With the publication here of the last interview that François Truffaut gave, to Bert Cardullo, in 1984, it’s worth considering the new light that the director’s discussion sheds on his films. My first piece for The New Yorker, in 1999, was a review (available to subscribers) of the biography of Truffaut by Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana. In praising that copiously researched volume, I mapped the mid-sixties as a watershed period in Truffaut’s career as a filmmaker and suggested that, after making his first four features (“The 400 Blows,” “Shoot the Piano Player,” “Jules and Jim,” and “The Soft Skin”), Truffaut filmed in a stiffer, stodgier, less emotionally direct way. (I said that “The Soft Skin,” from 1964, “may have been the last visceral, spontaneous film that Truffaut ever made.”) And I attributed the change to the unexpected consequences of three decisions that Truffaut made: the management of his own production company, which turned his focus commercial; the commitment to realize a book of interviews with Alfred Hitchcock, which ate up an enormous amount of time that could have been devoted to filmmaking; and the obsessive quest to make “Fahrenheit 451,” which took years to launch and for which Truffaut spurned other opportunities.

What I didn’t recognize, and what comes through in the interview that Truffaut granted Cardullo, is that, far from betraying the ideals of his youth in the course of his career, he seems to have fulfilled his original intentions surprisingly fully—but that what changed was less Truffaut than the times, the surrounding circumstances, and the French film industry overall.

His longtime friend Jean-Luc Godard (whose very public conflict with Truffaut was the subject of the excerpt from my book that appeared in the magazine in 2008) has expressed dismay that Truffaut, as a filmmaker, left behind the ferocity of his early critical broadsides, such as the clarion call “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” which was published in 1954. But it’s worth noting that, despite Truffaut’s vehement and derisive rejection of most of the French film industry in that piece, he reserves his greatest venom for screenwriters, and admits as much to Cardullo: “I did an incendiary piece in Cahiers against French films as typified by the screenwriters Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, the fossils of French cinema.” And, although Truffaut was a crucial champion of directors via the politique des auteurs (he was even scheduled to write a theoretical article for Cahiers about it in the mid-fifties, but never completed it), his conception of the auteur, the director who is the true author of his or her film, depended on the idea that the director would film a screenplay that he or she wrote—and that first-person approach to the screenplay is the subject of what may well be Truffaut’s single most famous critical pronouncement, which Cardullo cites in a question:

In 1957 you wrote the following: “The films of the future will be more personal than autobiography, like a confession or diary. Young filmmakers will speak in the first person in order to tell what happened to them: their first love, a political awakening, a trip, an illness, and so on. Tomorrow’s film will be an act of love.” If someone wanted to make movies today, would you tell that person, “Tell us about your life. There’s nothing more important or more interesting.” Or would you say, “The industry is tougher now. Conform to it and don’t listen to what I said.”

Truffaut answered,

Very tactfully put, M. Cardullo. Yes, well done. My prediction was fulfilled beyond my wildest dreams—you know that. So I wouldn’t say the opposite today. But I would say, “Talk about what interests you, but make sure it interests others, too.”

Truffaut told Cardullo that the movies he had inveighed against as a critic were “the kind of movie in which the script was written by five or six people, who had been given the royal treatment for a month at the Trianon in Versailles.” He explained that the future New Wave advocated “more personal films” but that the results were films that “eventually became more than personal: they became narcissistic. The makers of such films spoke very personally, but sometimes they could have benefitted from having had a friend read their scripts first.” Recognizing this, Truffaut told Cardullo, “I, and others, were gradually returning to a narrative tradition based more on observation and synthesis than subjectivity and self-exploration. Now we have both kinds of films,” and added, “Nowadays you write a script all by yourself, in your own little apartment—and this is perhaps not so good a thing as one might at first think.”

Alone among his colleagues at the crest of the New Wave, Truffaut hired a professional screenwriter (Marcel Moussy) to help with the script of his first feature. This was consistent with Truffaut’s surprisingly modest cinematic ambitions: