[In the following interview, Davis questions Truffaut about the making of Shoot the Piano Player.]

At the end of a little street, filled with the voices of children playing in the schoolyard, are the offices of Les Films du Carrosse, François Truffaut's production company in Paris. This is where we first met in 1978 to discuss a project for a book on Shoot the Piano Player. Images of The 400 Blows and Small Change came to my mind as I entered the building. The walls of Truffaut's office were lined with books. He had a genuine love for books, especially old and rare books. After a warm and friendly welcome the conversation focused on Shoot the Piano Player and he responded with characteristic enthusiasm to the project. He immediately began searching for material about the making of the film—newspaper clippings, documents, and photographs, as well as his own recollections. He spent time telling me anecdotes about the actors, anecdotes always tinged with affection. He even began to design a cover for the book. This stimulated a renewed interest in the film on his part and resulted in a revival of it in 1982 with beautiful new prints made possible by the financial success of The Last Metro.

After several meetings in Paris and California, and an extensive correspondence, we decided to tape a formal interview in his office at Les Films du Carrosse in January 1980 (with technical assistance by Robert Ernest Tompkins). What follows is a translated and edited version of the interview. It deals with the making of Shoot the Piano Player, the casting of actors, the reaction of the press, and the affinity of Truffaut for the novels of David Goodis.

[Cineaste:] What place would you give Shoot the Piano Player in relation to your other films?

[François Truffaut:] No place. Simply, the second film I made. I have said before that this film was made in reaction to The 400 Blows, which was so French, I needed to show that I had also been influenced by American cinema. It is so true that, at the time when I used to see Rossellini a lot—I had worked with him for years, and he had loved The 400 Blows—he told me he was going to see Shoot the Piano Player. I said, "Do me a favor, do not see Shoot the Piano Player," because I knew deep down that I had made this film almost against him, maybe.

Was Shoot the Piano Player a victim of criticism against the New Wave rather than against the film itself?

Yes. There was a polemic. I did receive the Young Critics Prize, a prize that existed only for two or three years. A few critics used to get together; Françoise Sagan was among them. They gave the prize to Shoot the Piano Player so they must have liked it. Other critics attacked it, as they did all the second films of New Wave directors. The idea was that these young men were capable of making a first film because they told the story of their childhood. But they could not make a second film. Thus we were refused entry into the profession.

Your first three films—The 400 Blows, Shoot the Piano Player, and Jules and Jim—were shot in CinemaScope. Why did you start with the large screen? Are you satisfied with the results?

When we were critics at the Cahiers du cinéma, we defended CinemaScope against older critics and some French directors. In The 400 Blows, as in the first New Wave films, we were shocked by the simplicity of our technical means for shooting. We had only a noisy camera. We did not record the sound directly, only a vague test sound. We were shooting on real locations, with a reduced crew. Our means were so limited that we thought the result would not be a real movie. I was very surprised when The 400 Blows was selected for the Cannes Film Festival, because I told myself that at Cannes they should not show a film that had not been shot with direct sound. (However, if we go back to 1946, at the first Cannes Film Festival, they showed René Clément's La Bataille du rail, which must have been shot under these same conditions.) Yet it is strange to think that in 1959 in Cannes the three French films presented—Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus), The 400 Blows, and Hiroshima, mon amour—had been shot without direct sound and outside a studio. In spite of the fact that he liked our films, Jean Renoir reproached us for not defending direct sound and was not satisfied with postsynchronization. In The 400 Blows it worked rather well because children are easily dubbed and Jean-Pierre Léaud is so well dubbed that you can't tell. With the parents it is not so good. Besides, there are parts shot with direct sound. For instance, the interview with the psychologist, which could not have been dubbed. I used this silent film system with postsynchronization up through Jules and Jim. Afterwards we switched to direct sound.

To answer your question on CinemaScope: by shooting The 400 Blows in scope, I had the rather naive feeling that the film would look more professional, more stylized; it would not be completely naturalistic. CinemaScope has this strange peculiarity of being an oblong window that hides many details. When someone moves in a room, if you have a square frame (1.33:1) you have all the details, what is on the table, on the wall, you judge the decor at the same time. Whereas in a CinemaScope room, the character moves abstractly, almost like in an aquarium. It is very clear in Shoot the Piano Player, during Théresa's confession, for instance. You are left with a face moving against a grey background. It becomes more abstract. And I liked that. I thought that in movies, we give actors absurd motivations to justify their movements, for instance, "Go over there to put out your cigarette in the ashtray." And I did not like these motivations. I believed that we could ask actors to move without a reason. That is why I liked CinemaScope. But afterwards, I abandoned CinemaScope when I learned that for The 400 Blows and Jules and Jim, 16mm reproductions were made, reducing the film to a flat screen. So CinemaScope, which had been invented to fight against television, was completely assimilated into the system; it was even harmed. We ended up seeing our favorite films massacred in movie theaters, with the top and bottom of the frame cropped. At first I thought that shooting a film in scope meant preserving it. Now that my films are shown on television cropped right and left, we know that there is no other solution than the 1.75:1 screen, which is the format used for most American films.

