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.
