FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT, MY LIFE, A SCREENPLAY
My Life, a Screenplay: the unpublished letters of François Truffaut
Truffaut still has so much to tell us about himself, his life, his childhood, ourselves. Almost forty years after his death, the leading New Wave director features in Le scénario de ma vie, François Truffaut (François Truffaut, My Life, a Screenplay) – a documentary by David Teboul based on the filmmaker’s unpublished writings. This film tribute will be shown at Cannes Classics in the presence of the director and his co-writer, Serge Toubiana.
“The Screenplay of My Life” was Truffaut’s final project. How did you make use of it?
Thanks to Laura and Eva, François Truffaut’s daughters, I was granted permission to use letters and correspondence. But I mostly worked off unseen material: the last of François Truffaut’s accounts. All his life, he had wanted to write an autobiography; he had thought about doing so after the death of his parents. But after hurting them so much with Les 400 Coups (The 400 Blows), he kept postponing the project. His ex-wife Madeleine Morgenstern, with whom he lived out the final months of his life, had suggested he take it back up. I worked on this material, which consisted of interviews Truffaut had done with his childhood friend, Claude de Givray. Their aim was to write this autobiography, which was to be called “The Screenplay of My Life”.
How do you bring a new dimension to François Truffaut’s story?
It’s a first-person documentary. Truffaut revisits his childhood and the first thirty years of his life. I drew on the connection between his films and the letters to create a sense of intimacy.
Would you say cinema was a form of therapy for him?
From very early on, cinema was a means of healing from childhood traumas, which he didn’t experience as such. He was extremely positive. He’s a more complex and more moving individual than he appears to be on the surface. And essentially, from the very beginning, the character of Antoine Doinel is our own. So Truffaut also had this desire to go beyond the intimate and create a character that belonged to all of us.
It’s also a story about love, about a lack of love…
The film is both tender and joyful. Truffaut is a lover of love. There’s this romantic side to him, and even the story about his potentially Jewish biological father resembles a film he could have made. I really wanted to talk about the sentimental Truffaut. His work essentially stems from childhood, the couple, passion and I tried to approach all of these themes by associating them with his own life.
What is it that touches you personally about François Truffaut?
The remnants of childhood, this childlike view of extremely serious subjects. I always get the sense that he’s doing things for the first time. But then there’s another side to Truffaut, which is hugely important to consider when looking at his character. That is to say, there is a kind of violence in how he feels. It’s anything but simple. And when it seems simple, it really isn’t. But he’s deeply in love with life, and that is quite rare for someone who has been through so much.