What made you decide to adapt Goodis's novel?

I read the book when it came out. It must have been at the time I was shooting Les Mistons. I had just written the scenario of Breathless, which I did not think I would make myself, but I didn't really know what I would do with it. It was a true story that happened in the Pigalle district, where I was born. At that time I discovered Shoot the Piano Player and I was enthused by the dialogue, the poetic tone of the book, the love story, the evocation of the past. I gave the novel to Pierre Braunberger, who was the only producer to take an interest in the young directors, and he liked it a lot and bought the rights to it. Then, while working on the adaptation, I felt that it was not right to start with this film. So I offered the script of The 400 Blows to him and he turned it down. He preferred Shoot the Piano Player. So I made The 400 Blows with my father-in-law who was a retired producer. My experience with Les Mistons had taught me that I worked well with children, that I was not quite ready for adults, and that I would work better on a subject close to me. After I discovered Shoot the Piano Player I started reading all of Goodis's books, looking for what they had in common. When we talk about the attraction that hard-boiled detective novels have for French people, we have to remember that it is not only the American material in which we find a certain poetry, but, because this material has been transformed by the translation, we get an almost perverse pleasure out of it. For instance, I believe that the version of Johnny Guitar dubbed in French is more poetic than the original film, because there is a certain style, a theatrical style that touched us in France, a sentimental style. I think that Americans like Johnny Guitar now in retrospect, after the French reaction. For instance it is the only Western in which the characters say "vous" to each other. "Jouez-nous un air, Monsieur Guitare." The French text of Johnny Guitar leads the film in the direction of classical tragedy.

There is also a rhythm of synchronization. When we like a book like Shoot the Piano Player it is difficult to explain why to an American audience. We even like the distortion. When I wrote an article for Cahiers du cinéma on Humphrey Bogart, I not only described what I liked in Bogart, but also paid homage to the two actors who used to postsynchronize his voice. Dubbing, like subtitling, is a technique that distorts and sometimes enhances the meaning. The printed word reinforces and makes things funnier. This is what happened to some of my films when they were shown at the New York Film Festival. It is the only time I ever saw my films in the States. I noticed more laughter than in France at certain points, just because of the printed words.

Is that what happened with "Avanie et framboise," the Boby Lapointe song?

It's quite different. Boby Lapointe's song was an accident. Pierre Braunberger didn't like this singer. He said that he did not understand a word he was saying and wanted to cut the scene. So, I said that I would subtitle the song so he could understand. I remembered the Canadian films of Norman McLaren that I loved. In these films, people in the audience were supposed to sing along. The words appeared syllable by syllable with a little ball bouncing on the syllable at the time it was to be sung. I had the syllables appear at the time Boby Lapointe pronounced them.

Did you plan the changes of tone in Shoot the Piano Player because they appear in the novel, or did this style come spontaneously during the shooting?

They were planned but they were reinforced in the shooting because I realized that I was faced with a film without a theme I clearly understood. In a movie like Adele H., I know that I have the same idea repeated, that the heroine must be excessive in her character, which becomes obsessive. Whereas with a film with an unclear subject, such as Stolen Kisses or Love on the Run, some days I stress the comical side, other days the dramatic side. It is only when the film is finished that I know what it is about. The first time I showed Shoot the Piano Player to Jacques Rivette, he told me something that upset me. He said: "Do you realize that the main character of your film is a bastard?" I suppose that he said it because the character is a complete introvert who never expresses his thoughts, who is withdrawn, who refuses to intervene when he sees that women are victimized. Later on Rivette liked the film. But it is unusual to have so little control over what one is doing. The scenario was really a compromise between what I liked best in Goodis and other things I wanted to say. I found Goodis's book too chaste. The film is not as chaste as the book. I was advancing instinctively, according to the actresses, too. I was what was appropriate for these three very different women. I consciously wanted to show three portraits of women who can pass through a man's life. That part was planned.

