English actress and singer Jane Birkin beautifully shifts between breathy French and British accents. She speaks of her time with former partner Serge Gainsbourg, one of France’s most brilliant artists, with great fondness. It was a romance that unfolded in the public eye after they worked together on the 1969 film Slogan. The couple would go on to record the controversial, erotic duet “Je t’aime… moi non plus.”
Jane’s career in music and film would continue to blossom, as she worked with French cinema greats including Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, Alain Resnais, Jacques Rivette, and Birkin’s third partner, Jacques Doillon. Daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg follows in her mother’s footsteps as an actress driven to complicated roles — and both women are now the subject of a retrospective at New York’s Film Society of Lincoln Center. Jane and Charlotte Forever runs through February 7.
One of the most remarkable things about François Truffaut's Jules et Jim, now regarded as the audacious apotheosis of the French New Wave, is that it was adapted from a novel written by a 75-year-old writer, Henri Pierre Roché. What we think of now as a perennially "young" film was thus the product of an old man's sensibility.
Truffaut adapted it with an exceptional panache and flair that was often not present in his later films, despite their other virtues. It wasn't characteristic of the two earlier films of Truffaut himself, and certainly not of Godard and Chabrol's first efforts, but it was at least as daring and definitely richer and more mature.
The film chronicles some 20 years in the lives of its three central characters, starting off in the era of La Belle Epoche, just before the first world war, and ending at the time of the Great Depression and the rise of Hitler. What is so astonishing about it is not just its freshness and vitality - the feeling that life is always exciting if sometimes dangerous - but the way the young director managed to mould his characters so accurately to the events of their time.
He did this with the aid of copious references to old movies, photographs, paintings, novels, music and theatre. Few other films illustrate better the axiom that the best film-makers have to know something about all the arts. But it is the changing reactions of the menage à trois to each other that most of us remember.
Although the film is called Jules et Jim, the dominant character in it is Catherine. She is independent, unpredictable and silly enough to throw herself into the Seine when the two men discuss a Strindberg play without her participation. She is prepared to bear Jules a child but not ready to be either an orthodox wife or mother. She even starts an affair with Jim, half knowing that both men are too fond of each other and of her to break off their friendship. Besides, as she says, "one is never completely in love for more than a moment".
Jeanne Moreau was the perfect choice for Catherine: she gives a performance full of gaiety and charm without conveying an empty-headed bimbo. She makes the watcher understand that this is no ordinary woman whom both men adore. It is possibly the most complete portrait of any feminine character in the entire ouevre of the New Wave and it made her an international star.
The film is full of idyllic moments that translate into doubt and retreat. The atmosphere of gathering gloom with which the film ends is thus totally logical, matching the storm clouds over Europe. "They left nothing behind them," is the commentary's epitaph after the death of Catherine. The whirlwind of life continues but without the three friends.
Jules et Jim seemed revolutionary at the time, but Truffaut's revolution, unlike Godard's, implied not so much the destruction of the past as a turning back to the humanism of Vigo, Renoir and the French cinema of the 30s. The film's "rondo of love" represents both a backward glance at the best of the past and a forward glance into the cinema's future. Its enthusiasm for what the cinema is and can be is what makes it so special.
Credits
Director: François Truffaut
Writers: Jean Gruault, François Truffaut
Original music: Georges Delerue
Starring: Jeanne Moreau, Oskar Werner, Henri Serre
400 blows for freedom: Stuart Jeffries on how Francois Truffaut rode into the festival on the crest of the new wave
Friday 7 May 1999 15.20 BST
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he Cannes Film Festival? It's a flop. It's dominated by compromises, frauds and faux pas. It's a bastion of the establishment, a home for mediocre film-makers, a place where smug functionaries who don't value movies pronounce on their merit.
Those, at least, were the words of Francois Truffaut in 1956. He wrote a series of scathing articles about the "progressive degeneration" of the festival. One was headlined: "Cannes, an undeniable success? No, Minister!" They were so hostile that the then head of Cannes demanded a right of reply, but even after that reply appeared in print, Truffaut was still refused accreditation to attend the festival as a film critic in 1958.
