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“... Why do we feel protective about François Truffaut? No one else in the old New Wave brings out the parent in us. Godard we either hate or admire, a disturbing influence gone solitary. Rivette and Resnais remain austere masters, full of mystification. Rohmer makes beautiful reflective films behind glass. Malle and Chabrol can take care of themselves ...”

“... It’s not a Hitchcock picture,’ the master told François Truffaut. He was being a little cagy, but in one sense he was right. Rebecca, now showing in a brand-new, sharp-focus print at the National Film Theatre and the Screen on the Hill, was a David O. Selznick film, ‘a picturisation’ as the title credits have it, of a very successful novel ...”

“... Truffaut called Hitchcock an ‘artist of anxiety’. Truffaut was himself anxious enough, and a great admirer of Hitchcock, but his own best films are a mixture of lightness and weight, as Kundera might say, of gaiety and distress; plenty of pain, tragedy even, but nothing as taut, as possessive as anxiety ...”

“... Cinema: 1930-1980 (its title playing on a controversial 1954 piece about the French cinema by François Truffaut in Cahiers du Cinéma) is the work of an intelligent American lover of American films engaging partly with his political and ethical conscience and partly with the spectre of the influential English film journal Screen, in which the ...”

“... sides are published) with Robert Flaherty, Dudley Nichols, Clifford Odets, Ingrid Bergman and François Truffaut. Many letters are exchanged, but since Renoir also actually saw these people, their friendship must have evolved in some space other than their writings, and a lot of the letters are filled with little pleasantries. So much so, in ...”

“... well as a Hollywood Western, a documentary on the ultra-efficient US postal system, which inspires François, the town’s gullible, accident-prone postman, to try to speed up his delivery round. The predictably disastrous consequences include a brush with two American military policemen in a jeep and a culminating headlong plunge into a river. ...”

“... asked where he got the idea of using the musical score from another film, he replies: ‘from Truffaut’ (he also mentions inclusion in the collage-like soundtrack of the theme music from Godard’s Le Mépris and Vivre sa vie). It would seem that we are travelling full circle, back to the original moment of Cahiers du cinéma and its ardent espousal of ...”

“... of five who, once they became film-makers themselves, came to be known as the Nouvelle Vague: François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol and Maurice Schérer, later known by his pseudonym, Eric Rohmer. By and large, unlike their counterparts on the left-wing journal Positif, the early Cahiers writers were either effectively ...”

“... Hitchcock​ liked assembly lines. In the long, consistently revealing interview he gave to François Truffaut in the summer of 1962, he described a scene he had thought of including in North by Northwest (1959), but didn’t. Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) is on his way from New York to Chicago. Why not have him stop off at Detroit, then still in its Motor City heyday? I wanted to have a long dialogue scene between Cary Grant and one of the factory workers as they walk along the assembly line ...”

“... Vague, to be sure) between Jean-Luc Godard, preaching the dogma of continuous revolution, and François Truffaut, the ingratiating humanist. Godard’s background was close to plutocratic, while Truffaut’s early life was almost caricaturally insecure. In Innocents and Others, Carrie Wexler is allowed to allude to ...”

“... noir – the Jean-Luc Godard/Jean-Paul Belmondo Breathless, made the year Chandler died, and the François Truffaut/Charles Aznavour Shoot the Pianist – fulfilled the form as tragedy and initiated the New ...”

“... artist deserving of studies, seminars and PhDs, as well as the book-length interview done by François Truffaut in 1967. Hitchcock was a different man after 1960, even if he was by then in his sixties and someone who should have known better. He could make objects and ethers potent – a knife, a glass of milk, mist at the Mission Dolores cemetery ...”

“... and 17th-century olive-wood panelling? Who else was an object of some interest to Mick Jagger, François Mitterrand and Greta Garbo, to Gorbachev, Judy Garland – ‘Rudi’, ‘Judy’, ‘Rudi’, ‘Judy’ – and François Truffaut? And, among those who were, who was also arrested on suspicion of drug ...”

“... and its universal atmosphere of overheated desperation so well, or so affectionately, as François Truffaut’s Day for Night. As a double-edged reminder that it is on the director’s broad shoulders that the success of the enterprise ultimately rests, and that it is only in his head that the complete formula is held, ...”

“... to his New Wave comrades, Rohmer’s work has never been especially cool or iconic, yet more than François Truffaut’s or Jean-Luc Godard’s it divides audiences right down the middle. Those who like his films are often protective and passionate and have seen them all; those who don’t complain of boredom and pointlessness. The complaints are partly ...”