Two years before making Shoot the Piano Player, I was a critic at the Cahiers du cinéma and Arts. There had been such an exaggerated reception and publicity for The 400 Blows at the Cannes Film Festival. We were in the news and were interviewed over and over. It did not go to my head, but it created a certain agitation in my mind after this disproportionate success of The 400 Blows. Afterwards in Shoot the Piano Player, there was an echo of the notion of celebrity and obscurity. It is reversed in Shoot the Piano Player since it is a famous person who becomes unknown. There are touches here and there of this feeling that troubled me. For instance, a small detail, when Aznavour is sitting and there are photographers who call him in a more and more familiar way: "Monsieur Saroyan, Charles, Charlie …" It is something that had struck me at the Cannes Festival, where Cocteau insisted that I go up the stairs with him before the showing of The 400 Blows. And Cocteau, who was very popular with the photographers, was hailed in that manner: "Cocteau, Maître, Jean …" It made me laugh. And the scene with Aznavour is an echo of this.

Why did you choose to stress the poetic atmosphere of Goodis's novel?

In spite of my admiration for Ernst Lubitsch, I have to disagree with him when he says "In a film one must never speak of the past." He thinks it is wasted time and we lose the audience. As for me I have always been moved by scenes that are told but not seen, or when there is a reference to the past. So there is that style of interior monologue in Shoot the Piano Player that excited me, and I wanted to reproduce it in the film. I was very meticulous. In a first version, I used Aznavour's voice. Later I realized that his voice was good for dialogue but not for voiceover, because his voice was not soft enough. Maybe we can see here something that is in several other films I made, that is, an attempt to include literary forms in the soundtrack of my films because I like commentary, flashbacks, and evocations of the past. Even the imperfect tense of a verb: when Marie Dubois says "You were here, you started playing piano again," it is very literary. It is funny because this film is an homage to American cinema, and at the same time this verb tense is not used in American cinema.

What about the superimposed images in their first intimate scene, where this very literary dialogue takes place?

The superimposed image expresses the passage of time. I liked the idea of intimacy being born. Also, because Aznavour's voice was not soft enough, I used only her words and no words from him. It emphasized the feelings and was rather well done.

What about the role of Marcel Moussy in the writing of the screenplay of Shoot the Piano Player?

His role was not as important as for The 400 Blows because The 400 Blows corresponded to the work he had done on television for a program called If It Were You (Si c'etait vous), which presented problematic social situations. For Shoot the Piano Player, I had not been able to explain to him why I liked the book, and he wondered why I wanted to make this film. In our first discussion, he wanted to establish social roots for the characters, to situate them socially. I realized that I could not answer his questions, because I felt like making an abstract film. In the script, there were precise references to places in Paris or in France and during the shooting I changed that, I decided to remain abstract; I wanted to say "the town," "the snow," to stress more the Série Noire aspect. There was an attempt on my part to oppose certain French films that adapted novels by James Hadley Chase taking place in America and transposed them to the French Riviera. That transposition was always done in bad taste. I did not want to give French equivalents for the locations. I wanted to remain abstract.

So Marcel Moussy did not continue?

After a few weeks, we gave up, and we said that we would work together on another script, some other time. Then I went to the Colombe d'Or at Saint Paul de Vence, and I wrote the script alone, up until the part when the characters have to leave Paris, because it was urgent to start shooting.

How did you develop the character of Fido?

There is a link with the previous film. The little boy had a part in The 400 Blows. He was in the classroom, tearing his notebook page by page because he had blotted the pages. Finally he had only three pages left. He made us laugh a lot. Also when he tried out for The 400 Blows, he imitated Aznavour, and he has a scene in Shoot the Piano Player where he imitates a singer as he walks away from the school.

How did you choose the other actors?

I had been moved by Aznavour [Charlie] when I saw him in Franju's film La Tête contre les murs (Head against the Wall). I liked his face, the way he moved. Nicole Berger [Théresa] I had known for a long time. She was Braunberger's stepdaughter. She had acted in several films, even, when she was very young, in Le Blé en herbe (The Game of Love) by Autant-Lara. She was a very sensitive girl, sad and interesting. Michèle Mercier [Clarisse] was not well known. She was a dancer in a few films.

