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The Wild Child is Back: Truffaut Daughter/Child Actress Speaks by Roger Rose
Laura Truffaut at her home in Berkeley, where she moved over twenty five years ago and became involved in the Pacific Film Archives.
This year marks the 40th anniversary of Francois Truffaut's film The Wild Child (L'enfant Sauvage), the true story of an 18th century French doctor, Jean Itard, who encounters an unsocialized young boy living alone in the woods. The film marked the acting debut for Mr. Truffaut, who played the crucial role of Dr. Itard. Just as important were the other first-time actors, Jean-Pierre Cargol, who played the "wild child," and Laura Truffaut, daughter of the legendary director, who plays a young companion of the child.
Ms. Truffaut also has some fascinating heritage on her mother's side. Her grandfather, Ignace Morgenstern, was a Jewish communist from Hungary, a double indemnity during the war. Well aware of what was brewing, he arranged to have the family, including Laura's mother, Madeleine, then but a child, hidden in the south of France. After the war, the owner of a film production company where Ignace had worked as an accountant left for the US and sold him the company. Despite his leftist leanings, he was quite the businessman, taking a chance on Francois Truffaut, the scrappy young film critic who his daughter met at the 1954 Venice Film Festival, and financing his first film, The 400 Blows. He also recommended Truffaut to retain ownership of all his films, sage advice, which allowed Franois to never have to work for hire.
We had the opportunity to speak with Ms. Truffaut, whose unique experiences as an actor in L'enfant Sauvage and as the daughter of the famous filmmaker afford her a unique perspective on the film. In addition to what she learned from the French New Wave architect, the younger Truffaut has become an expert in her own right. Moving from Paris to Berkeley more than 25 years ago, she began auditing classes and volunteering at Pacific Film Archive. Recently, a new 35mm print was recently released honoring The Wild Child's anniversary, with Laura Truffaut presenting the film at theaters across California.
CineSource: Thanks for speaking with us, Ms. Truffaut. What can you tell us about the summer of 1969 when L'enfant Sauvage was produced?
Laura Truffaut: I was 10 years old. Because the movie was filmed during school holidays my sister and I were able to stay with my dad while he shot, and because I was bored with doing anything else, he let me come on the set quite a bit. Actually, it was probably the first film set where I was there and aware of everything that was going on.
Jean-Pierre Cargol gave an amazing performance as a child who has lived for many years outside of human culture. He was only a couple of years older than you, though. Did you two become friends as a result of the contact?
Yes, we were roughly the same age. We used to play together. It was a very playful set. There were actually many people on the set who brought their children. It was vacation time, and there were houses where they could stay. One scene in particular, the scene where the wild child was brought to the village, filled with peasants - the crew brought their children into that scene. The child that played the wild child, Jean-Pierre Cargol, was not from that region. He was from further south in France, the Montpelier region, and he had a brother who was a year or two younger who was very funny, and always ready to act up and play. Jean-Pierre was in just about every scene. He was definitely busier than the rest of us, who were often fooling around.
This was also the first of his films that your father acted in, correct?
Yeah. He appeared in some of his own movies earlier, cameos. But that was his first role as an actor. He felt that a professional actor would be in unconscious competition with the child, scene by scene. He was aware that the focus was on the child. He felt it would not have been right to offer the role to a professional actor, and he also just wanted to be next to that child, scene after scene. Part of it was about being able to direct him closely. He also wanted to keep a certain distance, and not have - I think he did not want to eclipse the child. He wanted to convey a sort of care, but not too much affection; not something too sentimental. I think he wanted to carefully measure the distance that was felt between the doctor and the child.
Many have noted how childhood is a recurring theme throughout your father's films. Do you have any ideas of your own what he might have been grasping for in L'enfant Sauvage?
I do, because he mentioned it to me. What he told me was that he felt that to be interested in a child's education, in his well-being, his future, is a form of love. That what he was not exactly bitter, but working with the issue of his upbringing, with his own parents, his own childhood. The major issue was not brutality, at all, but a thorough indifference - to his well-being and his education. So he obviously cared a lot about the story, the questions. What does it mean to care for a child? Care about their well-being, their future.
A lot of the credit for ideas belongs with the other screenwriter, Jean Gruault. He worked very hard on the script. He also wrote the screenplays for Jules et Jim and Adele H, and a number of my father's movies, especially period movies, and also worked with Jean Leaud. In order to prepare for Adele, for writing a screenplay with my father, Jean [Gruault] studied all these 18th century philosophers who wrote on education, nature vs. culture, and so on. They did an enormous amount of work that doesn't show at all in the movies. There are no attributions, but they inform the movie.
Did he work at all with your father during the production of the film?
No, he worked in preproduction for a while, then they would work together on the script again, but during production he was not there at all. I'm not sure if that was the case for The Wild Child. Often, for other films, the screenplays did not necessarily have the dialogues in them, and my father and his assistant, Suzanne Schiffman would develop it later. She worked with him more frequently through the years and became his co-screenwriter. Often they would write the dialogue two or three days before shooting a scene. It mattered to him to hear how the actors expressed themselves, or to work on a scene as the shooting of a scene came closer.
