François Truffaut

François Roland Truffaut was a French filmmaker, actor and critic, widely regarded as one of the founders of the French New Wave. With a career of more than 25 years, he is an icon of the French film industry. As a young man, he came under the tutelage of film critic Andre Bazin, who hired him to write for his Cahiers du Cinéma. It was there that he became an exponent of the auteur theory, which said the director is the true author of the film. The 400 Blows, starring Jean-Pierre Léaud as Truffaut's alter-ego Antoine Doinel, was a defining film of the New Wave.