François Truffaut

François Truffaut did not learn to make films at a school.

His real education took place in the dim light of Paris cinemas, where he skipped school to avoid going back to a home where no one was waiting for him. That childhood loneliness fueled a filmography that never stopped looking at childhood and the education of the emotions.

In 1948 he founded a film club and ended up in a military prison for deserting the army. André Bazin got him out of there and gave him a column at Cahiers du Cinéma so he could channel his anger at the established system.

From those pages he earned the nickname the gravedigger of French cinema. He hated the stiff literary adaptations that dominated postwar box office and was not afraid to call out the established directors of the era. For him, cinema was a matter of survival, not entertainment.

And then he decided to take action.

The Street as a Film Set

With The 400 Blows in 1959, he proved that films could be shot on ridiculous budgets with absolute freedom. The story of Antoine Doinel was his own life projected onto the face of the young Jean-Pierre Léaud. He won the Best Director award at Cannes and laid the foundations of the French New Wave alongside his fellow critics.

But Truffaut did not want to be an aesthetic revolutionary forever. Unlike Godard, he sought an emotional connection with the audience and a storytelling style that respected the classical tradition he had criticized so harshly years earlier.

His cycle of films about Antoine Doinel spanned twenty years. Through titles such as Stolen Kisses and Love on the Run, audiences watched the character and the actor age at the same pace. Fiction and reality ended up merging into an unprecedented sociological experiment.

It was a one-of-a-kind life bet in the history of cinema.

The Man Who Loved Books

His fifty-hour interview with Alfred Hitchcock in 1962 led to The Cinema According to Hitchcock. That book changed how the British director was perceived and elevated him to the status of a total auteur in the eyes of international critics. It was the first major manual of modern film theory based on the real practice of the studios.

He shot Fahrenheit 451 in 1966 as a tribute to the written word. It was his only experience filming in English, and he ended up exhausted by the technical difficulties and the head-on clash with actor Oskar Werner during the production in England.

In 1973, he won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film with Day for Night. It is an ensemble portrait of the chaos of a film shoot, where the personal problems of actors and crew mix with the mechanics of creating fiction. The film earned three additional nominations in the categories of directing, screenplay and supporting actress.

But his health began to falter at the start of the following decade.

In 1980, he released The Last Metro and won ten César Awards in a single night. It was a story of theater and resistance during the Nazi occupation that reconciled his personal style with mass success in France's commercial theaters.

His last film was Vivement dimanche! in 1983. He died on October 21, 1984 at the hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine from a brain tumor. He was 52 years old and left thirty unfinished scripts in his office at the production company Les Films du Carrosse.