Jean-Luc Godard dead – Legendary film director who inspired Tarantino and Scorsese dies at 91
LEGENDARY film director Jean-Luc Godard who inspired Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorcese has died aged 91.
The news of his death was reported by the French newspaper Liberation citing people close to the Franco-Swiss director.
The cause of his death has not been revealed yet.
The moviemaker was best known for the films Breathless and Contempt which revolutionised cinema in the late 1950s and 60s.
Godard was a pioneer of the 1960s French New Wave film movement as his films broke conventions of French cinema and helped kickstart a new way of experimental filmmaking.
He used jump-cuts when filmmakers of the time traditionally preferred smooth editing, shot on location using hand-held cameras and wrote scripts on the day, giving actors their lines as he filmed.
"It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to," Godard once said.
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Godard was considered one of the world's most vital, provocative and radical directors.
He was born into a wealthy Franco-Swiss family on December 3, 1930, in Paris' plush Seventh Arrondissement.
His films propelled Jean-Paul Belmondo to stardom and his controversial modern nativity play Hail Mary grabbed headlines when Pope John Paul II denounced it in 1985.
Godard also worked with the Rolling Stones on the film Sympathy for the Devil in 1968.
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He was awarded an Academy Honorary Award in 2010 but did not attend the ceremony.
Quentin Tarantino is often cited as one of a more recent generation of boundary-bending directors that Godard and his Paris Left Bank cohorts initiated.
Tarantino was such a big fan of Godard's work, he even named his production company after one of his films, A Band Apart.
Martin Scorsese was also greatly influenced by Goddard and called Contempt "one of the most moving films of its era".
Goddard has been married twice, to actresses Anna Karina and Anne Wiazemsky.
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Both of them starred in several of his films.
The films with his first wife Anna, especially the critically-acclaimed 1964 Bande à part were cited as "the most influential body of work in the history of cinema".
