The man who “saved his life” was dying. After a years-long bout with Leukemia, Andre Bazin, the man who a decade earlier took the teenage Truffaut off the streets and into his home, the man who introduced Truffaut to film as an art form, the man who truly was his surrogate father, lay on his deathbed. So, at the last minute, Francois Truffaut changed the start time for his first day of filming from 9:00 am to 8:00 am. He needed to finish early. He wanted to be at Bazin’s bedside as soon as possible after the workday.

It was his first feature film, and he was the director. The crew was assembled. The script had undergone numerous changes, but now it was solid. The money was in place. It came from his father-in-law, so it needed to be well spent. The story he wanted to tell was about a kid almost exactly like himself, no matter how much he tried to deny it later. There was a lot at stake – professionally and emotionally.

François Truffaut was only 26 years old. He had binged on film from the time he was 8 years old. He reviewed movies and wrote essays for Andre Bazin, the man who had “saved his life,” when he was a youth around the same age as the protagonist of his film.

Truffaut was a prominent film personality with a few friends and many enemies. He had interned under Roberto Rossellini. He had directed one short film. He had disowned another. He had done his homework. He had done the legwork. He was full of hope and full of beans. He was ready to go.

There were worries, of course, and not just the need to end the workday early. This movie was about kids, and while his first directorial effort, a charming little short about some naughty boys, gave him some feel for how to work with kids, he knew that this film and this story were another matter altogether. If the adolescents he had hired, particularly the lead boy, were anything like he had been as a kid, then he needed to know a good deal more than where to point the camera. He needed to partner with his young charges, and particularly the boy he had chosen to play the protagonist, Antoine.

In September 1958, a 14-year-old upstart and mischief-maker named Jean-Pierre Léaud responded to an announcement in the popular newspaper France Soir:

"Truffaut, who already directed a short film played by two young boys, Les Mistons, is looking for his actors: they must be 12 and a half years old, their type should be either ‘melancholic’ or ‘mocking’, but not a ‘good little well-groomed boy’. (Mail to: Films du Carrosse, 10, rue Hamelin, including a recent photo along with a letter from the parents and a letter from the child)."

Léaud was in the eighth grade at Les Verrières, a boarding school in Pontigny 125 miles southeast of Paris. He didn’t bother to tell his dorm master, and certainly not the headmaster, his intentions, so on the morning of September 28, 1958, he hopped out of bed, dressed in a flash, not forgetting his favorite windcheater, and got on the fast train to Paris. He was in a hurry. He knew what he wanted. He wanted a way out. As he said in the audition, in response to Truffaut’s saying that the authorities might not be happy with his unexcused absence: “Who cares as long as I’m happy.”

He had no idea where he was headed. He simply wanted a way out of that murky and muddled world in which all adolescents find themselves -- a way into adulthood -- and this audition seemed to provide him an avenue of escape. It was there at the audition that Jean-Pierre Léaud first took on Antoine Doinel.

The boy’s audition was auspicious. Truffaut’s handwritten notes tell the tale.

"Very beautiful, a bit feminine 14 years old

Son of Jacqueline Pierreux and P. Léaud

He knows Domarchi

His letter is well written, simple, clear

Where born?

Intelligent

Antoine or René"

After Antoine, he had scratched out or René, leaving only that one name – Antoine. In the upper right-hand corner of his notes, he wrote 14 years old. In the advertisement for the audition, Truffaut had specified 12 and a half years old, but something in this 14-year-old kid, something at once like and unlike Truffaut himself, compelled him to scratch out or René, even though the role of René seemed better suited to this kid. The role of Antoine was conceived in Truffaut’s own image, so he must have sensed in the kid, as he was to write a year later, a shared “suffering with regard to family." Perhaps he was also drawn to the red-and-black-checked windcheater the kid was wearing, just like the one Marlon Brando wore in On the Waterfront, and just like the one Truffaut had worn when he was 14 years old. Most certainly he was attracted to the sassy confidence, leavened with a hooded vulnerability, which was apparent in the kid’s audition. But whatever the winning combination, the 14-year-old Jean-Pierre Léaud had the role, and François Truffaut had his Antoine. And the movie they would make together, The 400 Blows, was the first crest of the French New Wave, a movement that changed forever the way we think about film...

But now that Léaud had been cast...it was time for Truffaut to get started. He had worked and reworked his script many times, but since meeting Léaud, he knew his script would change once again. He sensed he needed to partner with the kid in a kind of jazz-like improvisation, strict in its measures but open to riffs and rambles. This kid needed room to roam, and Truffaut was eager to provide it.

As he filmed, he re-wrote and re-worked and focused on his task with the authority and precision of a seasoned auteur. Truffaut’s apprenticeship under Roberto Rossellini taught him a good deal and influenced his own work. As he recounts himself:

"The 400 Blows owes a great deal to Rossellini. I made it like a documentary and three years earlier I wouldn’t have been able to do that. I’d have thought of the American cinema. I didn’t even like the documentary form. But Rossellini showed me that things must be close to life."

Spending time with Rossellini sharpened the young cinéphile, who had spent hours and hours as a young vagrant watching movies, often indulging in orgies of repeated viewings, all the while learning the language of the visual. Many of the films he had seen were in English, a language he neither spoke nor understood, but he learned to see with his ears and to listen with his eyes. There is a memorable photograph of Truffaut with his fingers in his ears. He knew what he was up to. He wasn’t fooling around.

And yet, this was his first feature film.

And he was 26 years old.

France Soir put it this way in a piece dated 28 September 1958, feeling, apparently, that they had to make Truffaut one year older than he was and to double the number of 12-year-olds.

