After The 400 Blows, François Truffaut decided he wanted to do something quite different for his next feature. That something different was Shoot The Piano Player. Freely adapted from the novel Down There by David Goodis, Shoot The Piano Player is Truffaut’s most playful film. This movie is sometimes comic, sometimes tragic and sometimes suspenseful but always entertaining and mesmerizing. None of this feels forced and these elements fit together extremely well, a difficult feat for any film maker to accomplish.
Without a major studio backing the film, much of the shooting was done on the streets of Paris. Though the film was based off a book, much of the script was written as the movie was being filmed. Because of this and the crew being quite sure of themselves due to the success of The 400 Blows. Many of the people working on this film considered this one of the most fun times they ever had making a movie. With all this it is no wonder that Shoot The Piano Player has a sense of freedom and spontaneity few films have.
Truffaut found casting to be one of the easier parts of making this movie. After seeing Charles Aznavour in Georges Franju’s Head Against the Wall, Truffaut wrote the lead of this film with him in mind. Richard Kanayan played one of the school children in The 400 Blows and everybody working on the film found him entertaining so he was given a bigger role here. Truffaut saw a woman named Claudine Huz’e on TV and decided she should be in this film. He suggested her screen name of Marie Dubois, because she reminded him of the main character in the book Marie Dubois.
François Truffaut and Marcel Moussy started writing the script together. However unlike on The 400 Blows, the two did not see eye to eye. Moussy saw this film as a straightforward story, but Truffaut saw a spontaneous exercise in cinematic freedom. Truffaut also felt the characters should be less heroic than in the novel, which Moussy disagreed with. Moussy would leave this film early in the writing and Truffaut would finish writing the script his way.
Shoot The Piano Player was not the hit The 400 Blows had been. In fact it was not a hit at all. It fared no better with critics. Despite this the film is a classic, Truffaut was for a while unhappy for this film, probably due to it’s reception. However today many movie-lovers have discovered just how great this film is and it has found the respect it deserves.
-Michael J. Ruhland
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