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Francois Truffaut - InterviewsSeries of Interviews with French New Wave Great is PublishedFrench filmmaker Francois Truffaut was recognized as a great interview - but you'd hardly know it from this collection
The Ideal InterviewAmong critics, he was recognized as the ideal interview subject, a man happy to share his most detailed thoughts on all aspects of his art and reputation. Whether it was his lifelong admiration for the American masters, his personal relationships with his actors, or reflections on his troubled, cinema-salvaged childhood, Francois Truffaut, the late, still-loved French filmmaker, was verbosely obliging. Such a pedigree should account for a vast and varied volume of one-on-ones. Unfortunately, the chit-chats between journalists, critics and the estimable Truffaut currently gracing book shelves under the auspice "Interviews" fall prey to the trademark flaws of this literary series. Q and A'sThese volumes, each devoted to a great director (from Altman to Zinneman) began to appear on the scene a few short years ago. Each volume presents a succession of Q and As and/or articles with the title subject, in chronological order - usually from mid-career (when the mythos begins to seriously form) to the near-end. The Series' SinsBut the series' sins, instalment after instalment, go curiously unpunished. Each book is rife with redundancy (though admittedly, every director has his pet stories that survive the ages), curt with context, and a poor judge of interview talent. The filmmaker, then, becomes as badly maligned as a late night TV version of one of his own works. Surviving the SacrilegeThe volume on the fondly remembered Truffaut (who passed away prematurely in 1983) is especially representative. The man's reputation, however, survives the sacrilege; Truffaut's wordy individualism indeed makes for interesting copy, regardless of the style by which it is presented. His words are at once haughty and humane - ever the Frenchman and the critic, and ever the anti-Frenchman and the sympathetic soul. Whether he is commenting on the changing nature of cinema, deconstructing the work of a colleague or examining his own hit-and-miss oeuvre, Truffaut, in print as on celluloid, comes across as both a troubled romantic and an idiosyncratic realist. A Sad FateHad he lasted into the current age, Truffaut, like his cohort Goddard, would have no doubt felt the suffocation brought on by the ubiquity of the American blockbuster and declared the cinema dead. One can imagine, given his depthless love of the art, how truly melancholy he would have been over seeing the once-great reduced to a fraction of its potential - the same fate he himself suffers, cue the sad Georges Delerue music, at the hands of the editors of this collection.
The copyright of the article Francois Truffaut - Interviews in Foreign Films is owned by Dan Lalande. Permission to republish Francois Truffaut - Interviews in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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