Around this period there were other films with the similar theme of children raised outside of society. Only five years after The Wild Child, Werner Herzog did a similar film, The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser, about a man who, like the wild child, was denied social interaction throughout his adolescence. Do you have any thoughts on what encouraged your father and other filmmakers of this time to explore these sociological themes?
Yes, this is true. My father was really influenced by Arthur Penn's movie on Helen Keller, The Miracle Worker, which deals with similar ideas. With Herzog, I think of him as from a younger generation. For my dad, though, the other context is the '60s - of a return to nature. He was very sensitive to childhood and the rights of children, and obviously that came from his own youth, from very strong feelings of being thoroughly neglected - somewhat left to fend for himself. But also, the time, the late '60s, you know, were times that romanticized children being left alone, and I think he really wanted to go - I'm not sure how liberated he was, but he was going against that grain, and knew it.
Sometimes he was made fun of for his appreciation of Alfred Hitchcock, who some felt was a less distinguished director.
Very much so. His first trip to America was to promote The 400 Blows in 1959, and when American journalists asked him who he admired among American directors, he noticed that when he mentioned Hitchcock, people would laugh and not take him seriously. Those were the days when there was Alfred Hitchcock Presents on television, and Hitchcock had helped to make a kind of comic figure of himself, mostly from his cameo appearance at the beginning or end of his show. This program was not known in Europe at all at the time. My father was really shocked by how lightly Hitchcock seemed to be considered as a director in the States. Years later, he approached him about a series of interviews for [Monsieur Truffaut Meets Mr. Hitchcock] and that's how things went on.
How was your dad influenced by Hitchcock's style?
It was amazing to watch a Hitchcock movie with my father; he knew everything inside-out. I think one of the things he admired enormously in Hitchcock was the ability to tell a story visually on the screen. Hitchcock criticized what he would call 'photography of people talking.' He wanted to explore the ways of bringing information to the viewer that are not too direct. It was really interesting on the set, my father would approach a scene with an assistant or a screenwriter, and they would try and figure out how would Hitchcock do it, or how would Lubitch do it, even if it wasn't at all a comic scene or a suspenseful scene.
Another key element of Hitchcock for my dad, just the way Hitchcock takes over the audience's mind - gets your attention exactly where he wants it to be. In Hitchcock films, there are never two blonde actresses who look alike, and you have to struggle to tell them apart. That never, ever happens in a Hitchcock movie. There's a lot of clarity where it matters. This absolutely influenced my father's work.
I wanted to ask you a bit about "Nouvelle Vague" - the French New Wave. Your father is somewhat credited with the birth of this movement. Did he ever talk to you about what was happening artistically - the auteur theory?
A little bit, but like the others - this was a label that was given to them by a journalist. As it so happened, they had all been critics together, and film buffs together [at Cahiers du Cinema] - him and Rivette, Godard and Rohmer- they shared some aesthetic principles, some desires, some very strong beliefs, but at the same time they were each their own person, and it so happened, partly because they all helped each other out, that their first movies came out at the same time, but soon thereafter they each followed very different directions. I don't know that he really felt a responsibility to the aesthetic. I think he was interested in following his own curiosity, and so were the others. I think from the very beginning, as I understand, and maybe especially in the US, that the New Wave label had a very strong power to it, but they never wrote a manifesto, you know.
L'enfant Sauvage was also a major break for cinematographer Nestor Almendros. Why did your father decide upon him for this film?
It actually began with a little bit of a misunderstanding. My father was under the impression that Nestor Almendros had great expertise in filming black & white movies. He learned very quickly, though, that Nestor had a great eye. He was a very cultured man - very intelligent, sensitive, and really enjoyed the challenge of film. When my father wanted to fade to black at the end of scenes for The Wild Child, he wanted them to be like silent movies, like [D.W.] Griffith. I think that Nestor really had to search for the right technical tools to achieve that effect that was harkening back to silent film.
Toward the end of the '70s, my father was quite drawn to black and white, but it was just about impossible to finance a movie in black and white, because television networks would not buy them. They only wanted color, so with movies like Adele H, which is a little dark, and more in The Green Room, and other of my father's movies, there was a move towards monochromatic film. Thanks to the great success of Raging Bull in the States, and Woody Allen's Manhattan, my father was able to make Vivement Demanche! in black and white. It was filmed and released in 1983, just a few years after Raging Bull.
Is there anything you can say about the technical side of his filming process?
I wish I was better able to answer these questions, but what I do know is that he liked very slow camera movements, what we call in French something like 'sequential takes.' I think he was very sensitive to what the human eye would or would not read. In The Wild Child the focus was on the inside, and all those shots by the kitchen window, looking out, very unobtrusive. I can only refer you to Nestor's very excellent book, Man with the Camera.
What can you say about film today in comparison to when The Wild Child was first released?
It strikes me that today we have a very different challenge. A director who acts and is present in a lot of scenes has the luxury of the video monitor. It's a totally different exercise, I imagine, than for a director who is acting in a scene and is therefore not standing next to the camera. With all of this new technology, I am grateful to the audiences who are paying attention to a 40-year old film. It's really thrilling.
It was late by the time we left Laura Truffaut's house, thrilled as well to hear about an era of filmmaking when people raced to the theaters to see newest Truffaut or Bergman or, if you were European, Hitchcock or Altman. We thank her for the opportunity. Posted on Apr 07, 2009 - 04:29 PM