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Writing about movies and making them can look like separate trades. The first judges finished work from the outside, and the second has to solve problems no review ever mentions. Still, plenty of celebrated filmmakers began at a typewriter before they picked up a camera.
Some of them treated criticism as a rehearsal for directing. Others used it to argue for a kind of cinema that didn’t exist yet. Here are seven who made that jump.
François Truffaut
Truffaut built his reputation as a critic at Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s, and he was known for a sharp, combative pen. His 1954 essay attacking the habits of mainstream French filmmaking is still cited as a manifesto for the movement that followed. He spent years reviewing films he often disliked before he made one himself.
His debut feature, The 400 Blows, came out in 1959 and won him the Best Director prize at Cannes. Its semi-autobiographical story of a neglected Parisian schoolboy showed the personal, loosely structured style he had argued for in print. He kept writing about film throughout his career, and his long interview book with Alfred Hitchcock remains a standard text for movie fans.
Jean-Luc Godard
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Godard also wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s, sometimes under a pseudonym. His criticism was playful and restless, and it hinted at the rule breaking to…
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Author : Matthias Binder
Publish date : 2026-10-09 08:01:00
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