JEAN-LUC GODARD (Director/Writer) Born December 3, 1930 in Paris, the son of a doctor and a banker's daughter, Godard had his elementary and high school education in Switzerland and in Paris, then enrolled at the Sorbonne, ostensibly to study ethnology. During his university days he developed a passionate devotion to the cinema, spending endless hours at Left Bank cinema clubs and at the Cinémathèque Française, where in 1950 he met the critic André Bazin and future filmmakers François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, and Claude Chabrol, with whom he would later form the nucleus of the French New Wave. Godard began contributing articles and film criticism for La Gazette du Cinéma, then Cahiers du Cinéma. In 1951, Godard toured North and South America. Supporting himself with a variety of odd jobs, he continued watching films at a fanatical rate, and his articles for Cahiers began reflecting an enthusiastic admiration for little-known American directors of action films and at the same time a deep contempt for the traditional cinema, especially the commercial French film. In 1954, Godard returned to Switzerland and remained there to work as a laborer on a dam project. With his earnings he bought himself a 35mm camera and made his first film, Opération Beton, a 20-minute short about the construction of the dam. Following four more shorts, Godard stunned the world with his first feature film, Breathless, released early in 1960. The film marked a significant break from orthodox cinema techniques, reshaping the traditional film syntax with its astonishing jump cuts and unsteady hand-held moving shots. It was a spontaneous, impulsive, vibrant, and totally original film that reflected the director's enchantment with the immediacy of the American gangster movie and his impatience with the laboriousness of the traditional techniques of "quality" cinema. It immediately established Godard as a leading spokesman of the Nouvelle Vague. Godard's next film, Le Petit Soldat, was a savage exposition of the Algerian conflict and also the first of seven features to star his future wife Anna Karina. Karina next played a stripper in his A Woman Is a Woman (1961, re-released by Rialto Pictures in 2003) and a Paris prostitute in My Life to Live (1962). Les Carabiniers (1963) was an anti-war allegory that provoked violently hostile reaction from audiences. Its grainy dreariness stood in sharp contrast to the wide-screen color cinematography of Contempt (1963, re-released by Rialto & Strand Releasing in 1997 and again in 2008), which starred Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli. With Band of Outsiders (1964, re-released by Rialto Pictures in 2001), Godard returned to the world of the gangster. A Married Woman (1964) was the study of an alienated Parisian woman. Alphaville (1965), Godard's only excursion into science fiction, was followed in the same year by Pierrot le Fou. Godard’s impact on the cinema of the 60s was monumental and sweeping. He used the camera inventively, re-writing the syntax of films along the way. Masculine Feminine (1966) was a free-form study of the mores of Parisian youth. Made in USA (1966) was based on an American potboiler. Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967) told the story of a Paris housewife who moonlights as a prostitute. La Chinoise (1967) featured in the leading role actress Anne Wiazemsky, who became Godard's second wife. After Week End (1968), a new Godard surfaced, a revolutionary, didactic filmmaker who became obsessed with the spoken word and increasingly apathetic to cinema as a visual medium. He dedicated himself to making "revolutionary films for revolutionary audiences." In the late 70s Godard underwent yet another metamorphosis, rediscovering himself and his love of film. He refocused his sights on themes of universal humanistic concern in Every Man for Himself (1980), Passion (1982), and First Name: Carmen (1983). He even paid a renewed homage to American cinema in Détective (1985), but caused massive controversy with his Hail Mary! (1985). King Lear (1987) was an unsuccessful attempt to film Shakespeare. Soigne ta droite (1987), Nouvelle Vague (1990) and Hélas pour moi (1994) all featured top stars, but his For Ever Mozart (1997), with its typically Godardian disquisition on art and war, was the best received of the four. In 1998, Godard completed his long-gestating Histoire(s) du Cinéma, a highly personal meditation on 100 years of cinema. Other works of the 90s include Germany Year 90 Nine Zero and the self-portrait JLG/JLG (1995). In 2003, he made In Praise of Love, a surprisingly moving study of art, history, madness and exploitation and, in 2004, Notre Musique, shot on location in Sarajevo. Morceaux choisis (literally, “choice bits”), a 90-minute