59 Fun Facts About Jean-Luc Godard

Godard's first feature, Breathless (1960), paired the American actress Seberg with which French actor?

Jean-Paul Belmondo had already made a Godard short, but was called up for army service before it was dubbed, so in Charlotte et son Jules the voice coming out of his mouth is Godard's own.

Which then-unconventional editing technique made Breathless famous?

Jump cuts were a fix, not a plan: the first edit ran far too long, and instead of dropping whole scenes Godard snipped pieces out of the middle of shots.

Godard's best-known aphorism says all you need to make a movie is a girl and what?

A gun: Godard wrote the line in a 1964 ad for Band of Outsiders, and credited it not to himself but to the silent-film pioneer D. W. Griffith.

Before directing, Godard wrote criticism for which influential magazine?

Cahiers du Cinéma turned its young critics into directors, but Godard was the last of its famous five to shoot a feature; early on he signed pieces Hans Lucas, German for Jean-Luc.

Godard held French citizenship and that of which other country, where he spent much of his life?

Switzerland was home from early childhood, after his doctor father moved the family there to work at a clinic; Godard later claimed Swiss citizenship to dodge the French draft.

Which American comedian and director has a cameo as a film editor in Godard's King Lear (1987)?

Woody Allen appears as an editor named Mr. Alien; the whole film sprang from a contract Godard and producer Menahem Golan signed on a napkin at Cannes in 1985.

Godard's first film, the 1955 documentary short Opération béton, was about the building of what?

A dam in the Alps: Godard was a labourer on the site, paid for the film from his wages, and then sold it to the company building the dam, which used it as publicity.

Breathless is credited to an original story by which fellow New Wave director?

François Truffaut had sketched the outline from a news story, and his name did the rest: fresh from the triumph of The 400 Blows, he helped persuade the producer to back Godard.

In Breathless, Michel Poiccard shoots a motorcycle policeman after stealing a car in which city?

Marseille is where it starts, but the story was real: in 1952 a car thief named Michel Portail shot a motorcycle policeman, and he too had an American journalist girlfriend.

Jean Seberg's character in Breathless sells which newspaper on the Champs-Élysées?

New York Herald Tribune seller Patricia was, Godard said, a continuation of Seberg's role in Bonjour Tristesse: he could have opened on that film's last shot with the title 'Three years later'.

Which Hollywood star's poster does the car thief Michel study and imitate in Breathless?

Humphrey Bogart stares back from a poster for The Harder They Fall, his last film; Michel spends the story rubbing a thumb across his lips like a screen gangster, a gesture Patricia repeats in the final shot.

How were the tracking shots in Breathless achieved by cinematographer Raoul Coutard?

From a wheelchair pushed by Godard: renting a dolly and laying its tracks cost money and time the shoot didn't have, so Coutard sat with the camera in his hands.

Which New Wave director appears in Breathless as a dead body hit by a car?

Jacques Rivette lies in the road as the accident victim, one of many friends in the film; Godard himself plays the passer-by who recognises Michel and points him out to the police.

Which prize did Godard win in 1960 for Breathless?

Prix Jean Vigo, a French award for young directors of independent spirit, went to Breathless in January 1960, weeks before the film had even opened in cinemas.

Godard's Le Petit Soldat was banned in France until 1963 over its treatment of what?

The Algerian War was still being fought when he shot the film in 1960, and it showed torture used by both sides; the censors passed it only once the war was over.

In Le Petit Soldat (shot 1960), army deserter Bruno Forestier is hiding out in which city?

Geneva gave him neutral ground just across the border from a France at war; Anna Karina, his new lead, was his partner by the end of the shoot and his wife within a year.

Godard's first wife and muse Anna Karina was born in which country?

Denmark was home until she was 17, when she hitch-hiked to Paris with about $15 from her grandfather and almost no French; within months she was a busy fashion model.

Who gave Hanne Karin Bayer the stage name Anna Karina, evoking Tolstoy?

Coco Chanel met the teenage model at a photo shoot for Elle, heard that she wanted to act, and told her she could not do it under the name she had; Karina took the advice.

Anna Karina won a major festival's Best Actress prize for which Godard film, his first in colour?

A Woman Is a Woman was his homage to the Hollywood musical, about a stripper who wants a baby and plays her boyfriend off against his best friend; its story echoed his own new romance with Karina.

Godard subtitled Vivre sa vie (1962) 'a film in twelve' what?

Tableaux, each announced by a title card that says what is about to happen: a device from Bertolt Brecht's theatre, meant to keep viewers thinking about Nana's fate, not just feeling it.

Which silent classic moves Nana to tears in a cinema in Vivre sa vie?

The Passion of Joan of Arc, Carl Dreyer's silent about a woman judged by men, plays in the dark as Nana weeps; soon she is being questioned herself, by police over a banknote.

Which American critic called Vivre sa vie 'a perfect film' in a 1964 essay?

Susan Sontag also called it 'one of the most extraordinary, beautiful, and original works of art that I know of'; decades later a newspaper attack on her staging of Beckett in besieged Sarajevo sparked Godard's For Ever Mozart.

Contempt (1963), Godard's one big-budget production, starred which French screen icon?

Brigitte Bardot lies naked in the opening scene only because the producers complained that the first cut showed too little of her; Godard held out for months, then shot it on a replica set.

Which legendary director plays himself, adapting Homer's Odyssey, in Contempt?

Fritz Lang, the maker of Metropolis and M, agreed to play himself as the film's one dignified figure, and Godard cast himself in a walk-on as Lang's assistant director.

Contempt is based on Il disprezzo, a 1954 novel by which Italian writer?

Alberto Moravia's novel of a failing marriage was Godard's own suggestion to producer Carlo Ponti; he is said to have wanted Frank Sinatra and Kim Novak to play the unhappy couple.

Band of Outsiders (1964) is famous for a café dance scene that the actors called what?

The Madison was an American dance craze, though Godard liked to claim he invented it; the scene looks spontaneous, but the three actors, none of them dancers, rehearsed it for weeks.

In Band of Outsiders the three leads try to break the record for running through which building?

The Louvre dash, the narrator announces, beats the record of one Jimmy Johnson of San Francisco; Bertolucci's The Dreamers (2003) has its own trio run the same galleries to break it again.

Which director named his production company 'A Band Apart' as a tribute to Godard's Bande à part?

Quentin Tarantino founded A Band Apart in 1991 and paid a second tribute three years later: the dance John Travolta and Uma Thurman do in Pulp Fiction quotes the café scene in Godard's film.

Alphaville won which top festival prize in 1965?

The Golden Bear at Berlin went to a science-fiction film with no built sets and no special effects: Godard's city of the future is simply Paris by night, its new glass-and-concrete buildings.

Which Godard film ends with its hero wrapping his head in dynamite and lighting the fuse?

Pierrot le Fou ends with Ferdinand changing his mind and groping for the fuse a moment too late; Godard took its lovers-on-the-run plot from Lionel White's American crime novel Obsession.

In which Agnès Varda film do Godard and Anna Karina play the lovers in a silent comedy short?

Cléo from 5 to 7 pauses for a silent comedy in which Godard takes off his dark glasses and a gloomy world turns bright; he and Karina had married only a few months before Varda filmed it.

Masculin Féminin (1966) has a famous intertitle calling its subjects 'the children of Marx and' what?

Coca-Cola and Marx summed up the young Parisians he filmed; Godard, then 35, said he chose them because he no longer knew where he stood in cinema, and cast real pop singer Chantal Goya.

Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967) has as its most famous shot a lengthy close-up of what?

A cup of coffee fills the screen, its swirling bubbles filmed like a galaxy, while Godard whispers his doubts about language and the world; he narrates the whole film in that whisper.

Godard's Made in U.S.A., barely seen in America for four decades, was taken from a novel by which crime writer?

Donald E. Westlake wrote The Jugger under the name Richard Stark; nobody bought the film rights, so the picture reached American cinemas only in 2009, days after his death.

La Chinoise (1967), about young Parisian Maoists, loosely adapts which Dostoevsky novel?

Demons, also translated as The Possessed, follows conspirators plotting revolution in tsarist Russia; Godard moved the cell to a borrowed Paris flat and kept the name Kirilov for one of his five.

Weekend (1967) contains a celebrated tracking shot of what?

A traffic jam is only the start: the bickering couple's drive to the country ends among hippie guerrillas who cook and eat their prisoners.

Godard's second wife Anne Wiazemsky was the granddaughter of which Nobel-winning French novelist?

François Mauriac was a pillar of Catholic, Gaullist France; in 1967 his 20-year-old granddaughter married cinema's 36-year-old Maoist firebrand.

In May 1968 Godard helped shut down the Cannes festival in solidarity with whom?

Striking students and workers had brought France to a halt; when one screening was ordered to go ahead anyway, Godard and the film's own director, Carlos Saura, clung to the curtain to keep it shut.

Godard's 1968 film One Plus One watches which band build a song over days in a London studio?

The Rolling Stones said yes where the Beatles had said no, and Godard's cameras spent five days watching Mick Jagger and company piece together 'Sympathy for the Devil'.

What did Godard do at the 1968 London Film Festival after a producer recut the ending of One Plus One?

