Principal photography took place in August and September 1959.

For his lead, Godard chose Jean-Paul Belmondo, who had appeared in a few feature films prior to this but was unknown outside of France. Godard had met Jean Seberg through her then-husband, director Francois Moreuil, and thought she would be someone who could give the film more commercial appeal, having made high-profile appearances in some Hollywood productions, but still be willing to work on a low-budget feature since her American career did not live up to the initial expectations.

On the eve of production, Jean-Luc Godard wrote to producer Georges de Beauregard: "The poker game's about to begin. I hope to rake in a heap of dough. I want to thank you for trusting me and apologize in advance for many bad moods over the next months. ... I'm terrified and nervous."

Godard began filming without a completed script. "It's a matter of temperament; I'm lazy," he told the New York Times in February 1961, just before the film opened in the U.S. "Every morning before we went to work, I would write scenes for the day. Some days we had to stop work at noon when we ran out of script."

For his assistant director, Godard hired Pierre Rissient, who had apprenticed with director and Godard's fellow Cahiers du Cinéma critic Claude Chabrol. Godard gave him the first three or four pages of the script, which Rissient said later was basically the whole outline of the film (most likely, the outline Truffaut had given Godard). Rissient made a shooting schedule based solely on that, which he said was easy enough because it was obvious which was sequence one, sequence two, etc.

Rissient said all the locations and what hours to shoot were decided up front, despite the lack of a script.

Godard originally planned to use student cameraman Michel Latouche, who shot his shorts Charlotte et son Jules (1960) and All the Boys Are Called Patrick (1959), but he wasn't acceptable to the French unions. Producer Georges de Beauregard decided the right person for the job would be Raoul Coutard, whose first three film jobs, done just prior to Breathless, were on Beauregard productions.

Coutard later said because his background was in photojournalism he already knew how to shoot quickly and efficiently. "I had no reputation and nothing to lose. I wanted to see what would happen [shooting a film by Godard's method]."

Rissient had high praise for Coutard's adaptability to the project and its director. "He understood clearly what Godard wanted. He made it very easy for the actors. He could shoot in very different conditions without lighting."

According to Coutard, some sleight of hand was involved in getting a permit to shoot on the streets of Paris. A complete script was needed to obtain the permit, so Godard had an assistant type up a mock script for a film that would never be shot.

Coutard said Godard committed to making the film cheaply. (The final cost is estimated to have been around $90,000, with the single largest line item in the budget being $10,000 for leading lady Jean Seberg.) As a result, he had to make certain sacrifices: no soundstage or special lighting, no heavy cameras (to cut down on the need for extra grips and other crew). "We had to develop new technology to shoot the film."

One new way of shooting on the cheap, and to achieve an off-the-cuff, almost documentary feel, was to do everything with hand-held camera with Coutard in a wheelchair following the actors as Godard pushed him. Because the wheelchair was too low for most of the shots, Coutard had to sit on a crate placed on top of the seat. The method was quite different from the conventional way of shooting, but Coutard said it actually had an advantage over traditional dolly shots because he could then be moved in any direction, unconfined by dolly tracks. They did have a problem in some scenes with passersby staring at the director pushing his cameraman in a wheelchair, so according to Coutard, they bought a little vehicle that looked like a mail cart, cut a hole in the front for the lens, and tied packages around the top to hide where Coutard's head stuck out of the vehicle.

Godard and Coutard found a way to shoot at night without additional lighting by using high-speed (400 ASA) film meant for still photography. Developing it in a special chemical bath doubled the sensitivity without becoming too grainy. Using that film, however, wouldn't have been possible with most movie cameras because the sprocket holes on photo film are different than those on movie film. But it worked with the Cameflex cameras they were using on this production because the claws on those cameras, which pull the film through, only touch the edge of the perforation rather than going all the way through it, eliminating the need for a precise match.

Although the usual method was to shoot the footage with synchronized sound, Godard would call out to the actors the lines he wanted them to say (generally just written by him, so they had never seen the dialogue prior to shooting) and they would repeat them. Also, the handheld camera they used was so noisy there was no way to record sound on the spot. The lines of dialogue were dubbed later in post-production.

A tiny room in the Hotel de Suede was used as the room where Jean Seberg's character lived. It was so small there was only about eight inches of floor space around the bed. Godard, Coutard, and the actors all had to cram into the space, with the focus puller standing on the bed and the script supervisor watching through the door. "It was a relief not to have lights," Coutard later said.

