Breathless (1960 film) producer Georges de Beauregard
Filming
Godard envisaged Breathless as a reportage (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. He therefore took 18-metre lengths of HP5 film sold for 35mm still cameras and spliced them together to 120-metre rolls. 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 Cameflex camera was the only camera that worked for the film used.The production was filmed on location in Paris using an Eclair Cameflex during the months of August and September in 1959, including U.S. President Eisenhower's 2–3 September visit to Paris. Nearly the entire film had to be dubbed in post-production because of the noisiness of the Cameflex camera and because the Cameflex was incapable of synchronized sound.Filming began on 17 August 1959. Godard met his crew at the Café Notre Dame near the Hôtel de Suède and shot for two hours until he ran out of ideas. Coutard has stated that the film was virtually improvised on the spot, and that Godard wrote lines of dialogue in an exercise book that no one else was allowed to see. Godard gave the lines to Belmondo and Seberg with only a few brief rehearsals of scenes before filming them. No permission was received to shoot the film in its various locations (mainly the side streets and boulevards of Paris), adding to the spontaneous feel for which Godard was aiming. However, all locations were selected before shooting began, and assistant director Pierre Rissient has described the shoot as very organized. Actor Richard Balducci has stated that shooting days ranged from 15 minutes to 12 hours, depending on how many ideas Godard had on a given day. Producer Georges de Beauregard wrote a letter to the entire crew complaining about the erratic shooting schedule. Coutard said that when de Beauregard encountered Godard at a café on a day on which Godard had called in sick, the two engaged in a fistfight.Godard shot most of the film chronologically, with the exception of the first sequence, which was filmed toward the end of the shoot. Filming at the Hôtel de Suède for the lengthy bedroom scene with Michel and Patricia included a minimal crew and no lights. The location was difficult to secure, but Godard was determined to shoot there after having lived at the hotel after returning from South America in the early 1950s. Instead of renting a dolly with complicated and time-consuming tracks to lay, Godard and Coutard rented a wheelchair that Godard often pushed himself. For certain street scenes, Coutard hid in a postal cart with a hole for the lens and packages piled on top of him. Shooting lasted for 23 days and ended on 12 September 1959. The final scene in which Michel is shot in the street was filmed on the rue Campagne-Première in Paris.Writing for Combat magazine in 1960, Pierre Marcabru observed: "It seems that, if we had footage of Godard shooting his film, we would discover a sort of accord between the dramatized world in front of the camera (Belmondo and Seberg playing a scene) and the working world behind it (Godard and Raoul Coutard shooting the scene), as if the wall between the real and projected worlds had been torn down."
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