The following year, ironically, his first feature, The 400 Blows, was sent as the official French entry to the festival. Banned the previous year, the angry outsider was suddenly feted at Cannes when he won the best director award. Thus, 40 years ago this month, the new wave crashed on the Cannes shore and burst on the public consciousness: the mediocre, the functionaries behind what Truffaut angrily branded "le cinéma de papa" had to take their 400 blows and like it.
They were toppled not just by Truffaut, but by other remarkable film- makers who made 1959 that almost inconceivably wonderful year for French cinema. This was the year of Jean Luc Godard's Breathless, Claude Chabrol's Les Cousins, Jacques Rivette's Paris Belongs To Us and Alain Resnais's Hiroshima Mon Amour.
These were the films that Truffaut, when he was a gunslinger critic for Cahiers du Cinéma and Arts magazine in the mid-50s, had hoped would arrive, that would blow away the cobwebs a French national cinema that was capable only of psychological realism and which had failed to exploit the visual possibilities of film. For those who upheld le cinéma de papa, film was a place for literary adaptations. For Truffaut this could not carry on.
"The film of tomorrow will be made by adventurers," he wrote. "Young film-makers will express themselves in the first person and tell us about their experience. The films of tomorrow won't be made by the functionaries of the camera, but by artists who see film-making as an amazing, exciting adventure." In 1959, at Cannes, tomorrow had arrived and the adventure had begun.
Most of all, though, for Truffaut, le cinéma de papa could not capture the wonder he had experienced when he saw the films of the true masters of French cinema, Jean Renoir, Max Ophuls, Robert Bresson, Jacques Becker, Jean Cocteau. Nor could it capture the wonder Truffaut felt when he saw the great Hollywood movies of Hawks, Hitchcock and Ford.
Annette Insdorf, in her biography of Truffaut, makes the point: "[His] critical writings and films suggest that he has never forgotten the shivers of delight inherent in the early movie-watching experience: the escape into darkness and surprises, the screen that overwhelms with people larger than life, and then the growing realisation that film is less a substitute for life than a frame for a more intense and moving picture of it." Le cinéma de papa was hardly like this: film was merely a poor substitute for, and parasitic on, literature.
Truffaut singled out for particular contempt the now virtually forgotten, but then successful writing team of Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost who, he argued, were essentially literary men, contemptuous of the cinema. They supplied the French public with "its habitual dose of smut, non-conformity and facile audacity". Along with directors like Rene Clement, Jean Delannoy and Claude Autant-Lara, they were responsible for a cinema which did not take seriously the medium's visual possibilities.
Truffaut's greatest heresy, though, was not his ennobling of direction as a form of authorship every bit as creative and worthwhile as those of novelists, but in his ascribing authorship to Hollywood directors. Truffaut and other French critics of the time (most of them - like Godard, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette and Claude Chabrol - later to become new wave directors) were nicknamed "hitchcockohawksiens" since they championed directors like Hitchcock and Hawks - those who wrote their stories on celluloid. These were Truffaut's auteurs, the cinematic heroes he defended and extolled with a fierce love.
And yet these were the very films that Truffaut and his critical colleagues fanatically admired when they saw them at Henri Langlois' Cinémathèque in Paris. "There, during the 50s," writes Insdorf, "they devoured the silents, the talkies, the German Expressionists, the Italian Neo-realists and, most ravenously, the American studio films that had been banned during the Occupation." No wonder, with such a cinematic education, that Truffaut felt obliged, in 1968, to lead the protests against Langlois' dismissal as the president.