Marie Dubois [Léna] was the result of a search. I was looking for someone to convey the idea of purity. I looked at many actresses and photos. Then Marie Dubois's picture came to my attention, but she never came to our appointments because she was very busy. Her agent told me that she was going to appear on TV and, when I saw her, I was sure she was the right one. She finally came at the last minute. We hardly had time to buy her a raincoat for her part and she started right away. Actually I named her Marie Dubois, because her name was not good for an actress. Her name was Claudine Huzé. [In French Huzé is pronounced like usé, and means "worn out."—H.L.D.] Since I liked that novel by Jacques Audiberti entitled Marie Dubois, which is a great portrait of a woman, I proposed that name to her, and she agreed to be named Marie Dubois. And Audiberti was very happy.

Albert Rémy [Chico] was the father in The 400 Blows, and I felt like giving him a nice role, because he was my friend and I was embarrassed to have him this harsh role in The 400 Blows. There was also a clown side to him, very innocent, pure comic, which I wanted to show.

The gangsters are Daniel Boulanger [Ernest], who had played a small part in Breathless by Godard and was Philippe de Broca's scriptwriter, as well as being a novelist. Claude Mansard [Momo] was from the theater. He had acted in many plays by Ionesco, a very emotional actor. The two gangsters looked like two big cats. I was ill at ease with these gangsters. I had grown up in Pigalle and I only had bad memories of them. One night when I was very young, I was alone at home because my parents had gone out. There were guys making noise under my window, so I threw a pan of water on them. They took it badly and came up and kicked the door. I was dying of fear, and I pushed a heavy armoire against the door. When my parents came home I got in trouble because the door had been damaged. Those guys were gangsters. Often there were shots in the middle of the night in Pigalle. It is snobbism on the part of artists to like gangsters. There is no reason to like them, they are bad guys. During the war, they often worked with the Gestapo. That is why I made them comical. I never included gangsters in my later films, even those taken from the Série Noire, like The Bride Wore Black and Mississippi Mermaid.

The scene in the street with the passerby is taken from another book by Goodis. The title escapes me. Catherine Lutz [Mammy] had never acted before; I liked her a lot. She worked in a movie theater, I found her beautiful, with a Marlene Dietrich look. Her facial structure was beautiful. She acted again in Stolen Kisses, where she was a detective. Serge Davri, who played Plyne, was crazy. I first noticed him in the music hall, where he is still doing the same act after thirty years. He breaks plates on his head as he recites poems. Sometimes he is funny, and sometimes it is a fiasco. He made me laugh, that's why I chose him. But it was difficult to work with him, because some days he refused to work.

We noticed a difference in the timing of the various copies of Shoot the Piano Player. How do you explain that?

People are not accurate in the timing, they print anything. But I did make mistakes and changed a few scenes. I was ashamed of the dialogue in the car [when the gangsters discuss women—H.L.D.], which I found too raw. So I put so much traffic noise in the scene that one could not hear the dialogue. People blamed me for it, and I made a second cut where you could hear better. There may be other short scenes cut or moved. There was a scene in which you saw Aznavour in a Monoprix buying a pair of stockings for Marie Dubois. That scene was to be accompanied by a song in the Monoprix, a very famous song by Tino Rossi called "Petit Papa Noel." But it took very long to obtain the rights for this song and, when we finally got them, I was in the middle of editing and I had decided to cut the scene. Probably those timing differences are due to small things like this. It is also very difficult to make films with Pierre Braunberger at the Films de la Pléiade because it is quite disorganized. It often happens that there are several versions of a film. One time Shoot the Piano Player was on French television, and for four minutes a scene was shown with the soundtrack from another scene. Nobody noticed, because they thought it was another pretentious experiment of the New Wave. I was furious. But this illustrates the chaos of the Films de la Pléiade and Pierre Braunberger—in spite of his love of cinema, which is real.

How much did the film cost?

I think the film cost $150,000 at the time.

So a budget was imposed on you?

Yes, but although I was not working in luxury, it was all right. In black and white we do not pay so much attention. Of course some sets were ugly. Everything was done sparingly. At one point, we needed a cocktail party in the film; we needed a crowd. It was decided to use a cocktail party that had been organized to publicize the film. People had to be filmed secretly.

In general did those restrictions hinder you?

No. I was rather carefree and happy then. I had made The 400 Blows with a lot of anxiety because I was afraid that the film would never come out, that people would say that, after having insulted everybody as a critic, I should have stayed home. Whereas Shoot the Piano Player was made in euphoria thanks to the success of The 400 Blows. It was the discovery of some unusual material that I did not master, that I did not understand. But there was a great pleasure in filming, much greater than in The 400 Blows, where I was concerned about Jean-Pierre Léaud. I was wondering if he would show up each day, or if he had had a fight and would have marks on his nose. With children we worry more because they do not have the same self-interest as adults.