Jean-Luc Godard Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
59 free Jean-Luc Godard trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Jean-Luc Godard trivia quiz runs from the jump cuts of Breathless to the 3D of Goodbye to Language. The easier questions cover the landmarks any film fan knows: the star of his debut, the movement he pioneered, the magazine he wrote for, Bardot in Contempt, the traffic jam in Weekend and the Rolling Stones film. Medium questions get into the Karina years: A Woman Is a Woman, Vivre sa vie, Band of Outsiders and its Madison dance, Alphaville's computer, Pierrot le Fou. The hard end is for cinephiles: the dam documentary he started with, the Prix Jean Vigo, the OAS in Pierrot, the unlicensed Richard Stark novel behind Made in U.S.A., the Dostoevsky source of La Chinoise, Kodak's 'racist' film stock, Sonimage in Grenoble, Histoire(s) du cinema and the Special Palme d'Or for The Image Book. There are also questions on Anna Karina and Anne Wiazemsky, the shutdown of Cannes 1968, and Godard's death by assisted suicide in 2022. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on Godard, his individual films and his collaborators, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Fans of this one should try our French New Wave, Brigitte Bardot and classic film director quizzes next.
30 of 59 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Godard's first feature, Breathless (1960), paired the American actress Seberg with which French actor?
Jean-Paul Belmondo
Jean-Paul Belmondo had already made a Godard short, but was called up for army service before it was dubbed, so in Charlotte et son Jules the voice coming out of his mouth is Godard's own.
Q 02Which then-unconventional editing technique made Breathless famous?
Jump cuts
Jump cuts were a fix, not a plan: the first edit ran far too long, and instead of dropping whole scenes Godard snipped pieces out of the middle of shots.
Q 03Godard's best-known aphorism says all you need to make a movie is a girl and what?
A gun
A gun: Godard wrote the line in a 1964 ad for Band of Outsiders, and credited it not to himself but to the silent-film pioneer D. W. Griffith.
Q 04Before directing, Godard wrote criticism for which influential magazine?
Cahiers du Cinéma
Cahiers du Cinéma turned its young critics into directors, but Godard was the last of its famous five to shoot a feature; early on he signed pieces Hans Lucas, German for Jean-Luc.
Q 05Godard held French citizenship and that of which other country, where he spent much of his life?
Switzerland
Switzerland was home from early childhood, after his doctor father moved the family there to work at a clinic; Godard later claimed Swiss citizenship to dodge the French draft.
Q 06Which American comedian and director has a cameo as a film editor in Godard's King Lear (1987)?
Woody Allen
Woody Allen appears as an editor named Mr. Alien; the whole film sprang from a contract Godard and producer Menahem Golan signed on a napkin at Cannes in 1985.
Q 07Godard's first film, the 1955 documentary short Opération béton, was about the building of what?
A dam
A dam in the Alps: Godard was a labourer on the site, paid for the film from his wages, and then sold it to the company building the dam, which used it as publicity.
Q 08Breathless is credited to an original story by which fellow New Wave director?
François Truffaut
François Truffaut had sketched the outline from a news story, and his name did the rest: fresh from the triumph of The 400 Blows, he helped persuade the producer to back Godard.
Q 09In Breathless, Michel Poiccard shoots a motorcycle policeman after stealing a car in which city?
Marseille
Marseille is where it starts, but the story was real: in 1952 a car thief named Michel Portail shot a motorcycle policeman, and he too had an American journalist girlfriend.
Q 10Jean Seberg's character in Breathless sells which newspaper on the Champs-Élysées?
New York Herald Tribune
New York Herald Tribune seller Patricia was, Godard said, a continuation of Seberg's role in Bonjour Tristesse: he could have opened on that film's last shot with the title 'Three years later'.
Q 11Which Hollywood star's poster does the car thief Michel study and imitate in Breathless?
Humphrey Bogart
Humphrey Bogart stares back from a poster for The Harder They Fall, his last film; Michel spends the story rubbing a thumb across his lips like a screen gangster, a gesture Patricia repeats in the final shot.
Q 12How were the tracking shots in Breathless achieved by cinematographer Raoul Coutard?
From a wheelchair pushed by Godard
From a wheelchair pushed by Godard: renting a dolly and laying its tracks cost money and time the shoot didn't have, so Coutard sat with the camera in his hands.
Q 13Which New Wave director appears in Breathless as a dead body hit by a car?
Q 21Which silent classic moves Nana to tears in a cinema in Vivre sa vie?
