Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (13 page)

Once Beauregard’s involvement in the project was confirmed and Pignières’s promise of financing secured, Godard began to seek actors. He suggested to Beauregard
¹
that efforts be made to hire an American actress, Jean Seberg, to play the American woman. As Godard knew, Seberg lived in Paris with her French husband, François Moreuil, a young attorney who also harbored directorial ambitions (and was a cousin of the American director William Wyler).

Seberg had become famous in 1956 when, while still a high school student in Marshalltown, Iowa, she was chosen by Otto Preminger in a much-ballyhooed nationwide talent search to play Joan of Arc in his film
Saint Joan
. Seberg was miscast—and then tyrannized—by Preminger. His notoriously harsh methods may have borne fruit with other, experienced actors, but Seberg could not bear up under his verbal assault, and her performance suffered: a Joan of Arc without self-confidence is no Joan of Arc at all. For the role, her hair had been cut martially short; and Preminger again imposed this style, both pixieish and provocatively androgynous, for her second film,
Bonjour Tristesse
, based on the bestselling French novel by the young writer Françoise Sagan.

Bonjour Tristesse
, in which Seberg plays a teenage daughter who destroys her widowed father’s chance at happiness with another woman, had been scorned in the United States. (The
New York Times
critic called it a “bomb” and Seberg a “misplaced amateur.”) In France, where it was released in May 1958,
Bonjour Tristesse
was widely derided for what was taken to be Preminger’s glossy Hollywood treatment of a novel that should have been reserved for a French director. The dissenting voice of enthusiasm for the film was that of François Truffaut, who exulted in the pages of
Arts
that Seberg had a “special quality of heartbreaking young beauty that somehow shone through her technically inadequate performances.”
²
Godard placed the film third in his
Cahiers
ten-best list for 1958, behind Joseph Mankiewicz’s
The Quiet American
and Ingmar Bergman’s
Dreams
.

Seberg, who had been wounded by critics’ uncomprehending response to
Bonjour Tristesse
, was immensely grateful to Truffaut for his praise. She thanked him in what she called a “fan letter,” which she sent after the success of
The 400 Blows
. In the note, she told Truffaut: “of all the young directors I believe in you and Renais [
sic
].”
³
Her career had been hurt by the bad reviews and by the commercial failure of her films with Preminger: after making
Bonjour Tristesse
, Preminger had sold her contract to Columbia Pictures, which cast her in the minor comedy
The Mouse That Roared
.

Moreuil arranged a meeting between Godard and Seberg. She was unimpressed by the director, describing him as “an incredibly introverted, messy-looking young man with glasses, who didn’t look [her] in the eyes when he talked,” but she was encouraged by her husband to accept the role Godard was offering.
⁴
In any case, Seberg believed the project was more interesting than any she had been offered in the United States; meeting the director Samuel Fuller by chance in Paris, she told him, “It will be better than working with Preminger.”
⁵

Although Columbia had little work for Seberg, the studio was nonetheless reluctant to lend her out to unknowns. Godard tried to sway Columbia
with a twelve-page telegram, giving the studio the choice of either one-half of the film’s revenues outside France or fifteen thousand dollars. The decisive gesture, however, seems to have been that of her husband, who flew to Los Angeles and told the Columbia studio executives that Seberg would retire from acting if her request to film with Godard was not met. The studio executives agreed to terms with Beauregard on June 8. With little reason to believe that the film would generate much non-French revenue, they took the cash.

Godard had not forgotten his promise to cast Belmondo in the lead role of his first film. Although
Charlotte et son Jules
was still unreleased, Godard had in a way already publicly “discovered” the actor: writing in
Arts
in 1958 about the film
Un drôle de dimanche
, in which Belmondo plays a supporting role, Godard had likened him to two of the greatest French film actors, heralding him as “the Michel Simon and the Jules Berry of tomorrow.”
⁶
Belmondo, who was already recognized as a comic theater actor, was beginning to get lucrative, if uninspiring, offers from the mainstream film industry. While Godard was preparing
Breathless
, Belmondo was offered a supporting role in a film by the veteran director Julien Duvivier, which his agent, Blanche Montel, encouraged him to accept. While waiting for Belmondo to decide, Godard considered offering the role to, among others, the popular singer and songwriter Charles Aznavour, whom Truffaut had met at Cannes and would soon cast as the lead in his second film,
Shoot the Piano Player
. Belmondo took Godard’s offer, over the objections of Montel, who told him, “You’re making the biggest mistake of your life.” He signed a contract that paid him 400,000 francs (approximately eight hundred dollars), which barely covered his vacation on the Riviera before the shoot started.
⁷

A
LTHOUGH
G
ODARD KNEW
the story well, having worked on it with Truffaut, he was now at a loss as to how to tell it. His four short fictions had all been adaptations—
Une Femme coquette
of a Maupassant story,
All the Boys Are Called Patrick
of Rohmer’s script,
Charlotte et son Jules
based on Cocteau’s
Le Bel indifférent
, and
Histoire d’eau
using Truffaut’s footage. His occasional work in the film industry had also been second-order—editing nature footage for the producer Pierre Braunberger and the publishing house of Arthaud, writing dialogue for scripts by the young directors Edouard Molinaro and Jean-Pierre Mocky, adapting the Loti novel for Beauregard. The stories he had proposed to producers had all been adaptations—
Odile
from Goethe,
Quartier Nègre
from a novel by Simenon, even
The Myth of Sisyphus
. Until now, he had been a critic, a writer who wrote in response to preexisting material; and he was having trouble getting a story going on his own.

On June 17, Godard sent a note to Truffaut from the Côte d’Azur to request help with the story: “If you have time to finish off for me in three lines the story begun one morning métro Richelieu-Drouot (those were the good Times
⁸
), although I haven’t got Françoise Sagan
⁹
at my disposal, I’d be able to add the dialogue.” Truffaut had formally ceded the story in question to Beauregard for the derisory sum of one million francs (two thousand dollars), a gesture of friendship to Godard for which the producer was grateful; but the story was at that point not a script or even a story outline.
¹⁰
Truffaut, who was also staying in the south of France with his mistress, Liliane David, wrote back with a promise to sketch out the story upon his return to Paris.

The outline was needed by Beauregard and Pignières for the latter to submit with his application to the government for the production subsidy to which he was entitled. Laws passed in 1948 to aid the French cinema in the wake of the Blum-Byrnes accord offered producers direct grants on the basis of their previous productions (and financed them with a special tax on ticket sales), and also provided inexpensive credit to producers from the French national bank. Pignières’s track record allowed him to participate in this system, and on June 25, he submitted requests for a direct grant to foster production of
Breathless
.

Time was running out on this system of financing. On June 16, André Malraux, who had in January been named France’s first minister of cultural affairs,
¹¹
had announced a revision of the terms of government aid to the French cinema. Where the law had formerly granted financial assistance to producers primarily on the basis of the quantity of their previous releases—thus favoring the industry’s commercial mainstream—now it would favor quality. The new system would be called the “advance on receipts,” which granted producers financing on the basis of a script’s quality (as determined by a board of industry reviewers).

A French cinema of artistic merit, Malraux contended, would reinforce French culture both within France and around the world. The new policy was based on Malraux’s recognition that the cinema and its function had changed. As television became increasingly common in French households, demand for films was declining; the number of tickets sold in France had dropped from 411 million in 1957 to 371 million in 1958. Malraux recognized that, in order to remain viable, the French cinema would need to become part of the French cultural patrimony, and to be exported like Bordeaux wine or Camembert cheese; that if the French film industry was to have a future, it would be in the international market of art films.

