In 1973, after Francois Truffaut's movie about moviemaking Day for Night opened in Paris, Jean-Luc Godard sent him a letter. Fifteen years earlier, Truffaut and Godard had been friends and comrades, self-educated film nuts and critics who were beginning to make good on their shared dream of becoming filmmakers. Truffaut's The 400 Blows premiered at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, and was such a success that Godard was able to get funding for his own debut feature, Breathless, by having Truffaut agree to pretend that he had written the script. (Breathless originated with a news story about a young car thief turned killer that Truffaut had considered filming himself before making The 400 Blows.) The two had achieved fame as the twin giants of the French New Wave, but they had gradually drifted apart, both in their aesthetic aims and their personal relationship. In his letter, Godard accused Truffaut of having made a dishonest movie but also brought the happy news that he had a way for Truffaut to repent: he offered to allow Truffaut to use some of his ill-gotten proceeds to fund a movie by Godard that would tell the truth about film sets, with a political-minded focus on the people who do the grunt work. The sensitive, gentle-natured Truffaut freaked out; he sent Godard a lengthy reply in which he discharged years' worth of pent-up resentments and declared that Godard's radicalism, which Godard wore as a badge of honor even as it limited his access to the large audiences that turned out for Truffaut's movies, was actually practiced in bad faith: "Between your interest in the masses and your own narcissism there's no room for anyone or anything else." The two men were never friends again but remained obsessed with each other. The way Richard Brody tells this story, in "The Auteur Wars" in the current The New Yorker, the most poignant irony in all this is that Godard's letter, which ended with the line, "If you want to talk it over, fine," may have been a heartfelt attempt on his part to reconnect. Janine Bazin, the widow of the great French critic Andre Bazin, told Truffaut that it sounded to her as if Godard "must be unhappy and he doesn't have the same way of being unhappy as others."
Truffaut died in 1984; Godard lives, and still persists in making movies, though after a brief return to mainstream-art house consciousness after the 1980 Every Man for Himself, his more recent work has drifted back to extreme-minority-audience status. The two of them liberated movies, but they were fated to take wildly different paths, and it makes all the sense in the world both that they would not be able to sustain their friendship and that neither of them would be able to quite get over the other. (In a foreword he wrote for a collection of Truffaut's letters, Godard wrote, "If we tore each other apart, little by little, it was for fear of being the first to be eaten alive.") Brody, who has a book on Godard coming out next month, does a good job of conveying the explosive charge and confusion of their glory days, when the young George Lucas actually said of the awe-inspiring, mainstream-unfriendly Godard, "When you find someone who's going in the same direction as you, you don't feel so alone." (The piece isn't available on-line, but the magazine's website does offer a photo slideshow on the two directors, as well as an audio clip of Brody discussing his subjects and a 1976 profile of Godard by Penelope Gilliatt.)