Punched him in the face, on the way out: Godard had told the opening-night audience to reject the producers' cut, which added a finished take of the song, and to come and watch his own version outside.

Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin named their radical film collective after which Soviet director?

Dziga Vertov had tried to invent a new kind of political documentary in 1920s Russia, which is what the pair admired; under his name they gave up individual credit, and their films barely reached cinemas.

Which Hollywood star headlined Godard and Gorin's Tout va bien (1972) opposite Yves Montand?

Jane Fonda then became the pair's subject: their follow-up, Letter to Jane, spends 52 minutes picking apart a single news photograph of her taken in Hanoi.

Godard, filming for Mozambique's government, condemned which company's film stock as racist for failing to render dark skin?

Kodak tuned its colour film against 'Shirley cards', named after the pale-skinned staff model on the first one, so the stock was balanced for white faces and lost detail in dark ones.

In the early 1970s Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville based their video company Sonimage in which city in the French Alps?

Grenoble was where he rebuilt his working life after a near-fatal road accident in 1971: he and Miéville left Paris, swapped film cameras for video, and made experimental television series.

Godard called which 1980 film, starring Isabelle Huppert, his 'second first film'?

Sauve qui peut (la vie) was his return to cinemas, with stars and a story, after a decade of militant films and video; Britain retitled it Slow Motion, after scenes that slow to a frame-by-frame crawl.

Godard's Je vous salue, Marie (1985) drew papal condemnation for retelling which story in a modern setting?

The virgin birth befalls Marie, a basketball-playing student whose fiancé Joseph drives a taxi; French Catholics went to court to have the film banned, lost, and then protested outside cinemas.

Godard's monumental video series made between 1988 and 1998 was titled what?

Histoire(s) du cinéma hides a pun in its brackets: histoire is French for both history and story, so the title promises the history and the stories of film at once, told almost wholly through clips of other people's movies.

Goodbye to Language (2014) was Godard's first feature film shot in what format?

3D, but home-made: cameraman Fabrice Aragno built his own rigs from consumer cameras, and in one shot the two images drift apart so that each eye is watching a different person.

Which award did the Cannes jury give Godard's The Image Book in 2018?

A Special Palme d'Or was made up for the occasion: the real Palme went to the Japanese drama Shoplifters, and the jury gave Godard's film a prize the festival had never given before.

What did the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences give Godard in 2010?

An Honorary Award that he never collected: Godard stayed away from the ceremony, and when an interviewer later asked what the Oscar meant to him, he answered, 'Nothing.'

In Sight & Sound's 2002 critics' poll of the greatest directors, Godard came third behind Orson Welles and which other filmmaker?

Alfred Hitchcock came second, with Jean Renoir just behind Godard in fourth; nobody voted for directors as such, since the table was built by adding up the critics' votes for individual films.

Godard died in September 2022 at his home in Rolle, aged 91; how did his death occur?

Miéville was at his side, and Karina had long described him as a recluse.

Who played Godard in Michel Hazanavicius's 2017 comedy-drama Redoubtable?

Louis Garrel plays him in a comedy drawn from Un an après, Anne Wiazemsky's own account of their marriage turning sour, so the great director is seen through the eyes of the young wife he lost.

Which 1958 Claude Chabrol film, paid for with his wife's inheritance, is often cited as the first New Wave feature?

Le Beau Serge won a festival prize and a state grant that let Chabrol start his next film before the first had opened; a year later he lent his name to Godard's Breathless as technical adviser.

Godard credited his introduction to cinema to an essay by which French writer and future culture minister?

André Malraux. Godard was no regular filmgoer as a boy: by his own account his way into cinema began on the page, with Malraux's 1940 essay 'Outline of a Psychology of Cinema'.

Which future film director founded La Gazette du cinéma, the short-lived 1950 journal that printed Godard's first criticism?

Éric Rohmer. He built the Gazette out of a Latin Quarter film-club bulletin and it folded after five issues; Godard, then 19, signed some of his pieces there 'Hans Lucas', German for Jean-Luc.

What job was Godard doing on a construction site in 1954 when a call came through reporting his mother's death?

Switchboard operator. Godard, who had started on the site as a labourer, was on duty at the exchange and put the call through himself, to his mother's partner, with news of her scooter accident.

What was the name of the production company Godard and Anna Karina formed in 1964?

Anouchka Films, named with one of Godard's pet names for Karina. It produced Bande à part that year with her in the lead and outlasted the marriage, still backing his films in the 1970s.

Godard contributed a segment to which 1967 collective film, coordinated by Chris Marker with Resnais and Lelouch among the directors?

Loin du Vietnam (Far from Vietnam). In his segment, 'Caméra-œil', Godard stands at a huge film camera and reflects on what a French director can do about a war from so far away.