re-edit of his Histoire(s) du Cinéma, was shown in 2005 at the Pompidou Center in Paris and was the opening night film of the re-opened Museum of Modern Art in New York. Among his many prizes and honors, Godard won the best director award at the Berlin Festival for Breathless, a Berlin Jury Prize for A Woman Is a Woman, and Venice’s Golden Lion (Best Film) for First Name: Carmen. In 1986, he was honored with a Special French César Award for lifetime achievement. ANNA KARINA (Paula Nelson) Born Hanne Karina Blarke Bayer in Copenhagen, Anna Karina left Denmark at age 18 to pursue a modeling career (for Chanel among others) in Paris. Turning down a supporting role in Breathless (which would have required a nude scene), she appeared in Michel Deville's Ce soir ou jamais (1960) before accepting the lead in Godard's second feature, Le Petit soldat (1960). They married the following year and their cinematic collaboration continued with A Woman is a Woman, My Life to Live, Band of Outsiders, Alphaville, Pierrot le Fou, Made in U.S.A. and Anticipation (in the sketch film The Oldest Profession in the World). When not working with Godard, Karina appeared in a variety of other films, including Agnès Varda's Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), Roger Vadim's La Ronde (1964), Luchino Visconti's The Stranger (1964), as well as Jacques Rivette's controversial La Religieuse (1965). Karina's post-Godard career included many cross-Channel, European and international productions with such directors as George Cukor (Justine, 1969), Tony Richardson (Laughter in the Dark, 1969), Guy Green (The Magus, 1968), J. Lee Thompson (Before Winter Comes, 1968), Volker Schlondorff (Michael Kohlkaas, 1969), André Delvaux (Rendezvous a Bray, 1971), R. W. Fassbinder (Chinese Roulette, 1976), Franco Brusati (Bread and Chocolate, 1973), and Raul Ruiz (Treasure Island, 1986). Karina has written three novels, starred in a TV musical written for her by Serge Gainsbourg, appeared on stage in a production of Ingmar Bergman's After the Rehearsal and scripted, directed and acted in a feature film, Vivre ensemble (1972). More recently she has had success with a CD, Une histoire d'amour, and a concert tour. Her recent films include Richard Berry’s Moi, Cesar and Jonathan Demme’s The Truth About Charlie, in which she appeared singing one of her own songs in a nightclub. In 2001, Karina came to New York to help publicize Rialto’s re-release of Godard’s Band of Outsiders. Godard once said of her, "She was so sincere in her will to act that it was ultimately her sincerity that acted.” LÁSZLÓ SZABÓ (Paul Widmark) The veteran of over 120 films in France, America and his native Hungary, Laszlo Szabó was born in Budapest in 1936. He began his acting career in 1952 in Hungary and made his first appearance in a French film in 1959, with a small part in Claude Chabrol’s Les Cousins. In the 1960s, Szabó became a familiar figure in films of the French New Wave, becoming particularly associated with Jean-Luc Godard -- a collaboration that spanned over thirty years. Their nine films together include Vivre Sa Vie, Le Petit Soldat, Les Plus Belles Escroqueries du Monde, Pierrot Le Fou, Alphaville, Made in USA, Week End and Passion. He has also appeared in films by most of the great figures of French cinema of the last forty years, including François Truffaut (The Last Metro), Costa-Gavras (The Confession), Eric Rohmer (Full Moon in Paris), Jacques Rivette (Love on the Ground and Up, Down, Fragile), and Patrice Chéreau (Judith Therpauve), and in recent years, has worked with younger generation directors Arnaud Desplechin (The Sentinel, Esther Kahn) and Olivier Assayas (Cold Water, Tous les garçons et les filles de leur ages). He has also written and directed several films in France and Hungary, including his first film Les Gants blancs du diable/The White Gloves of the Devil (1973), starring Bernadette Lafont, and the crime drama Zig Zig I1975), starring Catherine Deneuve. Director François Truffaut, who directed him in The Last Metro and compared his silhouette to The Maltese Falcon’s, praised Szabo as “a strange and poetic actor.” Truffaut also praised Szabo’s directorial debut, Les Gants du diable, which he described as “precisely the bridge between Cocteau and Goodis, or between Godard (of Made in USA) and Hawks (of The Big Sleep).” László Szabó lives today in Manhattan, where he works as an actor, director and acting teacher. He is available for interviews. JEAN-PIERRE LÉAUD (Donald Siegel) Born in Paris in 1944, Léaud’s on-screen life was given birth in The 400 Blows (1959), as director François Truffaut’s fictional alter ego Antoine Doinel…[a performance that was] defiant, withdrawn, and, at the same time, fragile and exposed. It is for this role and the subsequent films in