10 Things I Learned: A Man Escaped
1.
Director Robert Bresson originally titled his screenplay Aide-toi . . ., a reference to the French expression “Aide-toi et le ciel t’aidera” (“Heaven helps those who help themselves”). He ultimately decided instead to use the title Devigny’s journalistic account of his story had run under in Le figaro: “Un condamné à mort s’est échappé.”
2.
Bresson and André Devigny, the real-life former prisoner of war on whose experiences A Man Escaped was based, had differing ideas of what type of actor should be cast in the role of Fontaine. Feeling that the character must look physically capable of making the escape, Devigny presented Bresson with a young paratrooper and military triathlete. Bresson, however, was interested in making a “very psychological, very internal” film, as Devigny puts it, and chose the philosophy student François Leterrier, who, though he didn’t resemble Devigny in build, had very expressive eyes.
3.
The film was shot both in a studio and on location at the prison Montluc, where Devigny had been imprisioned for five months during World War II. The shots composing the film’s escape scene alternate, cut by cut, between studio sets and the actual prison facade.
4.
Bresson had himself been a prisoner of war, captured by the Germans in the early part of World War II and sent to a labor camp, where he spent over a year and a half.
5.
The rope and hooks that Devigny had fashioned in his cell and used in his escape had been preserved at the prison, and Bresson referred to them for the film, showing Fontaine crafting a rope out of wire and strips of nylon just as Devigny had done.
6.
The fledgling filmmaker Louis Malle worked on this movie as an assistant. Years later, while editing his 1974 Lacombe, Lucien, Malle happened to watch A Man Escaped on television and recognized a striking similarity between the character of Jost in Bresson’s film and that of Lacombe in his own, as he recounts in a 1984 documentary. “It was sort of an unconscious homage to Bresson,” he says.
7.
Bresson put Malle in charge of Fontaine’s spoons, rope, hooks, and other escape implements, saying “Since you come from documentary, you take care of the props.”
8.
Bresson insisted on the entire film’s being shot with a 50 mm fixed focal length lens, in order to most closely mimic human eyesight.
9.
All of the dialogue in the film was rerecorded in a studio. Bresson would say the line to the actor, and he would repeat it back to him, usually no fewer than forty to sixty times. Then Bresson edited together the best take of each word to re-create the line of dialogue.
10.
The railway bridge that Fontaine and Jost cross at the film’s end is part of the actual route that Devigny took to freedom.
More: Production Notes
10 Things I Learned: Raging Bull
While working on our edition of Martin Scorsese’s 1980 masterpiece, producer Abbey Lustgarten found out how the director achieved some of the movie’s most evocative visual and sonic effects.
The Evolution of a “Superpig”: Designing Okja, from Start to Finish
Both intimidatingly massive and deeply sympathetic, the creature at the heart of Bong Joon Ho’s meat-industry fable is the product of a close collaboration between the director and artist Jang Hee Chul.
10 Things I Learned: Rouge
The producer of our edition of the masterful 1987 melodrama tells the stories of some of director Stanley Kwan’s legendary collaborators, including superstars Anita Mui and Leslie Cheung.
A Movie About Leaving Earth
On Earth Day, we celebrate Al Reinert’s For All Mankind, a groundbreaking documentary that is as much a reflection on our planet as it is a chronicle of space travel.