Francois Truffaut first read David Goodis’s novel in the mid-1950s while shooting Les Mistons, upon when his wife Madeleine Morgenstern’s recommendation. He loved the book’s dialogue and poetic tone and convinced producer Pierre Braunberger to buy the rights. Truffaut later met Goodis in New York, where the novelist gave Truffaut a vintage viewfinder from his experience as Unit Director on a U.S. film.
Truffaut made the film in reaction to the success of The 400 Blows, aiming to show his influence by American films. He wanted to shock the audience that had loved The 400 Blows by making a film that would “please the real film nuts and them alone.” “I refused to be a prisoner of my own first success. I discarded temptation to renew that success by choosing a “great subject.” I turned my back on what everyone waited for and I took my pleasure as my only rule of conduct.”
Truffaut began writing the script with Marcel Moussy, who had co-written The 400 Blows. Moussy attempted to establish social roots for the characters, but Truffaut disagreed, wanting the film to be loose and abstract, so Moussy left and Truffaut wrote the script himself.
Truffaut considered the Goodis novel to be too chaste and he made the characters less heroic. The book’s Charlie is stronger–Truffaut called it a Sterling Hayden type. Truffaut made the protagonist weaker and the female characters strong. Truffaut was also influenced by French writer Jacques Audiberti in his treatment of the character Plyne.
Truffaut also used some scenes from other Goodis novels, such as the one where Chico bumps into a lamppost and has a conversation with a stranger.
Truffaut had wanted to work with Charles Aznavour after seeing him act in Georges Franju’s Head Against the Wall and wrote the role with Aznavour in mind.
Child actor Richard Kanayan had appeared in The 400 Blows, so Truffaut cast him as Charlie’s youngest brother. Nicole Berger was an old friend of Truffaut’s and also Pierre Braunberger’s stepdaughter. Michèle Mercier was a dancer who had appeared in a few films before. Albert Remy had appeared in The 400 Blows and Truffaut wanted to show the actor’s comedic side.
Truffaut also cast actor and novelist Daniel Boulanger and theatrical actor Claude Mansard as the two gangsters in the film. Serge Davri was music hall performer who had recited poems while breaking dishes over his head. Truffaut considered him crazy, but funny, and cast him as Plyne.
Truffaut cast the role of Mammy with Catherine Lutz, who had never acted before and worked at local movie theater.
Truffaut first noticed Marie Dubois when he came across her headshot and attempted to set up several meetings, but she never showed up. Truffaut finally saw Dubois perform on a TV show and immediately wanted to cast her. Dubois’s real name was “Claudine Huzé” and Truffaut changed it to Marie Dubois because she reminded him of the titular character of his friend Jacques Audiberti’s novel Marie Dubois. Dubois was “neither a ‘dame’ nor a ‘sex kitten’; she is neither ‘lively’ nor ‘saucy’. But she’s a perfectly worthy young girl with whom it’s conceivable you could fall in love and be loved in return.”
Filming took place from 30 November 1959 until 22 January 1960 with some re-shoots for two weeks in March. Locations included a cafe called A la Bonne Franquette on the rue Mussard in Levallois, Le Sappey-en-Chartreuse, around Grenoble and throughout Paris.
Whereas The 400 Blows had been a tense shoot for Truffaut, his second film was a happy experience for the cast and crew after Truffaut’s first success.
Truffaut wanted to make it as a big budget film, but was unable to get sufficient funds and so it was made on the streets instead, on a budget of 890,062.95 francs Truffaut filled the film with homages to American directors as Nicholas Ray and Sam Fuller.
During the shoot, Truffaut realized that he didn’t like gangsters and tried to make their character more comical.
The script changed constantly during shooting. Truffaut said that “In Shoot the Piano Player I wanted to break with the linear narrative and make a film where all the scenes would please me. I shot without any criteria.”
Truffaut’s stylized and self-reflexive melodrama employs elements of French New Wave cinema: extended voice-overs, out-of-sequence shots, and sudden jump cuts.
Raoul Coutard’s cinematography was grainy and kinetic, reflecting the characters’ emotional state, such as the scene in which Charlie hesitates before ringing a doorbell.
The film references Hollywood B movies from the 1940s, the iris technique from silent films, Charlie is named after Charlie Chaplin, and having three brothers (including one named Chico) as a reference to the Marx Brothers.
The film’s structure and flashbacks resemble that of Citizen Kane. Truffaut stated, “In spite of the burlesque idea to certain scenes, it’s never a parody (because I detest parody, except when it begins to rival the beauty of what it is parodying). For me it’s something very precise–a respectful pastiche of the Hollywood B films from which I learned so much.”
This was Truffaut’s first film to include murder, which would become a motif in many of his films and was influenced by Truffaut’s admiration of Hitchcock.
Truffaut stated that the film’s theme is “love and the relations between men and women,” but later claimed that “the idea behind Le Pianiste was to make a film without a subject, to express all I wanted to say about glory, success, downfall, failure, women and love by means of a detective story. It’s a grab bag.”
Like The 400 Blows, Shoot the Piano Player was shot in Dyaliscope, a widescreen process, described as an aquarium that allows the actors to move around the frame more naturally.
Shoot the Piano Player was first shown at the London Film Fest on October 20, 1960. It later premiered in Paris on November 22. and in the U.K. on December 8. It did not premiere in the U.S. until July 1962.
The film was financially unsuccessful, although it was popular among “cinephiles” such as Claude Miller.
Pauline Kael called Aznavour’s performance “intensely human and sympathetic” and Andrew Sarris praised the film, stating “great art can also be great fun.”
Dwight Macdonald said that the film mixes up “three genres which are usually kept apart: crime melodrama, romance and slapstick.
The title has become somewhat of a joke on the club scene, usually to get a less-than-talented musician to stop performing, but occasionally breaks into the musical mainstream:
In the 1966 Hawks film El Dorado, when Cole Thorton (John Wayne) and Mississippi (James Caan) stop to buy a shotgun for Mississippi, they ask the gunsmith Swede Larson where the shotgun came from, they are told that the previous owner was a man who couldn’t see very well but got into a fight in a saloon. However, the shotgun owner couldn’t hear the other man because the piano player was making noise, so “he just shoot the piano player and they hung him.”
This is one of Bob Dylan’s favorite films and inspired his early work. Dylan references the film in “11 Outlined Epitaphs,” which serve as the notes to his 1963 album The Times They Are a-Changin’: “there’s a movie called / Shoot the Piano Player / the last line proclaimin’ / ‘music, man, that’s where it’s at’ / it is a religious line / outside, the chimes rung / an’ they / are still ringin'” (spelling and punctuation as in the original).
Scorsese said “Charles Aznavour’s character, who keeps almost acting but never does until it’s too late, had profound effect on him and many other filmmakers.”
In Britain, the joke about the piano player does not derive from this film but from the alleged remark of Oscar Wilde on his 1882 American tour: “Don’t shoot the pianist, he is doing his best.” This is also the book’s source and film title. The line gained some currency in popular European culture thereafter. The French translation—”Ne tirez pas sur le pianiste, il fait ce qu’il peut”—appears prominently in the wall décor of a nightclub in the Julien Duvivier’s 1933 detective film A Man’s Neck.
