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Up to no good: Teen actor’s impressive audition for Francois Truffaut’s ‘The 400 Blows’

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François Truffaut was casting for his first feature film The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups), the semi-autobiographical tale of Antoine, a rebellious adolescent growing up in Paris. The young director had already cast Claire Maurier as Antoine’s mother, Guy Decombe and comedian Pierre Repp as his teachers, and Henri Virlojeux as the night watchman who arrests the troubled youngster for the theft of a typewriter. But still Truffaut had no one for Antoine.

He placed an advert in the Paris Soir in the Fall of 1958. Hundreds of young hopefuls were auditioned but none were quite right for the role. Then a friend suggested the son of assistant scriptwriter Pierre Léaud and actress Jacqueline Pierreux.
 
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Actor and Director in Cannes, 1959
 
When Truffaut met Jean-Pierre Léaud he knew he had found his Antoine. The director later wrote that he saw in the 14-year-old:

...a certain suffering with regard to the family…With, however, this fundamental difference: though we were both rebels, we hadn’t expressed our rebellion in the same way. I preferred to cover up and lie. Jean-Pierre, on the contrary, seeks to hurt, shock and wants it to be known…Why? Because he’s unruly, while I was sly. Because his excitability requires that things happen to him, and when they don’t occur quickly enough, he provokes them.

 

 
Jean-Pierre Léaud was a pupil at a private school in Potigny, where he was a described by the school’s headmaster as “unmanageable” with a level of:

Indifference, arrogance, permanent defiance, lack of discipline in all its forms.

Jean-Pierre had been caught with pornography in his dorm, and had often escaped with the older boys on their nights out. But the teenager was bright with an aptitude for writing.
 
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An audition was held that confirmed that Jean-Pierre Léaud was Antoine, so much so, that Truffaut made changes in his script, as he later explained:

I think in the beginning there was a lot of myself in the character of Antoine. But as soon as Jean-Pierre Léaud arrived, his personality, which was so strong, often led me to make changes in the screenplay. So I consider that Antoine is an imaginary character who derives a bit from both of us.

The 400 Blows is described as “one of the defining films of the French New Wave.” It won François Truffaut numerous awards, and was his most successful film in France. It also began a fruitful collaboration between director and actor over the following decades, with Jean-Pierre Léaud going on to become one of France’s greatest actors.

As for the title, well The 400 Blows is a literal translation of the French, which doesn’t capture the nuance or double-meaning of the term Les quatre cents coups, which comes from “faire les quatre cents coups” meaning “to be up to no good.”
 

 
Below, an extraordinary interview with Jean-Pierre Léaud at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival:

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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07.18.2014
01:59 pm
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Jennifer Connelly auditions for ‘Labyrinth’, 1986
02.22.2012
08:35 pm
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Another curio from the Jim Henson vaults, this time the audition tape of a 14-year-old Jennifer Connelly for the 1986 cult classic Labyrinth. You gotta admit Connelly totally nails this audition, selling the action with her own reactions when there is literally nothing there. When he speaks near the end, you can tell Jim Henson is impressed:
 

 

Posted by Niall O'Conghaile
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02.22.2012
08:35 pm
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IWATCH: The Big Brotherization Of Los Angeles
10.23.2009
03:05 pm
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“Let law enforcement determine if it’s a threat…and let the experts decide.”  Earlier this week, I made note of the security cameras popping up all over Kabul.  Today, though, brings news that suggests the surveillance impulse is just as alive and well here in Los Angeles.  The below clip is from iWATCH, the LAPD’s:

community awareness program created to educate the public about behaviors and activities that may have a connection to terrorism.  This program is a community program to help your neighborhood stay safe from terrorist activities.  It is a partnership between your community and the Los Angeles Police Department.  We can and must work together to prevent terrorist attacks.

A noble aim, true, but must the campaign come off sounding—and looking—so creepy?  I’m not sure what’s more desperately transparent here: the pandering to youth culture with that lowercase “i,” or the PSA’s carefully calibrated casting?

I mean, do people not watch these things and realize that each and every one of these “LA voices” is an actor who, to land the gig, underwent a rigorous audition process?  A process that, at some point, probably hinged on how “threatening” their own ethnicity might be perceived?  And not to read too much into one PSA, but isn’t it odd that the more gratuitous close-ups belong most frequently to those of the white guys?

Posted by Bradley Novicoff
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10.23.2009
03:05 pm
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