n the 1950s, Jean-Luc Godard was one of a handful of young critics and film theorists writing for the highly influential journal Cahiers du Cinéma. Initially edited by future filmmaker Eric Rohmer, its staff of writers also included Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, and François Truffaut, all who would also go on to direct films. Truffaut's seminal 1954 article, "A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema," attacked what he called the "tradition of quality" in French cinema, noting the national industry's dependence on adaptations of "respectable" literature and its move from poetic realism to psychological realism, which he insisted was neither psychological nor real. He also sowed the first seeds of "la politique des auteurs" (literally "the policy/polemic of the author," later somewhat mistranslated to English as "the auteur theory"), on which he and his fellow critics based their re-evaluation of Hollywood films and such directors as Hitchcock, Hawks, Lang, Ray, and Anthony Mann, among others. They also championed non-American "auteurs" like Renoir, Rossellini, Mizoguchi, and Bresson. This atmosphere of youthful iconoclasm and rejection of classical modes of cinematic expression paved the way for a new movement to emerge. Not content to simply write about movies, these critics started making their own films, influenced by Italian Neorealism and certain Hollywood films and filmmakers. Although never formally structured, the loose movement was given the blanket term Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) by critics.

Godard scholar David Sterritt has noted that the social, cultural, and political atmosphere of France and the world in general was on the cusp of the societal upheaval and anti-authoritarian sentiment that rendered audiences, particularly the young and the intellectual, ripe for the kind of iconoclastic critical ideas and films that Godard and his fellow New Wave artists were beginning to develop.

The first New Wave film is usually considered to be Chabrol's Le beau Serge (1958), although this remains debatable among film scholars. Truffaut's directorial debut, The 400 Blows, is unarguably the first to focus widespread attention on the movement thanks to its quite unexpected global success. The release of Alain Resnais' Hiroshima mon amour the same year also keyed international audiences to the new styles of filmmaking coming out of France.

By 1959, Godard had not yet directed a feature film, although he had done some documentaries and shorts. While working on The 400 Blows, Truffaut tried to get some producers to back a Godard project. Among those that were discussed were an adaptation of a novel, Mouchette, later made into a movie by Robert Bresson in 1967; a Godard original called "Prénatal," which eventually morphed into his second released feature A Woman Is a Woman (1961), and an adaptation of a Georges Simenon novel, but none of them attracted any interest. With the triumph of The 400 Blows at Cannes, Truffaut at last had enough clout to appeal to producer Georges de Beauregard to take Godard on.

Beauregard felt that Godard had the necessary talent and drive, but the producer would only commit to a project if Godard could bring him a story that made sense. Godard remembered a story idea Truffaut had given him a few years before, based on a newspaper article and featuring a character named Michel Poiccard, and asked his friend to flesh it out quickly. "If you have the time to round out in three lines the idea...I could whip up the dialogues," he wrote. Truffaut sent him a four-page synopsis that proved to be enough to convince Beauregard. To help keep the film's budget low, Truffaut generously agreed to take only a modest sum for royalties. To help his friend even further, he offered to vet the final script and also told Beauregard he wanted no publicity beyond screen credit as author of the original story.

According to director and Cahiers fellow Claude Chabrol, the genesis of Godard's relationship with Beauregard was slightly different. Chabrol said Godard had taken a job as press attaché for 20th Century Fox in France, the studio that was distributing a film produced by Beauregard. After the screening, the always outspoken Godard went up to Beauregard to tell him "your film is shit." Instead of being angry, the producer proposed that Godard write the script for Island Fisherman (1959). "Godard may not admit he worked, or pretended to, on that script for six weeks until he persuaded de Beauregard it would be better to make the Poiccard film," Chabrol said. Beauregard, he added, agreed but only if Godard's better known friends, Truffaut and Chabrol, would work on the film somehow, if only to have their newly famous names attached to the project. Chabrol agreed to sign as a technical adviser, having no concern about Godard's ability to do whatever he wanted with the story. "I never gave a damn," he said. "We were convinced we were all geniuses."

As mentioned earlier, the Cahiers critics were drawn to certain types of American cinema because of "the ways in which [it] was...often enough, socially 'critical' without being directly 'political,'" according to critic Jim Hillier. Another critic, Thomas Elsaesser, noted the affinity French intellectuals had for American film because of its engagement with "certain modern tensions-between intellect and emotion, action and reflection, consciousness and instinct, choice and spontaneity." These observations shed some light on Godard's critical and artistic preoccupations at the time of making Breathless and his references to a number of American movies and Hollywood iconography (see Pop Culture 101) in the film that was beginning to take shape in his mind.

There's not much more to say about the development of the script. At a certain point, probably early on in development, Godard decided he would begin shooting without scripted dialogue and write it as he, his cast, and crew were working, although he did begin production with his basic story and ideas about what he wanted to accomplish. As his cinematographer Raoul Coutard said in an interview for the Criterion Collection DVD release of the film: "He wanted to show you could make movies a different way."

The night before his first day of shooting, August 7, 1959, Godard wrote to Truffaut that he would let him read the continuity in a few days-"after all, it's your screenplay." He noted that he had discussed it with director Jean-Pierre Melville and that he had recently added a scene in which Jean Seberg, the American actress cast as the leading lady opposite relative newcomer Jean-Paul Belmondo, would interview director Roberto Rossellini for a newspaper article. He summed up the story as that of "a boy who thinks of death and of a girl who doesn't. The adventures are those of a car thief [an aspect Melville would help him with] in love with a girl who sells the New York Herald and who takes French civilization courses." He guessed that Truffaut would probably not like the film and signed off with "kind regards from one of your sons."

by Rob Nixon