Lovebirds Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo in À bout de souffle directed by Jean-Luc Godard in 1960.
Jean Seberg & Jean-Paul Belmondo on set set of ‘À bout de Soufflé’, photographed by Raymond Cauchetier, 1959.
“It all started when I photographed Catherine Deneuve. Watching her, I immediately noticed her unusual facial expressions. At the end of the shoot, for fun, I kept asking her to make faces, and then we went on shooting. A good funny face assumes that you have an original face, as Sofia Loren demonstrated. You don’t need to be an actor to act, but it’s all a question of talent: the more talent you have, the funnier the faces you can make.”-Willy Rizzo
Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.
Jean-Luc Godard | December 3, 1930.
What do gangsters represent for you?
JEAN-PIERRE MELVILLE: Nothing at all. I think they’re pathetic losers. But it so happens that the gangster story… is a very suitable vehicle for the particular form of modern tragedy called film noir, which was born from American detective novels. It’s a flexible genre. You can put whatever you want into it, good or bad. And it’s a fairly easy vehicle to use to tell stories that matter to you about individual freedom, friendship, or rather human relationships, because they’re not always friendly. Or betrayal, one of the driving forces in American crime novels.Do you know any gangsters?
MELVILLE: Yes, I knew quite a few. But they’re nothing like the ones in my films.