When The 400 Blows was chosen to represent France at Cannes, it was André Malraux, the writer turned Minister for Cultural Affairs, who made the decision. Jean-Luc Godard later argued that Malraux found authenticity in the film that led him to rebuff government sceptics. "Malraux made no mistake," wrote Godard. "The author of La Monnaie De l'Absolu could hardly help recognising that tiny inner flame, that reflection of intransigence, shining in the eyes of Truffaut's Antoine as he sports a man's hat to steal a typewriter in a sleeping Paris; for it is the same as that which glittered 20 years ago on Tchen's dagger on the first page of La Condition Humaine."
No, Malraux didn't make a mistake. You only have to see the last scene of The 400 Blows to realise this. Antoine escapes from reform school, runs toward the sea and when he reaches the water, the camera sweeps around him and captures, in freeze frame, his uncertain face. It's a moment that is utterly human, utterly specific, and thoroughly cinematic.
"We won the day," trumpeted Godard after this triumph, "in having it acknowledged in principle that a film by Hitchcock, for example, is as important as a book by Aragon. Film auteurs, thanks to us, have finally entered the history of art. But you whom we attack have automatically benefited from this success. And we attack you for your betrayal, because we have opened your eyes and you continue to keep them closed. Each time we see your films we find them so bad, so far aesthetically and morally from what we had hoped, that we are almost ashamed of our love for the cinema.
"We cannot forgive you for never having filmed girls as we love them, boys as we see them every day, parents as we despise or admire them, children as they astonish us or leave us indifferent; in other words, things as they are. Today, victory is ours. It is our films which will go to Cannes to show that France is looking good, cinematographically speaking. Next year it will be the same again, you may be sure of that. Fifteen new, courageous, sincere, lucid, beautiful films will once again bar the way to conventional productions. For although we have won a battle, the war is not yet over."
The war still isn't over. Forty years on, we could do with another gunslinging critic like Truffaut or Godard. Not, to be sure, to target Cannes, although the festival is hardly beyond reproach, but rather to heap deserved opprobrium on British cinema. It's a cinema almost devoid of auteurs.
Our chief problem as a cinematic culture is that we are tremendously insular, more shockingly so than our European neighbours: Theo Angelpoulos's Eternity And A Day only reaches our screens nearly a year to the day after it won the Palme d'Or; the 1997 Palme d'Or winner, Abbas Kiarostami's A Taste Of Cherry, took more than a year after it won its award to reach Britain. Truffaut would not have railed against such pictures, since they are true films made by cinematic adventurers - films about real people; films with soul.
But he would have loathed the British cinema that has thrived in the thin air of our insular climate, with its Little Voices, Full Montys and Plunketts And Macleanes; films dependent on those very faults that Truffaut levelled at Aurenche and Bost: habitual smut, non-conformity and facile audacity. He would have detested, especially, Notting Hill, a film that depends on its writer rather than its director for the spark of creativity; a film that panders to American audiences with English and Welsh stereotypes; a film that shows us, as a result, only a sentimental vision of humanity rather than the thing itself.
But Notting Hill is only one symptom of a broader malaise. How we need a British Truffaut now, both to diagnose our ills, and to direct us towards a cure. But that may not be possible. How could there be a British Truffaut? After all, he once asked, typically waspishly, if there was a contradiction in the very phrase "British cinema". Yes there was. And there still is, Francois. There still is.
Film-makers usually come off badly when films get made about them. François Truffaut is the honourable exception
Alex Cox Thursday 17 February 2011 22.23 GMT
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t speaks well of film-makers that movies about movies are usually black comedies. Our industry is so detestable – so filled with lies, thefts, backstabbing, blacklisting, drug dealing, and the occasional murder – that one would expect a tendency to cover things up. Instead, almost all the films I can think of which deal with the film-making process portray it in the grimmest possible light.
Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950) is a classic instance: a dark comedy in which a failed screenwriter (William Holden) attempts to gain fame on the back of a faded silent-movie star (Gloria Swanson): she ends up mad, he, shot and drowned. Even the good-hearted comedy Singin' in the Rain (1952) conversely, depicts a hierarchical system dominated by the talentless, in which people who are actually good at something (in this case dancing) are ritually humiliated, while clinging to the loser's mantra: "dignity, always dignity".
