François Truffaut

Birthday: 6 February 1932, Paris, France

Birth Name: François Roland Truffaut

Height: 168 cm

François began to assiduously go to the movies at 7. He was also a great reader but not a good pupil. He left school at 14 and started working. In 1947, aged 15, he founded a film club and met André Bazin, a French critic, who becomes his protector. Bazin helped the delinquent Truffaut and also when he was put in jail because he deserted the army. In 1953, he published his first movie critiques in "Les Cahiers du Cinema." In this magazine, Truffaut and some of his friends as passionate as he is, became defender of what they call the "author policy". In 1954, as a test, Truffaut directed his first short film. Two years afterwords, in 1956, he assisted Roberto Rossellini with some later abandoned projects.The year 1957 was an important one for him: he married Madeleine Morgenstern, the daughter of an important film distributor, and founded his own production company "Les Films du Carrosse"; named after Jean Renoir's Le carrosse d'or (1952) (Le Carosse d'or). He also directed Les mistons (1957), considered as the real first step of his cinematographic work. The other big year was 1959: the huge success of his first full-length film Les quatre cents coups (1959) (Les quatre cents coups) was the beginning of the New Wave, a new way of making movies in France. This was also the birth year of his first daughter Laura Truffaut.From 1959 until his death, François Truffaut's life and films are mixed up. Let's only note he had two other daughters Eva Truffaut (b. 1961) and Josephine (b. 1982 of French actress Fanny Ardant). Truffaut was the most popular and successful French film director ever. His main themes were passion, women, childhood and faithfulness. Show less «

Is the cinema more important than life ?

Originally, I didn't like [John Ford]--because of his material: for example, the comic secondary cha...Show more »

Originally, I didn't like [John Ford]--because of his material: for example, the comic secondary characters, the brutality, the male-female relationships typified by the man's slapping the woman on the backside. But eventually I came to understand that he had achieved an absolute uniformity of technical expertise. And his technique is the more admirable for being unobtrusive: His camera is invisible; his staging is perfect; he maintains a smoothness of surface in which no one scene is allowed to become more important than any other. Such mastery is possible only after one has made an enormous number of films. Questions of quality aside, John Ford is the Georges Simenon of directors. Show less «

Cinema is an improvement on life.

[on Jean-Pierre Léaud] The most interesting actor of his generation. There are actors who are inter...Show more »

[on Jean-Pierre Léaud] The most interesting actor of his generation. There are actors who are interesting even if they merely stand in front of a door; Léaud is one of them. Show less «

[on Michelangelo Antonioni] Antonioni is the only important director I have nothing good to say abou...Show more »

[on Michelangelo Antonioni] Antonioni is the only important director I have nothing good to say about. He bores me; he's so solemn and humorless. Show less «

The talent of Godard goes toward a destructive object. Like Picasso, to whom he's compared very ofte...Show more »

The talent of Godard goes toward a destructive object. Like Picasso, to whom he's compared very often, he destroys what he does; the act of creation is destructive. I like to work in tradition, in the constructive tradition. Show less «

Sometimes I force myself. In the case of Domicile conjugal (1970) I laid down certain laws for mysel...Show more »

Sometimes I force myself. In the case of Domicile conjugal (1970) I laid down certain laws for myself. Henri Langlois, who loved Baisers volés (1968), said to me, 'Now you have to get Jean-Pierre Léaud and Claude Jade married.' Show less «

One looks at films differently when one is a director or a critic. For example, though I have always...Show more »

One looks at films differently when one is a director or a critic. For example, though I have always loved Citizen Kane (1941), I loved it in different ways at different stages of my career. When I saw it as a critic, I particularly admired the way the story is told: the fact that one is rarely permitted to see the person who interviews all the characters, the fact that chronology is not respected, things like that. As a director I cared more about technique: all the scenes are shot in a single take and do not use reverse cutting; in most scenes you hear the soundtrack before you see the corresponding images - that reflects Orson Welles' radio training, etc. Behaving like the ordinary spectator, one uses a film as if it were a drug; he is dazed by the motion and doesn't try to analyze. A critic, on the other hand, is forced to write summaries of films in 15 lines. That forces one to apprehend the structure of a film and to rationalize his liking for it. Show less «

Some day I'll make a film that critics will like. When I have money to waste.

Taste is a result of a thousand distastes.

I make films that I would like to have seen when I was a young man.

When I first saw Citizen Kane (1941), I was certain that never in my life had I loved a person the w...Show more »

When I first saw Citizen Kane (1941), I was certain that never in my life had I loved a person the way I loved that film. Show less «

[in "le Monde", Paris, 1962] The thing which gives me the courage to keep going is that in the cinem...Show more »

[in "le Monde", Paris, 1962] The thing which gives me the courage to keep going is that in the cinema industry one does not feel isolated. Solitude is one of the greatest problems facing other artists such as abstract painters and musicians. Show less «

I have always preferred the reflect of the life to life itself

[in 1964, on Edvin Laine's Tuntematon sotilas (1955)] It has to be one of the best anti-war movies.

Create a list » User Lists Related lists from IMDb users Directors that must see their fi...Show more »

Create a list » User Lists Related lists from IMDb users Directors that must see their films a list of 45 people created 24 Jan 2011 Greatest Moviemakers a list of 35 people created 29 May 2011 Top 30 Directors of all Time a list of 30 people created 18 Jul 2013 Best Directors a list of 48 people created 19 Oct 2013 Favorite Directors a list of 49 people created 08 Jan 2014 See all related lists » Show less «

Film lovers are sick people.

Claude Jade and Jean-Pierre Léaud are my contemporaries.