A Director’s Legacy From Truffaut

“Francois Truffaut,” said the French director Claude Miller during a recent visit to Los Angeles, “was there as a friendly ghost watching over us.”

A year before he died, in 1984 at the tragically young age of 52, Truffaut and Claude de Givray had completed a 35-page treatment of “The Little Thief,” about a truant teen-age girl who is for all the world a sister in spirit to Antoine Doinel, the hero of Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows.” (“Little Thief” opens Friday at the Royal.)

Realizing he would not live to make the film, Truffaut asked his friend, the producer-director Claude Berri (“The Two of Us”), to do it. But Berri, preparing “Jean de Florette,” could not and, after Truffaut’s death, he turned to Miller.

Thus Miller had the assignment, at once enviable, daunting and melancholy, of making Francois Truffaut’s last film. The choice made sense; Miller had worked closely with Truffaut for a decade, as his production manager on several films.

“In 1967 I was working as an assistant director to Jean-Luc Godard on ‘Two Or Three Things I Know About Her,’ ” Miller said through an interpreter. “Suzanne Schiffman was the script girl on the film and she and I got along. Later she asked me if I wanted to work with Truffaut on ‘Stolen Kisses.’

“I surely did. For 10 years I was with him on every film, from ‘Stolen Kisses’ to ‘The Story of Adele H.’ ‘The Wild Child,’ ‘Day for Night,’ ‘Two English Girls,’ all of them.”

Miller last chatted with Truffaut only two months before he died. “Even then he only wanted to talk about cinema.”

Janine Castang, the troubled girl who is the little thief, was to have been a character in “The 400 Blows,” Miller says. “But Truffaut realized he had too much material already, and he put her aside, intending to make her story later.”

The story treatment Miller inherited included, he says, all the characters, a well-described analysis of her psychology and the chronology of the story. Miller co-authored the shooting script with Luc Beraud and Annie Miller, his wife.

“Truffaut didn’t say everything he had to say about youth in ‘400 Blows,’ ” Miller believes. “Janine was intended to expose more things about Truffaut himself. One area in particular that was not exposed in ‘400 Blows’ was sexuality, and he wanted to explore that through Janine in ‘The Little Thief.’ ”

“The 400 Blows,” Truffaut’s first feature after two attention-getting and still-shown short films, was a remarkable autobiographical document, reflecting the turmoil of Truffaut’s own troubled youth, which included a term in reform school for theft.

Antoine Doinel, played by Jean-Pierre Leaud from age 12, was followed through a short film (“Love at Twenty”) and three features (“Stolen Kisses,” “Bed and Board” and “Love On the Run”), a sequence without exact counterpart in film history, and reflecting Truffaut’s own arrival at a secure manhood after the terrors of childhood.

“The boy and the girl are both revolting against the world at large, and especially against the world of adults. They both want to experience everything for the first time, including love and friendship.”

One story element not in the treatment but added by Miller (and evidently OKd by the friendly hovering ghost) is Janine’s discovery of photography. “The whole photography thing is an homage to Francois,” Miller says. “At 17 he had been in all kinds of trouble but he was saved by his love of cinema.”

What made “The Little Thief” workable was the actress Miller knew was available to play her. Charlotte Gainsbourg, born into show business as the daughter of actress Jane Birkin and singer Serge Gainsbourg, had worked for Miller when she was only 14, in a film called “L’Effrontee.” She was 17 when she filmed “The Little Thief,” and she has already received extraordinary reviews.

“Perhaps one of the reasons Truffaut didn’t make ‘The Little Thief’ himself earlier in his career is that he didn’t know Charlotte, that is, he didn’t know an actress who could do Janine. After we did ‘L’Effrontee’ three years ago, she became part of the family. She was there when we were working on the script. We discussed the character with her. That’s why I said yes to Claude (Berri) in the first place. I knew she could do it.”

Miller adds: “I can’t remember whether it was Capra or Hitchcock who said the three most important things about a film are, first, the script, second, the script, and third, the script. But it is true,” Miller says, “and with Francois’ treatment and his spirit to guide you”--he pauses eloquently.

Like “The 400 Blows,” “The Little Thief” is open-ended, a cliffhanger even. But Miller says he is optimistic about Janine. “At 16 or 17 you have your whole life ahead of you, as Truffaut did. And all those experiences, although as bad as they are, are good for your overall learning of life. That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, as someone says.”

It is tantalizing to think of future glimpses of Janine--in her own equivalents of “Stolen Kisses” and “Bed and Board.” But Miller says it cannot be.

“We did have the right to do the film based on Truffaut’s treatment. We don’t have the right to continue because the characters are not our own. We are not entitled.”

It is sad but unarguable. What Janine might have made of her adult life and whether (to dream very romantically indeed) her path might one day have crossed Antoine Doinel’s is a secret Truffaut has carried off with him.