60 Fun Facts About Jean-Luc Godard

Godard's first feature, Breathless (1960), paired the American actress Seberg with which French actor?

Godard had already tipped him in print in 1958 as 'the Michel Simon and the Jules Berry of tomorrow'.

Which then-unconventional editing technique made Breathless famous?

The film also broke the eyeline match and had characters speak straight to camera.

Godard was a pioneer of which film movement?

He is often called the most influential French filmmaker of the post-war era.

Before directing, Godard wrote criticism for which influential magazine?

He was the first of the young Cinémathèque crowd to be published there after André Bazin co-founded it in 1951.

Godard held French citizenship and that of which other country, where he spent much of his life?

His father was a Swiss physician who moved the family from Paris when Jean-Luc was four.

Godard's mother came from a banking family; her father Julien Monod helped found which bank?

The Monods also produced a theologian, a naturalist and a composer.

Godard's first film, the 1955 documentary short Opération béton, was about the building of what?

He was working on the Grande Dixence dam site at the time and rewrote a labourer's commentary.

The story of Breathless was suggested to Godard by which fellow New Wave director?

It came from a news item about a petty criminal, Michel Portail, whose girlfriend turned him in.

In Breathless, Michel Poiccard shoots a motorcycle policeman after stealing a car in which city?

He is pursued on the Route nationale 7 for crossing a solid line.

Jean Seberg's character in Breathless sells which newspaper on the Champs-Élysées?

Seberg took the part for $15,000, a sixth of the film's whole budget.

Which Hollywood star's poster does Belmondo's character reverently imitate in Breathless?

The film is also dedicated on screen to Monogram Pictures, an American B-movie studio.

How were the tracking shots in Breathless achieved by cinematographer Raoul Coutard?

Coutard had learned handheld work as an army documentary cameraman in Indochina.

Which New Wave director appears in Breathless as a dead body hit by a car?

Godard himself plays the passer-by who points Michel out to the police.

Which prize did Godard win in 1960 for Breathless?

He also took the Silver Bear for Best Director at Berlin that year.

Godard's Le Petit Soldat was banned by the French government for three years over its treatment of what?

He later called it his 'most fascist film' for its equivocal picture of both sides.

In Le Petit Soldat (shot 1960), army deserter Bruno Forestier is hiding out in which city?

The film also holds the much-quoted line that cinema is truth 24 times a second.

Godard's first wife and muse Anna Karina was born in which country?

She hitch-hiked to Paris with the equivalent of $15 from her grandfather and became a model for Elle.

Who gave Hanne Karin Bayer the stage name Anna Karina, evoking Tolstoy?

She was working as a model for Elle at the time, having been discovered on the street at 14.

Karina won the Silver Bear for Best Actress at Berlin for which Godard film, his first in colour?

She played Angela, a striptease dancer who dreams of MGM musicals and wants a baby.

Vivre sa vie (1962) is subtitled 'a film in' how many 'tableaux'?

Karina plays Nana, an aspiring actress who drifts into prostitution.

Which silent classic moves Nana to tears in a cinema in Vivre sa vie?

Nana also debates the limits of language with a philosopher played by Brice Parain, Godard's old tutor.

Which critic called Vivre sa vie 'a perfect film' in an essay in Against Interpretation?

The film won the Grand Jury Prize at Venice in 1962.

Contempt (1963), Godard's most commercially successful film, starred which French screen icon?

Producer Carlo Ponti had suggested Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni; Godard refused.

Which legendary director plays himself, adapting Homer's Odyssey, in Contempt?

Godard cast himself as Lang's assistant director and gave Lang many of his own New Wave opinions to voice.

Contempt is based on Il disprezzo, a 1954 novel by which Italian writer?

Jack Palance plays the vulgar American producer Prokosch.

Band of Outsiders (1964) is famous for a café dance scene that the actors called what?

Its music was written by Michel Legrand, and the scene inspired the Uma Thurman-John Travolta dance in Pulp Fiction.

In Band of Outsiders the three leads try to break the record for running through which building?

Godard described the film as 'Alice in Wonderland meets Franz Kafka'.

Which director named his production company 'A Band Apart' as a tribute to Godard's Bande à part?

He has called it his favourite Godard film.

In Alphaville (1965), Eddie Constantine's Lemmy Caution is sent to destroy which dictatorial computer?

The film has no built sets: 1960s Paris stands in for the future city.

Alphaville won which top festival prize in 1965?

The dissidents' lines are faux quotations from Paul Éluard's Capitale de la douleur.

Pierrot le Fou (1965) is based on the novel Obsession by which American crime writer?

Belmondo's Ferdinand hates the nickname Pierrot, which means 'sad clown'.

In Pierrot le Fou, Marianne is chased by hitmen from which paramilitary organisation?