Coutard related an anecdote illustrative of Godard's unconventional working methods. One day Godard called at 8 in the morning to say he was sick from eating some bad food and couldn't work. He had someone on the crew call producer Georges de Beauregard and tell him. Although according to Coutard, it was not a big deal, since cast and crew totaled only about seven or eight people, Beauregard was furious. A short time later, he went to have a drink and saw Godard sitting at the same café having breakfast. Coutard said they got into a fistfight and reporters from Paris Match had to pull them apart.

Having made her first few pictures in the classical Hollywood system, Seberg was rattled by Godard's shooting methods, and there was much tension between them. They also clashed over her character and performance, notably in the scene near the end when Patricia returns to the apartment to tell Michel she has informed on him to the police. According to Coutard, she and Godard were "at each other's throats" by this point. She wanted to do the scene in an emotional frenzy, whereas he wanted her totally calm and cool. He finally gave in and shot the scene her way, but when it came time to dub it in post, she realized he had been right, so she spoke her lines very low key, which doesn't always match her expressions on screen. Pierre Rissient later said he didn't think Seberg knew what was happening throughout the production and had no idea what kind of film this would be, so she was likely pleasantly surprised at the final product and the success it achieved.

Seberg did get her way on one key scene. Godard wanted her character at the end to rifle through the dying Belmondo's pockets, but she refused to play the scene that way. Instead it ends with a bit of dialogue whose translation is still sometimes disputed (with Seberg's Patricia asking what "dégueulasse" [disgusting] means and being told by the detective a different version of what Belmondo's character likely intended) followed by an iconic close-up of her making the Bogart lip-rubbing gesture Belmondo uses throughout the film, then turning away from the camera.

Although some sources have said both Seberg and Belmondo had problems with the director, Pierre Rissient said the relationship between Godard and his male lead was very easy going. "I think Jean-Luc had an instinct Belmondo wouldn't look like he was acting and so he was perfect for the part," Rissient said. "They very much trusted each other."

Instead of having Seberg's character interview Italian director Roberto Rossellini as originally planned, Godard included a scene in which she interviews a writer, Parvulesco, played with delicious self-importance and hyper-intellectual air by director Jean-Pierre Melville, whose film Bob le flambeur (1956) is obliquely referred to in the story.

Although listed as technical adviser, Claude Chabrol says he was never on set for a single minute. Truffaut, despite his assurances to Beauregard, was also not involved in the production at all.

The film is famous today for its revolutionary use of jump cuts, although some critics have rightly pointed out that Godard's long takes were equally unconventional and brought a unique rhythm to the final film.

Much has been made of the jump cuts and whether they were an intentional device or something that just happened. Pierre Rissient points out that Godard had not used jump cuts in his earlier shorts and insists they were not planned ahead of time or anticipated during shooting. He said that during editing they were discovered to be a means of making the film more "electric," and they certainly do give it the distinctive "breathless" quality for which it's known.

Here's how Godard himself, in 1980, described the genesis of the jump cuts: "People try to put everything into their first film. So they're always very long. And I was no exception to the rule. I had made a film that lasted two and a quarter or two and a half hours; and it was impossible, the contract specified that the running time not exceed an hour and a half. And I remember very clearly...how I invented this famous way of cutting, that is now used in commercials: we took all the shots and systematically cut out whatever could be cut, while trying to maintain some rhythm. For example, Belmondo and Seberg had a sequence in a car at a certain moment; and there was a shot of one, then a shot of the other, as they spoke their lines. And when we came to this sequence, which had to be shortened like the others, instead of slightly shortening both, the editor and I flipped a coin; we said: 'Instead of slightly shortening one and then slightly shortening the other, and winding up with short little shots of both of them, we're going to cut out four minutes by eliminating one or the other altogether, and then we will simply join the [remaining] shots, like that, as though it were a single shot. Then we drew lots as to whether it should be Belmondo or Seberg and Seberg remained."

Coutard said he was surprised to see the film after it was edited, that it was not at all as he imagined it would be. "There was a panache in the way it was edited that didn't match at all the way it was shot." He said the editing gave it a very different tone than films he was used to seeing, affording the story a liveliness that classic French films didn't have. He found the jump cuts, particularly in the scene between Seberg and the other journalist in the café terrace, to be "incredible," adding "It's no surprise today-television does it all the time. But back then it was revolutionary."

by Rob Nixon

The source for much of the material and quotes provided by Pierre Rissient and Raoul Coutard is a featurette about the making of the movie on the Criterion Collection DVD release of the film.