Antoine and Colette - Development

Development

Truffaut had just finished Jules and Jim in 1962 when he was approached by film producer Pierre Roustang for his omnibus film project Love At Twenty. Truffaut was influential in helping to select Shintarô Ishihara, Marcel Ophüls, Renzo Rossellini and Andrzej Wajda as the other directors who would eventually participate in the project. In his book Truffaut On Truffaut, Truffaut later said, "For my part, the French episode gave me the occasion to realize a project I hadn't dared to launch on my own, a short sequel to my first film, The 400 Blows, in which we would meet up with the young Antoine Doinel three years later having his first sentimental adventure, one that would illustrate the moral: you risk losing everything by wanting too much."

Antoine and Colette is a largely autobiographical work, based on seventeen-year-old Truffaut's infatuation with an unconventional beauty named Lilliane Latvin. Truffaut met Latvin at the Cinémathèque Française and quit his job as a welder and moved to Paris just to be near her. Like Antoine, he took an apartment across the street from hers so that he could monitor her activities. However, she was ultimately not interested in him nor in any of his friends (she had also attracted attention from Jean Gruault and Jean-Luc Godard).