"The most demanding among young critics will direct Les 400 Coups with 110 12-year-old actors. This week, the most demanding and the youngest among Parisian film critics, is retiring his pen. He is embarking on the path that creative people take when challenged by critics to “show us what you can do!” François Truffaut – 27 years of age – is about to direct his first feature film, Les 400 Coups."

Six weeks later, Truffaut started shooting, and he proved impressively efficient. Just as the script had been sharpened and focused, so too was the use of space and time in the shooting of the script. The entire film was shot on location. Here are the locations, in the order of the shoot:

Two maids’ quarters spliced together to create one small apartment

The streets of Paris

A spacious apartment borrowed from a close friend

Back to the streets of Paris

The beach at Villers-sur-Mer, where the film ends

A mansion in Andé, one hour from the beach

A classroom vacant during Christmas break

Back to the skein of Paris streets, the central landscape of The 400 Blows.

Truffaut exhausted one location before moving to another. Even in the face of the imminent death of the man who “saved [his] life,” he planned to begin filming on November 10 and to end January 3. He stuck to that schedule. He had 45 days total. He wisely held off shooting with a large number of adolescents until the final days of filming. He needed to get his feet wet, not soaked. Furthermore, he made it a policy from the first day to do as few takes as possible with his young charges – usually no more than two. He wanted them free to do their thing, and he sensed that improvisation is a dish best served quickly.

The opposite seemed to be the case with the professionals. The production reports show that the average number of takes with the kids was two whereas the average number of takes with the professionals was seven. Truffaut knew that the older actors had the patience and the technique to do repeated takes without going stale.

*

My big brother Chuck would take me into Texas. That’s what we called the strange little room he converted into his darkroom to process his photographs. Something to do, perhaps, with “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” or, more likely because this little afterthought of a room was wedged into a sliver in the south of the house. Our great grandparents built the house in 1904, and our best guess was that Texas was originally intended either as a pantry or a cold room, but Chuck found it just right for his photographic endeavors.

Rooms that are dark will roam this story like itinerant leitmotifs searching to settle.

I would go in there with Chuck to help him develop his photographs. There was a sweetly pungent chemical odor, a mixture of acetic acid and Hypo. There were three trays of liquids: developer, stop bath, and fixer. I would place the photo paper in the first tray and gently trace my fingers back and forth over the paper. Ever so slowly, the image would emerge. Chuck never told me in advance what that image might be. He knew that little Teddy Walch wanted that excitement to himself. Perhaps it was a prize-winning bull at the Missouri State Fair. Perhaps it was a photograph of the five Walch brothers: Stan, Chuck, Tony, Ted, and our father -- we called him Boss. But even Boss couldn’t get me to stop sucking my thumb as a kid. When I was six, Chuck furtively snapped me at the dinner table engaged in the offensive action. At age six! Still sucking my thumb! He printed it. The next night he put it on my dinner plate. He said not a word. Like all good teachers, he left the discovery to the student.

I stopped sucking my thumb.

Back to Texas.

I would attend that first tray like a monk illuminating a manuscript, trying not to hurry the image, which wasn’t easy for my 8-year-old self. I was an eager kid, on task, but always in a bit of a hurry. I got good marks in elementary school. “Sees needs and meets them” was one comment. But another, “talks while others are talking,” spoke to both my enthusiasm and my impatience. I was always rushing, getting ahead of myself, too eager to enter the conversation, but there I was attending that first tray, patiently and solemnly. I couldn’t hurry. The image would arrive on its terms, not mine, but the very idea that on this blank sheet of paper was an image waiting to reveal itself was downright intoxicating. The aromatic scent of the chemicals added to the intoxication. It was incense, and I was the acolyte in a private ritual; Chuck, the high priest. When the image was finally as he wanted it, he instructed me to put the stock in the middle tray, where it stayed for just a few seconds in the stop bath, and then I lifted it into the final tray, the fixer, where, over several minutes, the image was hardened and set.

I was the youngest of four boys. We were thought of in pairs. Stan and Chuck. Tony and Ted. Our mother died when Stan was 12, Chuck was 10, Tony was 6 and I was 4. Our father, a traveling flour salesman, saw to it that Stan looked after Tony and Chuck looked after me, which is how I ended up in Texas bringing images to life in that trinity of trays with Chuck at my side.

Perhaps that’s what I’m still doing – bringing images to life. As the investigation into The 400 Blows intensified, images toppled on images, stories on stories, in a heady palimpsest of possibilities – and all of it sparked by this little movie about an adolescent boy, a boy bent on making mischief, and as he does so opening up the mischief in me, the mischief in the students on my research team, and the mischief in the students I teach, to whom adolescence still clings, as it does to all of us, reminding us that we are always, in one way or another, in that liminal state of the in-between. Young Old, That This, Life Death. Developer. Stop Bath. Fixer.

Liminal states and spaces, not unlike Texas, not unlike the Stop Bath, scatter the landscape of my story helping me discover that I have buddies in Francois Truffaut, Antoine Doinel, and Jean-Pierre Léaud and together we have teachers and mothers and fathers and friends and foes as common denominators. And just as the young Truffaut found refuge in the movie theater, when I was grieving over an overwhelming loss (some very real, others very perceived), I found that movies could soften the blows of adolescence.

A question hovers over adolescence. It’s a question aimed at the kid and aimed by the kid. What are we going to do with the kid? That was the question that came to define Francois Truffaut’s adolescence. It’s also the question that haunts the adolescent every moment they’re in that first tray, waiting to find out who they are – when they’re just about to fall asleep listening to adults talking in distant rooms. And it’s the question that this teacher, like most teachers, asks. What are we going to do with the kid? It gets asked, quietly and out loud, at a distance and in your face – in a relentless litany of the unanswered.