The list of negative portrayals goes on and on. Robert Aldrich's The Big Knife from 1955 is a fine noir that pulls no punches: its protagonist, wonderfully played by Jack Palance, is a vain, tough-guy actor who has killed someone while drunk-driving. The studio steps in and covers things up, thereby locking Palance's character into a lifetime of meaningless macho roles. When he tries to rebel, and play a part he likes, a demonic studio boss (Rod Steiger) blackmails him back into the fold. Contempt (aka Le Mépris) from 1963 is, I think, Godard's best film: a merciless dissection of the kind of fools who attempt to "commercialise" Homer's Odyssey. Palance plays the villainous producer; Fritz Lang – as himself – is the hapless director. A highway cataclysm is the inevitable outcome.
Alexandra Stewart and Truffaut in Day for Night.
Want more evidence of the film industry's moral vacuum? Day of the Locust (1975) may not be John Schlesinger's greatest picture, but it has two of his best-directed scenes, both Hollywood apocalypses. In the first, a soundstage set collapses, killing and maiming the actors and crew; in the second, an opening-night crowd goes zombie-mad, overturning cars and murdering the stars they've shown up to cheer. Richard Rush's The Stunt Man (1980) is a vision of the film director as Satan: Peter O'Toole, of course, is perfect in the role. Robert Altman's The Player (1992) is easily the best work of his later years - an anti-industry comedy involving sleaze, blackmail and the inevitable murder. Tom DiCillo's Living in Oblivion (1995) applies the same jaundiced gaze to low-budget feature film-making; there are no murders (less money is at stake) but the same procession of betrayals and cop-outs. The film's star turn is by James LeGros, as the manipulative actor Chad Palomino – a character possibly based on Brad Pitt, whom DiCillo had directed previously, in Johnny Suede.
Given this impressive level of consistency, is there any film that depicts the film-making process as a positive, uplifting thing? Yes! Step forward régisseur François Truffaut, with Day for Night (1973). The opening titles tell us where the director is coming from: his film is "dedicated to Dorothy and Lilian Gish". In other words, though he is a French film-maker, and his film is made in France, in French, it isn't about French films at all. The English-language title is meaningless whereas the French title says it all: La Nuit Américaine. The reference is to a way of shooting night-time scenes by daylight, by placing a blue filter over the lens and not pointing the camera towards the sky. The words "day for night" are just a practical expression of a pragmatic process: whereas "la nuit Américaine" is romantic, suggestive, allusive.
Truffaut's film works in this way. It opens on a busy street, full of cars and people. Cut! And all at once we realise we are on a movie set: a giant, exterior mock-up of Paris, complete with Métro station and 160 extras. Did the French really make films like this? I think not. Truffaut was – like Godard – one of the new wave. These guys, like the Italian neorealists and the American noir directors, made their films cheaply, on actual locations. They didn't build massive sets –they couldn't afford them. If they needed a street scene, they went out on the street and shot what they found there.
No matter. Truffaut is not concerned with reality, certainly not his reality, or his national culture. He is recounting the creation of illusions, and, it must be said, he does this well. In all the "movies about movies" I have seen, it is the only instance in which the film director is not a monster or a morally bankrupt fool. But, despite my wishy-washy moral misgivings, I must confess to enjoying Day for Night. For every stupid voiceover from the director ("Making a film is like a stagecoach journey into the far west …") there is a funny and ironic scene depicting the frailty of an actor.
Criminal no 1 in this writhing nest of thespians is Alphonse, played by Jean-Pierre Léaud. Alphonse combines the whininess of Palance in The Big Knife with the manipulative cruelty of LeGros in Living in Oblivion. Valentina Cortese is splendid as the grande dame of the stage, Severine, a drunk who cannot remember her lines nor keep from walking into cupboards. Such a character might be monstrous or ridiculous: instead Cortese and Truffaut join forces to make her simultaneously annoying and appealing. We may hate Alphonse because he is actually nasty, but we feel pity and sympathy for Severine.
Inevitably, all grinds to a halt when it's time for the animal scene: even the most precious, in-a-hurry thespians are forced to cool it while the crew move heaven and earth to make a kitten drink milk on camera. This is true. I've been there – ignoring Gary Oldman and a room full of highly strung professionals, trying to get a performance out of a cat.
So, if actors are disposable, replaceable commodities, vain, silly and mean, why do we get the feeling this director loves them so? Because he does. And to love actors, if you are a director, is The Only Thing That Matters, in the end.
Hitchcock/Truffaut review – two great directors meet again
A fascinating account of the famous interview of Hitchcock by François Truffaut that sought to recast the British film-maker as a genuine auteur
Mark Kermode Sunday 6 March 2016 08.00 GMT
In 1962, director François Truffaut conducted a series of in-depth interviews with Alfred Hitchcock, published in a lavishly illustrated book, which became something of a film-makers’ bible. Truffaut’s aim was to reclaim Hitchcock as an artist – an “auteur” rather than just an entertainer. Kent Jones’s documentary, which draws on audio tapes of those conversations along with new interviews with Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, Wes Anderson et al, is no less evangelising, arguing that Truffaut’s book should be viewed and valued on a par with his movies. The documentary certainly makes for fascinating viewing; although most cineastes will already know the source text inside out, it’s great to hear audio of these exchanges, and the new interviews that make up the bulk of the film are entertaining, erudite, and (most importantly) refreshingly enthusiastic.
Talking dirty … François Truffaut and Alfred Hitchcock.
Photograph: Philippe Halsman/Magnum
‘Actors are cattle’: when Hitchcock met Truffaut
Hidden necrophilia in Vertigo, glowing milk, an on-set spat with Montgomery Clift … in 1962, Alfred Hitchcock revealed his tricks, and the often shocking meanings behind his films, to fellow director François Truffaut. Now their talks have been turned into the revealing film Hitchcock/Truffaut
Stuart Jeffries Tuesday 12 May 2015 07.01 BST
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here’s a derangingly perverted scene in the 1958 film Vertigo. The femme fatale Judy, played by Kim Novak, appears before Scottie, James Stewart’s retired cop, in a sleazy motel room. She’s dressed as the dead woman with whom he’s obsessed. “I indulged in a form of necrophilia,” the director Alfred Hitchcock told François Truffaut during a week-long series of interviews they did in Hollywood in 1962.
Scottie has insisted that Judy dye her hair blond and wear the outfit he bought. Only then will he be able to have sex with her. But there’s a problem. Scottie can’t consummate his desire because one detail is wrong: Judy is wearing her hair down. The dead woman, Madeleine, wore it up. “This means,” Hitchcock explains to Truffaut, “she’s stripped but won’t take off her knickers.”
Scottie sends her back to the bathroom and sits impatiently on the bed. “He’s waiting for the woman to come out nude ready for him,” Hitchcock adds. “While he was sitting waiting, he was getting an erection.” Then Hitchcock tells Truffaut to turn the tape off so he can tell a story. We will never know what it was, but the safe money says it was really dirty.
Kent Jones’s engaging new documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut teems with such moments: the 30-year-old tyro French director asking his hero to explain how he made his films, and the 63-year-old responding in detail, often revealing the lubricious impulses behind such masterpieces as Psycho, The Birds and Marnie. For 50 years, these conversations have existed in book form. Jones has set them free, juxtaposing the audio recordings with relevant scenes from the films.
Hitchcock clearly revels in disclosing some of his secrets. As we watch the superbly sinister scene in the 1941 thriller Suspicion in which Cary Grant slowly, but implacably, ascends a spiral staircase towards Joan Fontaine’s bedroom, we may well wonder why the glass of milk he’s carrying looks so ominous and hyperreal. Because, Hitchcock explains, he lit it from inside with a little lightbulb. Truffaut gasps.
Truffaut had seduced Hitchcock into doing 30 hours of interviews by means of an imploring letter: “Since I have become a director myself, my admiration for you has in no way weakened; on the contrary, it has grown stronger and changed in nature. There are many directors with a love of cinema, but what you possess is a love of celluloid itself.” Hitchcock, flattered, telegrammed back in French from Bel Air: “Dear Mister Truffaut, your letter brought tears to my eyes, and I am very grateful to receive such a tribute from you.”
At the time, Truffaut had made just three films, including his semi-autobiographical debut, Les 400 Coups, while Hitchcock was editing his 48th, his extraordinary and probably self-revealing account of sexual repression, Marnie, starring Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery.
Truffaut’s aim was to liberate Hitchcock from his reputation (one that the Englishman cultivated) as a light entertainer and celebrate him for what he was, a great artist. “It’s wonderful that Truffaut got Hitchcock to talk because directors of his generation didn’t often,” says Jones, head of the New York film festival, and the director who collaborated on Martin Scorsese’s survey of Italian cinema, My Voyage to Italy. “They were dismissive about their art, at least publicly. John Ford would say, ‘I only make westerns.’ Howard Hawks would say, ‘I only make comedies.’ They weren’t inclined to talk seriously about their work, partly because they needed to survive in the studio system.”
Hitchcock and Truffaut were from different cinematic cultures. Hitchcock had made the first of his pictures in the silent era and went on to work in Hollywood. Truffaut was initially a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma. Thanks to critics such as Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette, Godard and indeed Truffaut (all of whom who would become the iconoclastic hipster directors of the Nouvelle Vague), cinema for the first time became, as director Olivier Assayas puts it in Jones’s film, self-conscious. For the first time, it reflected on itself as art rather than dismissing itself as mere entertainment. The Hitchcock-Truffaut interviews were part of that revolution.
Truffaut and Hitchcock began their interviews on 13 August, Hitchcock’s 63rd birthday. Four years later, the interviews were published. “It has been an incredibly influential book,” says Jones, adding that it was pivotal in the education of film-makers such as Coppola, De Palma, Lucas, Spielberg, Scorsese, Friedkin and Schrader. Today’s generation, it seems, is no less in awe. “When I asked David Fincher if he’d read it, he said, ‘Only, like, 200 times.’”
There are only two moments when Hitchcock clams up. First, as Truffaut suggests, quite sensibly, that the lack of realism and plausibility in Hitchcock’s movies (think of the scene in North by Northwest when Cary Grant emerges unscathed from a fireball caused by the crop-dusting plane that’s been pursuing him crashing into a fuel truck) is because his pictures yield to a deeper logic, the logic of dreams. “Hitchcock just doesn’t want to go there,” says Jones. “He’s not comfortable with that level of disclosure.”
Yet, as Fincher, one of 10 present-day directors whom Jones interviews for the film, argues, one of the exciting things about Hitchcock is that his fears and fetishes, his nocturnal terrors and his sexual daydreams, are all over his work. Indeed, for Fincher, one of the lessons of Hitchcock’s cinema is that any film-maker who thinks they can stop their psychopathologies leaking on to the screen is, as he puts it, “nuts”. Jones says: “I think David’s right. Hitchcock does what he wants, and indeed, if you look at those film-makers who try to do what others want, or what they think the audience want, they come unstuck.”
The other moment is when Truffaut, again quite sensibly, argues that Hitchcock’s trademark omniscient shots (the terrifying airborne shot of the town on fire in The Birds; the camera descending from Olympian heights to find the compromising key in Ingrid Bergman’s hand in Notorious) could have been made only by someone raised, as Hitchcock was, a Catholic. Hitchcock asks Truffaut to turn off the tape so he can go off record. “Again, we don’t know what he said, but he clearly didn’t want to reveal his motivations,” says Jones. Instead, in Jones’s film it’s left to another Catholic director, Scorsese, to clinch the point: the God-like perspective of Hitchcock’s aerial shots induce terror.
“In the book of the interviews,” says Jones, “Hitchcock came over as stilted and formal, which you can hear he isn’t.” Quite so: Hitchcock is often droll and cantankerous. “Actors are cattle,” he tells Truffaut, underlining his reputation for giving them no scope but to fulfil his artistic vision. “He can’t mean that,” says Jones. “Yes, he started in cinema during the silent era, well before the post-war era after which, as Scorsese says, the power shifted to the actor. But he wasn’t contemptuous – he had immensely fruitful relationships with actors.”
True, but Hitchcock was always boss. The film recalls his on-set spat during I Confess with Montgomery Clift over a split-second moment in which the actor was required to look up at a building as he crossed the street. The method actor who had trained with Lee Strasberg said he needed to consider whether his character, a guilt-ridden Roman Catholic priest, would look up at that moment. Hitchcock didn’t care what Clift thought: he needed him to look up at that precise moment or everything leading up to and from that glance would not make sense. Truffaut, when Hitchcock explains this to him, agrees: if Clift refused, he would have ruined the story arc. Happily, Clift ultimately glanced upwards and the scene makes sense.
Jeanne Moreau in Truffaut’s 1962 film Jules et Jim. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
Truffaut, for all that he was profoundly influenced by this father figure, gave actors more leeway. He tells Hitchcock about a scene in Jules et Jim that his three actors improvised. Hitchcock is incredulous: he could never allow that.
Later, Jones reveals, Hitchcock worried that he was too rigid in his commitment to narrative rigour. Perhaps he should have given his actors more freedom. In one telegram to Truffaut, he says how difficult it would have been for Mondrian to paint like Cézanne: by which he means how difficult it would have been for Hitchcock to direct like Truffaut, or indeed like others in the Nouvelle Vague, still less like the great American directors of the 1970s who allowed their actors a great deal of freedom.
It’s a point taken up by Fincher, who wonders how Hitchcock would have got on directing such actors as De Niro, Pacino and Hoffman. “Sadly, we’ll never know,” says Jones. “But he did have conflicts with actors who were less willing to respect his authority, not just with Clift on I Confess and Paul Newman on Torn Curtain.”
In any case, he did try to loosen up, to mutate, as it were, from Mondrian to Cézanne. “There is some 16mm test film provisionally called Kaleidoscope/Frenzy, in which he tried to be freer and give some young kids in New York the chance to express themselves as actors.” But that film was never made. Instead, in 1972 he made Frenzy, his penultimate – and psychosexually deranged – film, in which Barry Foster strangles his victims with a necktie, grunting: “Lovely! Lovely!”
Almost two decades after Truffaut and Hitchcock recorded their interviews, the Frenchman was still lecturing the world on his hero’s merits. “In America,” Truffaut told the American Film Institute in 1979 during a homage, “you call him Hitch. In France, we call him Monsieur Hitchcock. In America, you respect him because he shoots scenes of love as if they were scenes of murder. We respect him because he shoots scenes of murder like scenes of love.”
The following year, Hitchcock died. All too soon Truffaut followed him in 1984, aged only 52, and at the height of his powers.
Fanny Ardant: 'Tears are like diamonds, you can't waste them'
The French actor on being Truffaut's muse, why she never married, and the feminine side of Gérard Depardieu
Interview by Jonathan Romney Sunday 15 June 2014 06.07 BST
In your new film, Bright Days Ahead, you play a retired married woman who has a guilt-free affair with a younger man. Is the film a manifesto for holding on to sensuality?
It's a hymn to the present moment. What makes the present moment? It can be a magnificent bath, or getting into bed, eating salad or drinking Château Margaux… All very modest things – not a cruise to the tropics, just anything that helps you live. What really matters is love, but if you're having problems of the heart the only thing that helps you fight that is the senses. Or reading. I've spent a lot of my life in hotel rooms, and it was always books that got me through.
