Phaidon £39.95 pp320
In the winter of 1966, François Truffaut was at Pinewood, filming Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. It was an uneasy time. He was frustrated by union insistence on the teabreak (“le five o’clock”) and infuriated by Oskar Werner, his leading actor, whom he had made famous with Jules et Jim (1962) and who had become starry and difficult. Worst, Truffaut’s lack of English rendered him unable to hear the music of the dialogue.
A few months earlier I had met him because he wanted to discuss Alfred Hitchcock, having almost completed his book on his idol, the distillation of hours of intense conversation. I had recently written a modest book on Hitch, and was astonished that Truffaut should even have heard of it. At his side at dinner was Helen Scott, an American whose rapport with Truffaut’s thought processes and gifted interpretation had made the project possible. Truffaut spoke not only of Hitchcock, but Howard Hawks, Robert Aldrich, Billy Wilder, Raoul Walsh and a slew of American directors whose work he knew backwards. Alas, he had little regard for British cinema, regarding the very term as an oxymoron.
During Truffaut’s sufferings at Pinewood, Charlie Chaplin was on the next stage making A Countess from Hong Kong, his last film. It starred Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren and would turn out a sorry mess. The proximity of two giants from different generations seemed extraordinary and, aware of Chaplinesque influences in Tirez sur le pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player) and Jules et Jim, I asked Truffaut if he had been to see the great “Charlot” , then 77. “No,” he replied. “What could I say to him?”
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Was it humility, shyness or the fear that Chaplin would not know who he was? Most film-makers are so absorbed in their own work that they pay little attention to rivals. Hitchcock had an extraordinary recollection of his films, but refrained from speaking of other directors. However Truffaut, like Martin Scorsese, was the exact opposite, an obsessive cine-addict with encyclopedic knowledge. Of the group of young critics on André Bazin’s influential journal Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s who became the founders of the revolutionary nouvelle vague or new wave (Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer among them), he was intellectually the most formidable, sparking off the controversial auteur theory with his 1954 essay. Yet he was to achieve the greatest success within the mainstream, even acting in a key role in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. As for his own films, their romanticism stemmed from his love of Jean Renoir’s cinema, sometimes in conflict with Hitchcockian themes of guilt and retribution.
Truffaut’s middle-class background was hardly easy. Like Ken Tynan, he was born on the wrong side of the blanket and raised by an adoptive stepfather. A lonely, neglected child, he was hooked on film from the age of seven, finding solace enveloped in comforting darkness, even though Parisian cinemas could show only programmes approved by the occupying Germans. Wartime denial probably drove the French post-war appetite for Hollywood, and in the latter 1940s and 1950s Paris was awash with showings of backlogged American films. At 14, Truffaut was a school dropout and at his stepfather’s request was sent to a delinquents’ centre. On release he was taken up by Bazin,who started him writing about film. Later he became a military deserter, and it was Bazin who rescued him from the detention barracks, becoming his mentor and surrogate father. Shortly after Truffaut’s first feature, Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows), began shooting in 1958, Bazin died, and Cahiers went with him.
Truffaut himself would be dead in 1984 at only 52, felled by a brain tumour, which he likened to a firecracker in his head. He left a huge archive of notes, drafts, plans, annotated books, drawings, memoranda, correspondence and dossiers on other directors. It is a treasure trove revealing the secrets of every film he made.
Carole Le Berre, a French critic who has already written extensively on Truffaut, gained access to his great paper mountain. As expected, her book is compendious, and she chronologically analyses each of 21 features and a handful of shorts from the director’s point of view, with a minimum of post-hoc editorialising. It is fascinating to learn how works that flow easily and lightly on the screen were often born of pain and conflict that was not necessarily artistic, a reminder that the producer-director’s function is as much to do with making deals as shooting films. With nearly 400 illustrations, including rare production stills and close-ups from Truffaut’s notebooks, her book is sumptuous.
It does not, however, purport to be a biography. Only one page, an appendix, gives a timeline of her subject’s life. Le Berre has an almost Leavisian disinclination to refer beyond the films themselves. For instance, the author, while frequently citing Truffaut’s sensitivity towards women and his reverence for feminine beauty — observable from the opening shot of his “first real film”, Les Mistons (The Brats), a glorious image of Bernadette Lafont bicycling in wooded countryside near Nîmes, summer sun rippling on her bare legs — fails to note that Fanny Ardant, the star of his two last films, La Femme d’à côté (The Woman Next Door) and Vivement Dimanche! (Finally Sunday!), bore him a daughter outside his marriage. Instinctively, one feels it should be relevant.
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François Truffaut at Work is available at the Books First price of £35.95 on 0870 165 8585