Jean-Luc Godard, the daring director who shaped the French New Wave, dies at 91

It was a description of a famous scene in the movie Breathless in which Jean-Paul Belmondo recklessly steals a car in Paris and drives it into the countryside without a plan.

“The problem with talking to people is that I’ve always confused cinema with life,” Mr. Godard said in that interview. “Life for me is just part of the movies.”

In 2010, Mr. Godard, who had been at odds with Hollywood for a long time, was awarded an honorary Oscar for his life’s achievements, though not without controversy. Prize focus Longstanding accusations that Mr. Godard holds anti-Semitic views. Didn’t attend the party In which the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded this honor, and when an interview After that he asked him what the award meant to him, and he was frank.

He said, “Nothing.” “If the academy likes to do it, let them do it.”

Jean-Luc Godard was born on December 3, 1930 in Paris, the second of four children in a very wealthy Protestant family. His French-born father, Paul Jean, was a prominent physician, and his mother, the former Odile Monod, was the daughter of a prominent Swiss banker. Mr. Godard credited his parents with instilling in him a love of literature, and he initially wanted to become a novelist.

Paul-Jean Godard, who became a Swiss citizen, opened a clinic in Nyon, Switzerland, and Jean-Luc spent his early childhood there, visiting his family’s estates on the French and Swiss sides of Lake Geneva and staying there until the end of World War II.

After the liberation of France, he returned to Paris, as a teenager, to attend high school, Lycée Buffon, and then entered the Sorbonne in 1949, aiming to study ethnology. Instead, he immersed himself in the cinema, spending most of his time in the Cinémathèque Française, then located on Avenue de Messine on the Right Bank, and in the cinema communities of the Latin Quarter.