“I’m not coming back”: how François Truffaut made Callum Turner fire his therapist
The healing power of movies has been much underestimated over the years. