10 Iconic Directors Who Lived Their Movies Whilst Making Them

2. Francois Truffaut (Fell In Love With Women And Filmed Them...Or Filmed Women And Fell In Love With Them)

Francois Truffaut "The history of cinema," Jean-Luc Godard famously declared, "is the history of boys photographing girls." Perhaps no director embodied that philosophy more fully that Francois Truffaut, Godard's "brother" in the "French New Wave". Truffaut's films, from the very beginning, were almost compulsively personal: he mined painful autobiographical memories of his own childhood for his debut film, The 400 Blows; he would take his own relationships with actors and collaborators and make them the basis of his stories (his 1973 Day for Night is basically one large in joke, with actors standing in for the faithful members of Truffaut's crew...or, in the case of lead actor Jean-Pierre Leaud, Truffaut's longtime cinematic doppleganger, standing in for themselves); as his career went on, he even began casting himself in his films, as if desperate to find new ways to connect directly and personally with his audience. Little wonder, then, that Truffaut's interest in human sexuality would manifest both in front of and behind the camera -- indeed, become almost inseparable from the films themselves. Truffaut has a troublesome habit of either falling in love with an actress and casting her in a film, or casting an actress in a film and falling in love with her. He had an affair with Jeanne Moreau while filming Jules and Jim; he had an affair with Francoise Dorleac while filming The Soft Skin; he had an affair with Claude Jade while filming Stolen Kisses, with Catherine Deneuve while filming Mississippi Mermaid, he started a great romantic affair with Fanny Ardent while shooting The Woman Next Door...what we're saying is when this guy wrote and directed a movie called The Man Who Loved Women, it wasn't just a cute title, it was a confession. Truffaut said many times that he had argued with himself about whether or not cinema was more important than life. What seems obvious is that - particularly in matters of the heart - it became almost impossible for him to distinguish the two.
Contributor

C.B. Jacobson pops up at What Culture every once in a while, and almost without fail manages to embarrass the site with his clumsy writing. When he's not here, he's making movies, or writing about them at http://buddypuddle.blogspot.com.