Background and writing Breathless was loosely based on a newspaper article that
François Truffaut read in
The News in Brief about Michel Portail and his American journalist girlfriend Beverly Lynette. In November 1952, Portail stole a car to visit his sick mother in Le Havre and ended up killing a motorcycle cop named Grimberg. Truffaut wrote a treatment with
Claude Chabrol, but they disagreed on the story structure. Godard was working as a press agent at
20th Century Fox when he met producer
Georges de Beauregard. He helped Beauregard with the script for ''
Pêcheur d'Islande, but pitched him on Breathless'' because he liked the treatment. Chabrol and Truffaut were now star directors. They were at the
Cannes Film Festival in May 1959 when they wrote Beauregard to endorse Godard as the director. Their names helped greenlight the film, but both would have very small roles in its production. Truffaut believed Godard's change to the ending was personal, "In my script, the film ends with the boy walking along the street as more and more people turn and stare after him, because his photo's on the front of all the newspapers... Jean-Luc chose a violent end because he was by nature sadder than I." The film includes many in-jokes like the young woman selling
Cahiers du Cinéma and Michel's occasional alias of Laszlo Kovacs, the name of Belmondo's character in Chabrol's 1959 film
Web of Passion.
Jean-Paul Belmondo was not famous outside of France prior to
Breathless. In order to broaden the film's commercial appeal, Godard sought a prominent leading lady who would be willing to work in his low-budget film. He came to
Jean Seberg through his acquaintance with her husband Francois Moreuil. In June 1959, Seberg agreed to appear in the film for $15,000, one-sixth of the film's budget. Godard gave Moreuil a cameo in the film. The 1958 ethno-fiction
Moi, un noir has been credited as a key influence for Godard. This can be seen in the adoption of jump-cuts, use of real locations rather than constructed sets and the documentary, newsreel format of filming.
Filming Godard envisaged
Breathless as a documentary and tasked cinematographer
Raoul Coutard to shoot the entire film on a
hand-held camera with next to no lighting. In order to shoot under low-light levels, Coutard had to use
Ilford HP5 film, which was not available as
motion picture film stock at the time. It is very often claimed that he therefore took 18-metre lengths of HP5 film sold for 35mm still cameras and spliced them into 120-metre rolls, but Coutard has denied this, saying that no splicing took place. During development he
pushed the negative one stop from
400 ASA to 800 ASA. The size of the sprocket holes in the photographic film was different from that of motion picture film, and the
Eclair Cameflex camera was the only camera that worked for the film used. Filming ran 23 days from August 17 until September 12, 1959. It included
President Eisenhower's visit to Paris, which Godard used as a backdrop for the film. Michel's death was filmed on the rue Campagne-Première in Paris.
Publicity Godard and his media-savvy friends were well-positioned to gin up publicity before the movie was released. Richard Balducci was in charge of promoting the film and he embedded a reporter from
France-Observateur in the crew to report on the production. A novelization by Claude Francolin was released in February 1960, a month before the film's release. Columbia also issued a soundtrack album of Martial Solal's music. ==Reception==