But Pignières, when he submitted his dossier to the Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC) on June 25, 1959, under the old system of aid
for producers, was not claiming for the film any artistic merit; he was simply requesting quasi-automatic financial assistance for a commercial venture.

Beauregard’s commerce, however, was singularly tenuous. The producer worked on a tightrope of solvency and did not always keep his footing. José Bénazéraf, a producer who shared an office with Beauregard at the time, summed him up in a phrase: “fragility and payment due.”
¹²
Beauregard, he explained, “seems to have been persecuted by the constant lack of money. He put into a film everything he had and everything he didn’t have.”
¹³
Beauregard’s two previous films (the Loti productions) had largely been financed by an independent backer, but did so poorly that Beauregard was left with a debt of 60 million old francs ($120,000). As a commercial proposition,
Breathless
could hardly do worse.

Godard’s friends from
Cahiers
had made their first films without producers: Chabrol’s first two films had been self-financed; Truffaut’s company was funded by his father-in-law; Rivette’s film,
Paris nous appartient
(
Paris Belongs to Us
), was self-financed (and was, at the time, unfinished, for lack of funds); Rohmer’s forthcoming film was backed by Chabrol. Only Godard had a producer from within the French film industry. Beauregard, because of his trusting (and cavalier) temperament, granted Godard a liberty that was exceptional by industry standards but was still less than that afforded his friends by the autonomy of their productions. Compared to his cohorts, Godard was making his film in the face of opposition, which, although initially mild, would intensify during the shoot over matters of pure practicality.

I
N
P
ARIS
, G
ODARD
worked on the adaptation of
Breathless
. His original plan had been to use Truffaut’s story outline and merely add dialogue to it. Instead, he remodeled the entire story, reconfiguring the action, adding and subtracting characters, and drastically shifting the emphases.
¹⁴

Truffaut’s new story outline differed in several respects from the version of the story that he had hoped to shoot several years earlier. His original plan ended in suspense, with the criminal aware that he was recognized by passersby from newspaper pictures: he knew that he was being looked at in the street, as Truffaut said, “like a star.”
¹⁵
But when sketching out the subject for Godard, Truffaut replaced this personal touch with a clearer and more decisive ending, the criminal’s bloodless suicide by aspirin overdose. Truffaut also cut a long flashback in the middle, concerning the backstory of the French criminal and his American lover in the United States several years earlier. He offered Godard a more straightforward and neutral story than the one he had planned for himself.

The new outline by Truffaut told a story of claustrophobia, of the increasingly frantic anguish of a young man who, having turned in despair to crime, sees the walls of the world close in around him—a parallel to
The 400 Blows
, and to Truffaut’s own experience. It was mainly a manhunt, in which the point of view shifted between the police and the man being hunted.

Godard, however, removed all but a trace of the police side of the plot, focusing the action on the young man who is desperate in a big city, scrambling for help from his friends, who are all away or unable to help in time—an echo of the financial difficulties that Godard himself had endured.
¹⁶
And most importantly, in Godard’s draft, the American woman comes into the plot near the beginning, and their love story dominates the film.

Also, Godard shifted the bulk of the action to his own stomping grounds—the Champs-Elysées (where
Cahiers du cinéma
was located), Montparnasse (the neighborhood of the hotel seen in
Charlotte et son Jules
), and St.-Germain-des-Prés—and even included in his treatment a geographical wink to Jean-Paul Sartre, showing the fugitive as he “crosses the boulevard Saint-Germain, passes in front of [the bookstore] la Hune and enters the courtyard of a building next to the Flore”
¹⁷
—the café made famous by Sartre during the war. Writing to Truffaut, Godard explained that “the action revolves around a car thief… in love with a girl who sells the
New York Herald
and takes courses in French civilization.”
¹⁸
He similarly described the basic idea of the film he was about to make: “In general, the subject will be the story of a boy who thinks about death and that of a girl who doesn’t.”
¹⁹