Francois Truffaut
François Roland Truffaut was a French filmmaker, actor, and critic. He is widely regarded as one of the founders of the French New Wave. He came under the tutelage of film critic Andre Bazin as a young man and was hired to write for Bazin's Cahiers du Cinéma, where he became a proponent of the auteur theory, which posits that a film's director is its true author. The 400 Blows (1959), starring Jean-Pierre Léaud as Truffaut's alter ego Antoine Doinel, was a defining film of the New Wave. Truffaut contributed to another significant milestone of the movement with his work on Breathless (1960), a film directed by his colleague from Cahiers, Jean-Luc Godard.