The runaway couple burn a car full of money and sink another in the Mediterranean.

Masculin Féminin (1966) has a famous intertitle calling its subjects 'the children of Marx and' what?

The film draws on two Maupassant stories and studies Parisian youth and their politics.

Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967) has as its most famous shot a lengthy close-up of what?

Godard's own whispered narration runs through the film about the new high-rise suburbs of Paris.

Made in U.S.A. (1966) went unreleased in America for decades over which unlicensed novel?

Marianne Faithfull sings 'As Tears Go By' in a bar; the film was Godard's last feature with Karina.

La Chinoise (1967), about young Parisian Maoists, loosely adapts which Dostoevsky novel?

The film won the Grand Jury Prize at Venice and starred Godard's future wife Anne Wiazemsky.

Weekend (1967) contains a celebrated eight-minute tracking shot of what?

The bourgeois couple later fall in with hippie revolutionaries who practise cannibalism.

Godard's second wife Anne Wiazemsky was the granddaughter of which Nobel-winning French novelist?

She made her debut at 18 as the lead in Bresson's Au hasard Balthazar, which Godard reviewed ecstatically.

In May 1968 Godard and Truffaut led protests that shut down Cannes in solidarity with whom?

The festival was abandoned partway through as directors withdrew their films.

Godard's 1968 film Sympathy for the Devil documents which band recording the title song?

He had asked for the Beatles or the Stones; the Beatles turned him down.

What did Godard do at the 1968 London Film Festival after the producer changed Sympathy for the Devil's ending?

Godard's own title was One Plus One; the producer's cut added the complete song.

Godard and Gorin's radical 1969 film collective was named after which Soviet director?

Vertov made the Kino-Pravda newsreels and Man with a Movie Camera.

Which Hollywood star, then married to Roger Vadim, headlined Godard and Gorin's Tout va bien (1972)?

The companion piece Letter to Jane spends fifty minutes examining one photo of her in North Vietnam.

Godard criticised which company's film stock as 'inherently racist' for failing to render dark skin?

Its Shirley calibration cards used only Caucasian subjects, a problem not fixed until 1995.

With his partner Anne-Marie Miéville, Godard founded the video company Sonimage in 1972 in which city?

The pair made experimental series for European TV including Six fois deux.

Godard called which 1980 film, starring Isabelle Huppert, his 'second first film'?

It was released in the UK as Slow Motion and in the US as Every Man for Himself.

Godard's Je vous salue, Marie (1985) drew papal condemnation for retelling which story in a modern setting?

Marie works at her father's petrol station and plays basketball; the film was banned in Brazil until 1988.

Godard's monumental video series made between 1988 and 1998 was titled what?

It combined his video experiments with a meditation on the twentieth century and film itself.

Goodbye to Language (2014) was Godard's first film shot in what format?

His own dog Roxy has a leading role and won a prize at the festival.

Godard's The Image Book received which unique award at Cannes in 2018?

He had shot it over two years, partly in Tunisia, as an examination of the Arab world.

What honour did the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences give Godard in 2010?

He had already received two honorary Césars, in 1987 and 1998.

Where did Godard rank in the 2002 Sight & Sound critics' poll of the greatest directors of all time?

Filmmaker magazine called his Karina films 'arguably the most influential body of work in the history of cinema'.

Godard died in September 2022 at his home in Rolle, aged 91; how did his death occur?

Miéville was at his side, and Karina had long described him as a recluse.

Who played Godard in Michel Hazanavicius's 2017 comedy-drama Redoubtable?

It was based on Wiazemsky's memoir One Year After and released in the US as Godard Mon Amour.

Which film is traditionally, if debatably, credited as the first feature of the Nouvelle Vague?

Varda's 1955 film was chronologically first but had no commercial release until 2008.

Godard credited his introduction to cinema to an essay by which French writer and future culture minister?

Not a frequent filmgoer as a boy in Nyon, he was won over by Malraux's Outline of a Psychology of Cinema and La Revue du cinéma.

With Rohmer and Rivette, Godard founded which short-lived film journal that ran for five issues in 1950?

Bazin's Cahiers du Cinéma, which Godard would write for, followed a year later.

What job was Godard doing at the Grande Dixence Dam when he took the call reporting his mother's death?

He had moved from construction work to the switchboard to prolong his stay and film the dam for Opération béton.

What was the name of the production company Godard and Anna Karina formed in 1964?

Its first fruit was Bande à part, which Godard described as 'Alice in Wonderland meets Franz Kafka'.

Godard directed one of seven sketches in which 1967 anti-war compilation with Resnais, Marker and Varda?

He recycled stock footage from La Chinoise; Lelouch, Ivens and William Klein also contributed segments.