François Truffaut

Antoniani, Mastroianni, Fellini, Pasolini, Billy Weider, Lana Turner, Reiner, Werner, Fassbinder, Marlene Dietrich, Ernst Lubitsch, Jay Westin, Charles Chaplin, François Truffaut, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Belmondo, Brigitte Bardot, La Manie du Cinéma.

Hello

and welcome to Random Acts of Cinema, a podcast where two friends sit down each week to journey through the wonderful world of the Criterion Collection, one randomly selected film at a time.

So those are two I really like.

I really like Truffaut.

I actually prefer Truffaut to Godard.

Ooh,

same.

I never get the urge to re-watch Contempt.

Actually, maybe I do.

Anyways, I like Truffaut a lot.

I've thought about that too, very much.

And in the book, there are a few people who compare him to, say, Truffaut, for example.

Truffaut, who actually willingly asked for Milos to do some of the films that...

he perhaps could have done or who suggested him in a different context.

There are also people who liken him to Antonioni.

But of course, Antonioni also tried to go to the US and make films.

And Zabriskie Point was hardly a big success.

Truffaut never really got any success in the US.

I think that this makes Simon King of the Witches seem like, I don't know, some sort of masterpiece.

Like a Truffaut movie? Yes, like day for night.

Yeah.

Also, like you said a couple episodes ago, and this is probably your curse, not the curse of the Headless Horseman, but the curse of Adam, is you said, boy, we've been showing a lot of movies that really could have been made in Hollywood.

Now he looks like the Grim Reaper up on a horse.

Right.

Now it's gone from Truffaut to Bergman.

Yeah.

You were basically not watching the news and you'd drunk the Kool-Aid to use Americanism.

And it's kind of interesting because there's a bit in the book where you talk about Goddard and Truffaut and the 68 student demonstrations and then essentially cancelling Cannes.

And Milos Forman has a film that he's about to show in competition at Cannes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And he was critical of parts of the left.

I think he was critical of...

While I'm sure he didn't dislike, well, certainly Godard was important, like, cinematically, and I'm sure that Milos Forman liked some of his films, although he probably felt more closely connected to Truffaut, I would guess.

They sort of stylistically, or in sensibility, or more closely connected, certainly.

I at 21, I got in my car, packed it up with stuff from Minneapolis and moved to L.A. and went to a school called Art Center College of Design, which is very commercial, slick school.

I was kind of an oddball because I loved Kubrick and Truffaut and Hitchcock.

And it was a very slick.

A lot of commercial directors came.

He goes, that's what you should refocus on is really telling the smaller characters the better.

Would you agree with that? Since you that you tore that out, your story with those two?

I don't know if it was Truffaut, but someone back in the French New Wave said, if you can't cut it out, you should cut it out.

And that's true.

100 yeah

well that but he also put one of um kind of just like a basically a list of influences on his of his movies and i was i was reading through that again i could share this with you please but like he uh he cited like the original oceans 11 the frank sinatra one not the cluny one of kind of just like the feeling of the rat pack in that movie and how he wanted the uh uh, Henry Hill and his crew to feel, uh, Jules and Jim, the Francois Truffaut film and like, in like the wild bunch, um, film in terms of like the film, like almost coming at you out, out of the screen.

Yeah.

And, um, and, and so just, uh, yeah.