David Teboul was 12 years old when he experienced the “shock” of seeing his first François Truffaut film, The 400 Blows (1959). This was Truffaut’s debut feature, an autobiographical drama introducing the then adolescent character Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), the alter ego to the director who was to feature in many of his subsequent movies. It was a sometimes brutal film about a young kid getting into scrapes, playing truant from school and discovering his mother’s infidelity.
“I love the way Truffaut shows childhood, raw and without clichés. His films were a cinematographic revelation,” Teboul enthuses. He later went on to see Truffaut’s dark romantic drama The Woman Next Door(1981) and was equally startled by that film, “a second shock” as he puts it.
Now, Teboul has made a feature doc, The Scenario Of My Life, François Truffaut, about the legendary French auteur. The film, sold by MK2, premiered this week in Cannes Classics. It is co-written by Teboul and Serge Toubiana, the renowned film critic and biographer (with Antoine de Baecque) of Truffaut.
That biography was one of the starting points for the film. Teboul was also able to draw on unpublished interviews Truffaut has given to his friend, fellow filmmaker and screenwriter Claude de Givray, with the hope of writing his autobiography before dying.
“He had the idea of the autobiography for a long time, but he didn’t want to write it before his parents’ death. He didn’t want to hurt them again after The 400 Blows. So he started very late and even [with] the interviews with Claude de Givray, it stayed unfinished,” Teboul says.
“The idea of the film started with this incredible material,” the director adds. “I had the trust of [Truffaut’s daughters] Eva and Laura Truffaut so I had access to personal unpublished archives, interviews, letters and photos.”
“With the discovery of these unpublished interviews, given by Truffaut at the end of his life, I was able to make an intimate portrait to the first person, from the point of view of Truffaut. This has never been done before.”
Teboul enlisted French actor Louis Garrel to voice Truffaut in the film. “He is the incarnation of the Nouvelle Vague,” the director says of the charismatic French star who also once portrayed Truffaut’s colleague, friend and rival Jean-Luc Godard, in Michel Hazanavicius’s Redoubtable.
“Ploughing into the unknown,” Truffaut once summed up what he regarded as his greatest strength as a filmmaker. Outwardly, he was a calm and controlled figure, always courteous with the press. However, Truffaut has also often been portrayed as a troubled character, beset by doubts, scarred by the unhappy childhood he dramatised in The 400 Blows. Teboul’s doc acknowledges the difficulties in its subject’s life but shows another side of his personality. “I think the film shows a solar Truffaut, full of life, joy, with a sense of humour and lightness. This aspect of his personality was not, or [only] inadvertently, in his films.”
Teboul details the young Truffaut’s growing obsession with cinema. In the 1940s, he regularly skipped class or sneaked out late at night when he was supposed to be in bed to watch movies. Sometimes, his parents would take him to see films that he had already surreptitiously watched on his own. This, he says, gave him the passion for rewatching films. His best friend was Robert Lachenay, who shared his passion for cinema. As a penniless teenager, Truffaut tried to set up his own film club – and this was when he first came into the orbit of André Bazin, the critic and founder of Cahiers Du Cinéma, who became one of his most important mentors.
The doc also deals with Truffaut’s short stint in the French army (he ended up deserting) and his epistolary friendship with the writer Jean Genet.
Despite his love of Hitchcock, Truffaut was often openly dismissive of British cinema which he called “dull” and “submissive.” Nonetheless, as the documentary reveals, he was a fervent lover of the work of English novelist Charles Dickens. Passages from David Copperfield inspired his movies, in particular the novel’s famous opening lines: “whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages will tell,” which he quoted directly in Fahrenheit 451. He was inspired by Dickens to improvise stories about his own birth and childhood.
“I didn’t know his link with Charles Dickens and David Copperfield until I read these unpublished interviews,” Teboul says of Truffaut’s debt to Dickens – a debt still largely unacknowledged by critics and film historians.
Teboul, whose previous credits include well received documentaries on a wide range of subjects including Yves Saint-Laurent, Brigitte Bardot and Sigmund Freud, regarded this project as a labour of love. He talks of Truffaut’s movies as “a cinematographic revelation.” His film offers a frank, affectionate and intimate portrait of a man, who, by the time he died aged 52 in 1984, was already one of the titans of French film history.
“The film will have a first TV release on France Televisions. We hope for more festivals and a lot of international broadcasters,” Teboul observes of the release plans for a documentary bound to reignite interest in its subject. After all, this is a film in which Truffaut seems to be speaking directly to the audience, sharing some of his most intimate and heartfelt insights into his own life and work.
