François Truffaut Trivia
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46 free François Truffaut trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This François Truffaut trivia quiz covers the critic-turned-director who became the most accessible face of the French New Wave. The easy questions handle the basics: his debut film, the boy actor who played his alter ego Antoine Doinel, the love triangle of Jules and Jim, the Oscar-winning film about making a film, and the Spielberg blockbuster in which he played a French scientist. From there it moves through his savage years at Cahiers du Cinéma, the auteur theory, André Bazin, the Doinel cycle with Claude Jade, and his week-long interview with Alfred Hitchcock. The harder half is for cinephiles: the Cornell Woolrich thrillers, the English-language Fahrenheit 451 shot by Nicolas Roeg, The Wild Child and the doctor he played in it, Isabelle Adjani's record Oscar nomination for Adèle H., the ten Césars for The Last Metro, the furious 1973 letters between Truffaut and Godard, the production company named after a Renoir film, and the hitchhiker he threw out of his car for not liking films. If you enjoyed our Hitchcock or classic cinema quizzes, this is the deep dive on one director. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries for Truffaut and each of the films named before publishing.
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Q 01Truffaut is regarded as one of the founders of which film movement?
The French New Wave
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.
Q 02The French title of Truffaut's debut The 400 Blows comes from an idiom meaning what?
To raise hell
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.
Q 03Which actor played Truffaut's alter ego Antoine Doinel in five films over twenty years?
Jean-Pierre Léaud
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.
Q 04For which magazine did Truffaut write his notoriously brutal reviews as a young critic?
Cahiers du Cinéma
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.
Q 05Which critic became Truffaut's mentor, got him out of military prison and found him a job at his new magazine?
André Bazin
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.
Q 06Which idea did the young critic Truffaut champion, later popularised in America by Andrew Sarris?
The auteur theory
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.
Q 07Truffaut's incendiary 1954 essay 'A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema' attacked which kind of film?
Prestige literary adaptations
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.
Q 08Truffaut's film obsession began at eight with Paradis Perdu by Abel Gance, who made which silent classic?
Napoléon
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.
Q 09In The 400 Blows, what does Antoine steal from his stepfather's office to fund his plan to leave home?
A typewriter
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.
Q 10The 400 Blows lost the 1959 Palme d'Or to Black Orpheus but won Truffaut which Cannes prize?
Best Director
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.
Q 11In The 400 Blows, Antoine is accused by his teacher of plagiarising which French novelist?
Balzac
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.
Q 12How does The 400 Blows famously end?
With a freeze-frame of Antoine at the sea
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.
Q 13Truffaut supplied the story for which 1960 landmark, the first feature by a fellow critic?
Breathless
Q 21Which future director served as cinematographer on Fahrenheit 451, Truffaut's first film in colour?
Nicolas Roeg
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.
Q 22Which actress played Christine Darbon, Antoine Doinel's fiancée and later wife, in three films?
Claude Jade
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.
Q 23Which 1979 film closed the Antoine Doinel cycle with the couple's divorce?
Love on the Run
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.
Q 14Which singer starred as the pianist in Truffaut's second feature, Shoot the Piano Player?
Charles Aznavour
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.
Q 15Which French star played the female leads in Truffaut's Mississippi Mermaid and The Last Metro?
Catherine Deneuve
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.
Q 16Which actress played Catherine, the woman at the centre of the love triangle in Jules and Jim?
Jeanne Moreau
She won the best actress prize at the 1962 Étoile de Cristal, and Truffaut cast her again in The Bride Wore Black.
Q 17In Jules and Jim, which war forces the two friends to fight on opposing sides?
The First World War
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.
Q 18Truffaut filmed two novels by Henri-Pierre Roché: Jules and Jim and which other?
Two English Girls
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.
Q 19Which 1967 American crime classic was offered to Truffaut, who worked on its script but declined to direct?
Bonnie and Clyde
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.
Q 20Fahrenheit 451, Truffaut's only English-language film, was adapted from a novel by which author?
Ray Bradbury
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.
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.
Q 24Cornell Woolrich, whose story became Rear Window, wrote the novels behind Truffaut's Mississippi Mermaid and which other film?
The Bride Wore Black
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.
Q 25What is the original French title of Day for Night?
La Nuit américaine
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.
Q 26What is the name of the melodrama being made within Day for Night?
Meet Pamela
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.
Q 27Which Academy Award did Day for Night win?
Best Foreign Language Film
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.
Q 28Which star, accepting the 1975 Supporting Actress Oscar, apologised to Day for Night's Valentina Cortese from the stage?
Ingrid Bergman
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.
Q 29Which former friend wrote Truffaut a raucous 1973 letter calling him 'a liar' over Day for Night, prompting a 20-page reply?
Jean-Luc Godard
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.
Q 30The Story of Adèle H. earned which 20-year-old actress the youngest Best Actress Oscar nomination up to that time?
Isabelle Adjani
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.