46 Fun Facts About François Truffaut

Truffaut is regarded as one of the founders of which film movement?

The French New Wave was a revolt by young critics turned directors, who left the studios to shoot cheap, loosely scripted films on real streets with handheld cameras.

The French title of Truffaut's debut The 400 Blows comes from an idiom meaning what?

To raise hell: 'faire les quatre cents coups' means running wild, as the film's truant schoolboy does. The literal English title keeps the number and loses the meaning.

Which actor played Truffaut's alter ego Antoine Doinel in five films over twenty years?

Jean-Pierre Léaud won the part as a schoolboy by answering a newspaper ad. Truffaut later said Antoine had become a mixture of two real people: himself and Léaud.

For which magazine did Truffaut write his notoriously brutal reviews as a young critic?

Cahiers du Cinéma doubled as a film school: Truffaut and several fellow critics there put down their pens and became the directors who remade French film.

Which critic became Truffaut's mentor, got him out of military prison and found him a job at his new magazine?

André Bazin and his wife all but adopted the young Truffaut. Bazin died just as shooting began on The 400 Blows, and Truffaut dedicated the film to him.

Which idea did the young critic Truffaut champion, later popularised in America by Andrew Sarris?

The auteur theory treats a film's director as its true author. Truffaut called it a policy, 'la politique des auteurs'; Sarris recast it as a theory in a 1962 essay.

Truffaut's incendiary 1954 essay 'A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema' attacked which kind of film?

Prestige literary adaptations, France's 'tradition of quality', were to Truffaut scriptwriters' films that betrayed the novels they adapted. The uproar brought him an offer from the weekly Arts, where he went on to write some 500 pieces.

Truffaut's film obsession began at eight with Paradis Perdu by Abel Gance, who made which silent classic?

Napoléon is the 1927 epic Gance is known for. With no money for tickets, the young Truffaut began skipping school to sneak into cinemas, and at 14 he set himself a goal of three films a day.

In The 400 Blows, what does Antoine steal from his stepfather's office to fund his plan to leave home?

A typewriter, which he fails to sell and is caught trying to put back. Truffaut had stolen one himself, from his father's office, to fund his teenage film club.

The 400 Blows lost the 1959 Palme d'Or to Black Orpheus but won Truffaut which Cannes prize?

Best Director went to the 27-year-old for his first feature. The award established Truffaut as a leader of a new generation of French film-makers.

In The 400 Blows, Antoine is accused by his teacher of plagiarising which French novelist?

Balzac: Antoine loves his books and had rebuilt a passage from memory for an essay on his grandfather's death. Branded a cheat, he walks out of school for good.

How does The 400 Blows famously end?

With a freeze-frame of Antoine at the sea: he slips away from reform school during a football game and runs to the shore he has always wanted to see, then turns to face the camera.

Truffaut supplied the story for which 1960 landmark, the first feature by a fellow critic?

Breathless grew from an outline Truffaut had sketched from a real 1952 case: a car thief with an American girlfriend who shot a motorcycle policeman.

Which singer starred as the pianist in Truffaut's second feature, Shoot the Piano Player?

Charles Aznavour plays Charlie as a shy, withdrawn man. Midway through the shoot Truffaut realised he hated gangsters, so he turned the film's hoodlums into comedians.

Which French star played the female leads in Truffaut's Mississippi Mermaid and The Last Metro?

Catherine Deneuve. Truffaut said he loved the way she suggests a secret inner life beneath the visible one, and her Marion Steiner in The Last Metro won the César for Best Actress.

Which actress played Catherine, the woman at the centre of the love triangle in Jules and Jim?

She won the best actress prize at the 1962 Étoile de Cristal, and Truffaut cast her again in The Bride Wore Black.

In Jules and Jim, which war forces the two friends to fight on opposing sides?

The First World War parts them just after Jules marries Catherine, and each fights in dread of killing his friend. When Jim visits after the armistice, the triangle begins again.

Truffaut filmed two novels by Henri-Pierre Roché: Jules and Jim and which other?

Two English Girls flips the triangle: one Frenchman in love with two sisters. Roché was in his seventies when Jules et Jim, his first novel, appeared, and Truffaut found it on a second-hand stall.

Which 1967 American crime classic was offered to Truffaut, who worked on its script but declined to direct?

Bonnie and Clyde was written by two Americans in love with French film, who sent it to Truffaut. He worked on the script for a while, then chose to make Fahrenheit 451 instead.

Fahrenheit 451, Truffaut's only English-language film, was adapted from a novel by which author?

Ray Bradbury's world of book-burning firemen was bound to appeal to a book lover like Truffaut, who cast Julie Christie twice over, as both the hero's wife and the neighbour who sets him reading.

Which future director served as cinematographer on Fahrenheit 451, Truffaut's first film in colour?

Nicolas Roeg shot the film in England with a mainly English crew. He later turned director himself and cast its star, Julie Christie, in Don't Look Now.

Which actress played Christine Darbon, Antoine Doinel's fiancée and later wife, in three films?

Claude Jade and Truffaut fell in love while making Stolen Kisses and planned to marry in the spring of 1968, until he called it off. She went on to Hollywood for the spy thriller Topaz.

Which 1979 film closed the Antoine Doinel cycle with the couple's divorce?

Love on the Run was made because The Green Room had flopped at the box office. It tells the couple's parting through frequent flashbacks to the four earlier Doinel films.