The Passion of Joan of Arc
The Passion of Joan of Arc, Carl Dreyer's silent about a woman judged by men, plays in the dark as Nana weeps; soon she is being questioned herself, by police over a banknote.
Q 22Which American critic called Vivre sa vie 'a perfect film' in a 1964 essay?
Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag also called it 'one of the most extraordinary, beautiful, and original works of art that I know of'; decades later a newspaper attack on her staging of Beckett in besieged Sarajevo sparked Godard's For Ever Mozart.
Q 23Contempt (1963), Godard's one big-budget production, starred which French screen icon?
Brigitte Bardot
Jacques Rivette
Jacques Rivette lies in the road as the accident victim, one of many friends in the film; Godard himself plays the passer-by who recognises Michel and points him out to the police.
Q 14Which prize did Godard win in 1960 for Breathless?
Prix Jean Vigo
Prix Jean Vigo, a French award for young directors of independent spirit, went to Breathless in January 1960, weeks before the film had even opened in cinemas.
Q 15Godard's Le Petit Soldat was banned in France until 1963 over its treatment of what?
The Algerian War
The Algerian War was still being fought when he shot the film in 1960, and it showed torture used by both sides; the censors passed it only once the war was over.
Q 16In Le Petit Soldat (shot 1960), army deserter Bruno Forestier is hiding out in which city?
Geneva
Geneva gave him neutral ground just across the border from a France at war; Anna Karina, his new lead, was his partner by the end of the shoot and his wife within a year.
Q 17Godard's first wife and muse Anna Karina was born in which country?
Denmark
Denmark was home until she was 17, when she hitch-hiked to Paris with about $15 from her grandfather and almost no French; within months she was a busy fashion model.
Q 18Who gave Hanne Karin Bayer the stage name Anna Karina, evoking Tolstoy?
Coco Chanel
Coco Chanel met the teenage model at a photo shoot for Elle, heard that she wanted to act, and told her she could not do it under the name she had; Karina took the advice.
Q 19Anna Karina won a major festival's Best Actress prize for which Godard film, his first in colour?
A Woman Is a Woman
A Woman Is a Woman was his homage to the Hollywood musical, about a stripper who wants a baby and plays her boyfriend off against his best friend; its story echoed his own new romance with Karina.
Q 20Godard subtitled Vivre sa vie (1962) 'a film in twelve' what?
Tableaux
Tableaux, each announced by a title card that says what is about to happen: a device from Bertolt Brecht's theatre, meant to keep viewers thinking about Nana's fate, not just feeling it.
Brigitte Bardot lies naked in the opening scene only because the producers complained that the first cut showed too little of her; Godard held out for months, then shot it on a replica set.
Q 24Which legendary director plays himself, adapting Homer's Odyssey, in Contempt?
Fritz Lang
Fritz Lang, the maker of Metropolis and M, agreed to play himself as the film's one dignified figure, and Godard cast himself in a walk-on as Lang's assistant director.
Q 25Contempt is based on Il disprezzo, a 1954 novel by which Italian writer?
Alberto Moravia
Alberto Moravia's novel of a failing marriage was Godard's own suggestion to producer Carlo Ponti; he is said to have wanted Frank Sinatra and Kim Novak to play the unhappy couple.
Q 26Band of Outsiders (1964) is famous for a café dance scene that the actors called what?
The Madison
The Madison was an American dance craze, though Godard liked to claim he invented it; the scene looks spontaneous, but the three actors, none of them dancers, rehearsed it for weeks.
Q 27In Band of Outsiders the three leads try to break the record for running through which building?
The Louvre
The Louvre dash, the narrator announces, beats the record of one Jimmy Johnson of San Francisco; Bertolucci's The Dreamers (2003) has its own trio run the same galleries to break it again.
Q 28Which director named his production company 'A Band Apart' as a tribute to Godard's Bande à part?
Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Tarantino founded A Band Apart in 1991 and paid a second tribute three years later: the dance John Travolta and Uma Thurman do in Pulp Fiction quotes the café scene in Godard's film.
Q 29Alphaville won which top festival prize in 1965?
The Golden Bear at Berlin
The Golden Bear at Berlin went to a science-fiction film with no built sets and no special effects: Godard's city of the future is simply Paris by night, its new glass-and-concrete buildings.
Q 30Which Godard film ends with its hero wrapping his head in dynamite and lighting the fuse?
Pierrot le Fou
Pierrot le Fou ends with Ferdinand changing his mind and groping for the fuse a moment too late; Godard took its lovers-on-the-run plot from Lionel White's American crime novel Obsession.