
pictures. So we became aware of the fact that we had to return one way or the
other to artifice. Ideally the perfect artifice would be to do everything in
the studio, even street scenes, even a scene within a forest, like Hawks'
SERGEANT YORK (!941), for instance, but we can't do that. However we are
careful now about color. Since color provides too much useless information we
come back to unity rather than having three different scenes taking place in
three different places. If these three scenes can take place in the same place,
it's better for the picture.
JG: Do you have any theories about camera movement?
FT: The best director of the invisible, non-obtrusive camera
is probably Howard Hawks. But that doesn't mean that's the only way to make
films because Hitchcock often has a very visible, very obvious camera movement,
and he is not wrong because at certain moments you use the camera to take the
public by the hand and say, " Come, I want to show you something."
JG: Have your views on the auteur theory changed at all over the years?
FT: Not really. I still go to see an Ingmar Bergman film the
day of the release and there are many film makers who've made twenty pictures
and I haven't seen on of there's. So in this sense I continue to apply the auteur
theory. On the other hand I might concede
more readily than I did in the past than on occasion a good director will make
a picture that isn't so good. At the time of the Cahiers du Cinema, we in bad faith would insist on defending any
picture by a good director but today I believe it is not necessary to be in bad
faith.
-- JOHN GALLAGHER
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