Cornell Woolrich, whose story became Rear Window, wrote the novels behind Truffaut's Mississippi Mermaid and which other film?

The Bride Wore Black was the first of the two. For the second, Truffaut moved Woolrich's New Orleans story to the French island of Réunion and cast Jean-Paul Belmondo as a wealthy planter.

What is the original French title of Day for Night?

La Nuit américaine, 'American night', is the French term for shooting night scenes in daylight through a filter. Truffaut got the idea for the film from a huge leftover street set at a studio in Nice.

What is the name of the melodrama being made within Day for Night?

Meet Pamela is a deliberately clichéd melodrama, because the real story is the chaos of the crew making it. Truffaut plays its harried director, Ferrand.

Which Academy Award did Day for Night win?

Best Foreign Language Film came in 1974. A year later the same film was back with three more nominations, for its direction, script and a supporting actress, and lost them all.

Which star, accepting the 1975 Supporting Actress Oscar, apologised to Day for Night's Valentina Cortese from the stage?

Ingrid Bergman, who won for Murder on the Orient Express, ended her speech: 'Please forgive me, Valentina.' Cortese had played Séverine, a fading diva who can't remember her lines.

Which former friend wrote Truffaut a raucous 1973 letter calling him 'a liar' over Day for Night, prompting a 20-page reply?

Jean-Luc Godard used the same letter to ask Truffaut to fund his next film. The reply called him 'the Ursula Andress of militancy', and the two never spoke again.

The Story of Adèle H. earned which 20-year-old actress the youngest Best Actress Oscar nomination up to that time?

Isabelle Adjani was under contract to the Comédie-Française, which refused to release her. Truffaut pressed her and the company for months until he got the star he wanted.

Adèle H., the subject of Truffaut's 1975 film, was the daughter of which writer?

Victor Hugo's younger daughter crossed the Atlantic after a British officer, living under a false name. Truffaut worked from her diaries and filmed on Guernsey, the island of her father's exile.

Truffaut played the French scientist Claude Lacombe in which 1977 Hollywood film?

Close Encounters of the Third Kind was Steven Spielberg's follow-up to Jaws, and he rang Truffaut to offer the part. Truffaut spent the long waits on set writing his next film, The Man Who Loved Women.

Truffaut helped force the 1968 Cannes Film Festival to shut down early in solidarity with whom?

Striking students and workers had brought France to a standstill, and Truffaut was among the film-makers who demanded that the festival stop. They took to the stage to disrupt a screening, and the festival was called off.

Truffaut's The Green Room adapts 'The Altar of the Dead', a story by which author?

Henry James supplied the tale of a man who keeps a shrine to his dead. Truffaut, who had lost many friends and mentors, played the part himself, saying: 'I'm faithful to the dead, I live with them.'

The Last Metro's title refers to the train Parisians had to catch because of what?

The curfew cleared the streets of the occupied city each night. Short of fuel at home, people spent their evenings out at shows, then ran for the last train.

In The Last Metro, where is Marion's Jewish husband Lucas secretly hiding?

In the theatre's cellar, from where he goes on directing in secret: an air vent carries the rehearsals down to him, and Marion brings his notes back up each night.

Truffaut's final film, Confidentially Yours (1983), starred which actress, his partner in his last years?

Fanny Ardant had starred in his previous film, The Woman Next Door, and the two fell in love while making it. Their daughter was born in 1983, weeks after this last film opened.

For a landmark 1966 book, Truffaut spent a week in 1962 interviewing which director about his entire career?

Alfred Hitchcock sat for a week of taped questions in his office at Universal Studios, where he was finishing The Birds. Truffaut, who spoke very little English, brought an interpreter.

Truffaut named his production company Les Films du Carrosse after a film by which director?

Jean Renoir's The Golden Coach, Le Carrosse d'or, gave the company its name. Truffaut founded it in 1957 with his future father-in-law's backing, before he had made a single feature.

Which English novelist, then living on the Riviera, has a cameo in Truffaut's Day for Night as an insurance man?

Graham Greene took the part under a false name, and Truffaut had no idea who his English bit-player really was. He found out only later.

What is unusual about the opening credits of Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451?

They are spoken aloud by a narrator, with not one written word on screen: the film's first hint of a society where reading is banned.

In 1968 Truffaut helped lead protests after the French government removed Henri Langlois, co-founder of which institution?

The Cinémathèque Française had been Truffaut's real film school. He and hundreds of others blocked its screening room, directors around the world withdrew their films, and by April Langlois had his job back.

With which relative did Truffaut spend his early childhood, gaining his love of books and music?

His grandmother took him in after his first years with a wet nurse, because his parents had little to do with him. Only when she died did he go to live with them, and they often left him alone.

In Stolen Kisses, Antoine Doinel loses his job as a hotel night clerk and is hired by what kind of business?

A detective agency, which ends up firing him. That same year Truffaut hired real private detectives himself: their inquiry told him his unknown father was a dentist named Roland Levy.

Why was the young soldier Truffaut locked in a military prison in 1951?

Attempting to desert: he had enlisted on impulse after a failed romance, and when his unit was bound for Indochina he overstayed a leave in Paris. The army discharged him in 1952 for 'instability of character'.

In which Paris cemetery is Truffaut buried?

Montmartre was the quarter where Truffaut spent his boyhood. He was cremated at Père Lachaise, but his ashes were buried here.