Khalid Mohamed rewinds way back to 1977 to a face-to--face conversation with Francois Truffaut, one of the masters of the Nouvelle Vague of French cinema and the legacy shaping global cinema for future generations worldwide.

Hanging around the Columbia Studios in the Metro cinema building circa January 1977, for a story on film censorship, I heard one of its officers telling another that he had received a fax from the U.S., announcing Francois Truffaut would be arriving for a shoot in Mumbai.

“What Truffaut, really?” I yelped. The officer said sternly that the news was strictly confidential. I hadn’t heard it, I couldn’t report a word about it in The Times of India, where I was a trainee at the time. I couldn’t do something unethical. No verification, no story. Get it? I didn’t.

Adding two and many more twos together, I could guess why. For decades, the Indian representatives of the major American studios couldn’t repatriate more than 25 per cent of their annual earnings to the U.S, in keeping with the foreign exchange norms.

Obviously, the Columbia bosses had surplus cash collecting cobwebs. So maybe Truffaut was scheduled to shoot his next film in Mumbai, since there was finance to spare. I snooped around a bit with a trade source and he laughed, “Don’t you know Mr Truffaut is acting in a sci-fi movie – Close Encounters of the Third Kind?.”

Disappointed because film’s director Steven Spielberg wasn’t known factor in India since Jaws had delayed release. Most Hollywood films were, since their earnings here amounted to a ‘mere drop in the ocean’.

Be that as it may, Francois Truffaut (1932-1984) was my film deity, accidentally so. My buddy, Abbas, during school days had inducted me to the Nouvelle Vague cinema at a week-long film festival of French cinema, organised by the film societies, at the New Excelsior theatre, a brisk walk away from school. Although we were both under-age, the Film Forum society needed as many members as it could keep to stay alive. We were registered with a welcome smile.

Discovering Alternative Cinema

And then was a flash moment for me. Within a week, I discovered that there was something like Alternative Cinema, stunned by the sub-titled screenings of Truffaut’s iconic 400 Blows and Jules et Jim, as well as Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar and Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou (the only one in stylish, coordinated colour). A junkie of Bollywood fare, here was another world, of free and unfettered films, devoid of so much as a whiff of adhering to formulaic conventions.

So much for the backstory for my irrepressible lust to meet Francois Truffaut, face-to-face, maybe even snag an interview for my newspaper. Dream on I did, and got there, not without much huffing-puffing though, leaping over the barbed-wire fences built around the French auteur.

The crew had arrived in February-end, to picturise a scene in a village, near Khopoli on the Bombay-Poona highway, which was to pass off as Dharamsala in North India. The filming took place on 24 February, with Truffaut playing scientist Claude Lacombe, who along with 3.000 junior artistes watch the landing of an alien spaceship, all for a two-minute sequence in the final edit.

No ’guests’, especially journos, were allowed to join the melee. As hissy as a rattlesnake, I left a letter in fractured French for Monsieur Truffaut at the reception desk of the Taj Mahal Hotel where the crew was staying. The letter described my identification with his coming-of-age, often truant and restless Antoine Doinel, and it was unfair that I couldn’t meet its creator for a minute or two.

The Taj Meeting

The next day, what do you know? Nisha D’Cunha, who usually handled the production coordination of overseas films in India, summoned Bikram Singh of Filmfare, Iqbal Masud of Indian Express and ahem, me of The Times, for a round-table meeting with my idol at 4 p.m. sharp. Instead of a round-table of any sort, we were asked to wait in the lounge of the Taj Mahal Hotel, meaning on one of the round sofas there.

Truffaut was late, by an hour, delayed by the shoot at Khopoli, and burnt lobster red by the sun. Wearing shades of beige trousers and a shirt, its sleeves rolled up, to store two packs of Gauloise cigarettes which he would chain-smoke almost absent-mindedly, moving his hands like a windmill while talking to us, pausing to get the right word in English.

He seemed harassed and to Ms D’Cunha’s alarm informed us albeit off the record, ,”Being a director, I know actors can be difficult. I’ve been following the instructions never asking why or whatever for. The shoot has been a bit chaotic, not because of Steven. The budget has gone haywire It was so disorganized today that they had me show up and then do nothing.”