the Doinel cycle that Léaud remains best known. Doinel, the hapless romantic frustrated by modern life, has become one of the best-loved characters in French cinema. During the same period, Léaud made a number of films with Jean-Luc Godard. While Léaud’s performances for Truffaut were that of a lonely, romantic outsider, for Godard, Léaud was a dogmatic and often didactic idealist who also skirted the fringes of life. Truffaut described Léaud’s Doinel persona as one who "does not openly oppose society (and in this sense is not a revolutionary), but he is wary of it and goes his own way, on the outskirts of society." Godard, on the other hand, almost always had Léaud play a revolutionary or ideologue, and in many ways, this was closer to the truth of the performer. Truffaut biographers Antoine De Baecque and Serge Toubiana wrote: Both directors used Jean-Pierre Léaud as an actor, but in opposite ways. Truffaut was often appalled or wounded by Léaud’s personal choices and his commitment to left-wing militancy. The actor for his part surely felt closer to Godard, even though, on a human level, he remained extremely attached to Doinel’s creator. Regardless of the personal dynamics, both directors attached enormous importance to Léaud as a principal performer in the early stages of their careers. Léaud expressed a defining characteristic of both directors…Truffaut in emotions and romance, Godard in anger and ideals, and Léaud in body and spirit. DONALD E. WESTLAKE (Novel) Born in Brooklyn in 1933, legendary mystery writer Donald Westlake published his first novel in 1960, following a stint in the Air Force and stabs at acting and editing. At first specializing in the tough, hard-boiled style, he created his first series character in 1962, with Parker, a professional thief who often gets away with murder. Under the pseudonym of “Richard Stark,” Westlake has written over 20 Parker novels, from 1962 to 1974 and from 1997 to the present. Under his own name he began his most successful and popular series in 1970, comic novels about crime “genius” Dortmunder and his raffish pals, forever planning extremely elaborate capers that somehow never quite come off. Many of his novels have been adapted for the screen, including Point Blank, The Hot Rock, Bank Shot, Payback, and in the case of Jimmy the Kid, three times, in decades-apart versions in the U.S., Italy, and Germany.  A screenwriter himself—though not of his own novels—Westlake was Oscar-nominated for his 1990 adaptation of Jim Thompson’s The Grifters (produced by Martin Scorsese and directed by Stephen Frears) and wrote the original script for the sleeper hit The Stepfather. The author of over a hundred books under his own name and at least ten other pseudonyms, Westlake has won three Mystery Writers of America “Edgars” (the Pulitzers of the genre), only the second person to win in three separate categories -- Best Novel (God Save the Mark, 1968);  Best Short Story, ("Too Many Crooks," 1990); and Best Motion Picture Screenplay (The Grifters, 1991) —and in 1993 was named “Grand Master,” the society’s highest honor. Made in USA was adapted by Godard from Westlake/Stark’s Parker novel The Jugger (1965). Producer Georges de Beauregard’s insolvency resulted in Westlake’s retaining all U.S. rights to the film. Mr. Westlake died of a heart attack on New Year’s Eve, 2008, while vacationing with his wife in Mexico. RAOUL COUTARD (Cinematographer) "My friend Raoul Coutard, France's most brilliant cinematographer," says the hero of Godard's Le Petit Soldat. Between 1959 and 1967, Godard's friend shot all but one of his first 15 features (Masculine Feminine) and returned to shoot Passion and Prénom Carmen in the early 80s. The definitive New Wave cinematographer, Coutard began his career in photojournalism, first as part of his military service, then for such magazines as Paris-Match and Life. This experience and his early work in documentaries fed directly into his innovative use of hand-held camera and natural lighting techniques. He shot most of Truffaut's 60s classics, beginning with Shoot the Piano Player and Jules and Jim, along with Jacques Demy's debut feature, Lola (1960). With Pierre Schoendoerffer, he made the Indochinese War fiction feature, La 317e Section (1964) and Le Crabe-tambour, for which he won a César in 1977. Other major credits include Jean Rouch's cinema verité-style Chronique d'un Eté (1961) and Costa-Gavras's Z (1969), in which he also makes a cameo acting appearance [Z will be re-released by Rialto Pictures, opening on March 13 at New York’s Film Forum]. Coutard personally directed three films: Hoa Binh (1970), an evocation of the Indochina War, and La Légion saute sur Kolwezi (1979), a recreation of a true paramilitary operation in Africa, and S.A.S à San Salvador (1982).