The regular series of Google homepage tributes to influential figures in arts, culture and science today honours the achievements of Truffaut, who was one of the founders of the New Wave movement in film, who began his working life writing as a film critic but went on to have an illustrious and influential career as a filmmaker in his own right.
The homepage shows a slideshow of three images dedicated to the director’s work, with the first slide showing a man on a beach looking out to sea, pays tribute to his first feature Les Quartre Cent Coups (The 400 Blows).
Truffaut’s only English language film was a 1966 adaptation of the dystopian sci-fi novel Fahrenheit 451 about a world in which firemen are employed specifically to burn books and destroy all literature in the world. He called it his “saddest and most difficult” experience in filmmaking due to conflict with his leading man, Oskar Werner.
The director was influenced by US directors like Alfred Hitchcock (his 1983 film Confidentially Yours was a tribute to Hitchcock) and in turn influenced the work of Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg.
His film Day for Night won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1973. François Truffaut died in 1984 after suffering with a brain tumour.
