Georges Delerue : my friend François…

"François Truffaut was an exceptional man warm, discreet, rather timid and sensitive, who nevertheless always surprised me and who always expressed what he thought and felt most deeply."

"He was profoundly admired by those who worked in the cinema and I, who also had great affection for him, suffered a terrible shock upon learning that he was gravely ill."

"When I arrived in the United States, I was surprised to learn that I was rather well known thanks to François' films. Everyone seemed to know Jules and Jim (1962) and Shoot the Piano Player (1960). Day for Night (1973) was a critical triumph. All of his films were discussed and analyzed in film programs of American universities. And, of course, in studying the films, one discovered the music I had written for them."

"It is perhaps Day for Night that, of all his films, has always moved me the most. That love song for the cinema very much resembled François himself. Film was his life, his passion. The scene where everyone takes leave of each other at the end of shooting captures what everyone in cinema experiences at such moments. That feeling one has of a family, close-knit and intense during its work, now breaking up and scattering has always been difficult for me. The way in which François shot the scene suggests that he too was moved to sadness at the end of shooting a film."

"I lost in François' disappearance someone I loved and someone who taught me an enormous amount about film-making. It is hard to believe that I shall never be with him again in a cutting room and that I shall never again hear him say: "It's time for a break. Let's talk about music."

The director/composer relationship

The decade of the fifties was a crucial time for film music in the United States.
As the amazing muted horns of Bernard Hermann and the famous Jericho trumpets of Miklos Rosza resounded in Hollywood, there emerged a new generation of creative film composers.
Among this group Jerry Goldsmith especially transformed and enlarged cinematic musical codes, as one can see and hear in John Huston's Freud (1962) and John Guillermin's The Blue Max (1966).
In Europe as well, the ambitions of film music were changing with Georges Delerue in France and Ennio Morricone in Italy.
This important shift owed a great deal to Alfred Hitchcock, who was one of the first to realize how crucial music was to film narrative. Hitchcock was drawn to Bernard Herrmann, who became his favorite film composer. They developed into a close creative team of director and composer.
This kind of symbiotic relationship, built on total confidence between director and composer, would prove fruitful in several film genres: Ennio Morricone/ Sergio Leone for westerns, Lalo Schifrin/Don Siegel for detective films, or Henri Mancini/Blake Edwards for comedy. To cite just a few more examples: Georges Delerue and François Truffaut, John Williams and Steven Spielberg, Jerry Goldsmith and Franklin J. Schaffner, Maurice Jarre and David Lean, Nino Rota and Frédérico Fellini.

It was probably the collaboration of Delerue and Truffaut which most resembled that close relationship of Hitchcock and Herrmann. Even more than their contemporaries they worked together with a single cinematic concept. These two working relationships are now part of film history and are actually studied in detail in many film schools throughout the world.