On 400 Blows and Childhood

Itching to get the q and a going, I piped up -- how autobiographical his 400 Blows was. Truffaut in his broken English (paraphrased here) remarked that he had never aspired to be a filmmaker, and thought of himself as a film critic (for the cult magazine Cahiers Du Cinema).

At most, he had aspired to write screenplays or novels. However, since he was going through a bleak childhood and punishment at schools, he had often skipped classes to sneak in without a ticket into an auditorium from the back entrance and had seen hundreds of films, as he put it. This was during the time of World War II.

Impacted instantly by the films of Jean Renoir – The Rules of the Game and The Goden Coach – which he saw repeatedly till he was familiar with every frame, line of dialogue, refrains of the background music, the acting process and where and how the camera was placed during the shot takings. In retrospect, he felt that this constant exposure to films, was something he could have never learnt at a film school or as an assistant director.

Influences and Beginnings

Among his other catalysts towards film direction were the Italian auteur Roberto Rossellini’s whose Open City Roma (1945) and Germany Year Zero (1947) depicted children, using non-professional actors, to delineate their unbridled courage during the devastation of Rome and Berlin in the course of World War II.

Drawn to films centred around children, inevitably Truffaut’s debut-making 400 Blows (1959) tracked his own difficult life as an adolescent of Paris whom adults dismiss as a trouble-maker, compelling him inadvertently to drift towards committing petty crime.

Solemnly he pointed out that it was ‘semi-autobiographical’ with the dramatic licence of using fictional elements to work as a “narrative which could otherwise have been boring or self-indulgent. I didn’t want anything to sound conclusive. So I ended with Antoine in a freeze frame looking at the camera silently, after he had escape a detention centre.”

Ray, Hollywood and L’Enfant Sauvage

Next: Aware that we had an allocated time of 15 minutes or so, Iqbal Masud asked Truffaut to clear the controversy once and all for whether he had walked out of the1955 Cannes screening of Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, infamously stating that he didn’t want to see a film about peasants eating with their hands. To that he retorted immediately, “On the contrary, I wanted to see Pather Panchali once again after it ended. I did struggle with its pace initially but realised it had to be that way because the film isn’t about poverty at all. It’s a coming-of-age work about children being introduced to the horrors and wonders of life.” 

Aah, we had that newsy bit for the interview. Noticing Truffaut itching to head out to his suite, Bikram Singh asked him a two-pronged question about the Hollywood influence on him, and his recent work L’Enfant Sauvage, about a Mowgli-like child restored to ‘civilisation’. The answers were precise, “For me, during the post World-War II years in Paris, America cinema had an almost drug-like effect. I was in a trance during the screenings of Howard Hawks and John Ford westerns, the films of Sidney Lumet, John Tashlin, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) and of course Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954), a masterpiece reflecting the act of filmmaking itself -- in which the central protagonist, portrayed by Jimmy Stewart, observes his neighbours as if watching everyday life through a camera.”

Of the new Hollywood cinema, he thumbed up Leonard Kastler’s The Honeymoon Killers (1970) for its humanity, realism and brutal force.

Quickly, he talked about L’Enfant Sauvage: “It’s again 400 Blows, with a reversal of the mise en scene. So I played the role of a father figure concerned about an untamed boy -- about the enforcement of a language, clothes and the behaviour which must conform to the societal rules. I hope you liked it,” adding politely, “I must leave with your permission. It’s been a rough day, the heat was, well, unbearable, though I was covered by a huge umbrella.”

A Final Glimpse

Next evening, a dinner was hosted at the Taj Presidential Suite by Columbia Studios, presumably for the completion of the Khopoli sequence. Ignorance wasn’t bliss: Spielberg scanning the skies from the balcony was royally ignored. Truffaut was surrounded by glamorous company, including Simi Garewal and fashion models.

Bikram Singh sagely advised that we should leave, there wasn’t an ice lolly’s chance in hell to address a few more questions to him.

So we did, but not before I’d got my dog-eared copy of the marathon interview-based Hitchcock Truffaut, autographed by the auteur. He had smiled broadly, as if to convey his happiness that the book was in the Indian stores. “Merci,” he said, gratefully.

A joint interview by Bikram Singh and me was published in the Sunday section of The Times of India, thus ending our encounter with Truffaut --almost like that like that last frame from 400 Blows.

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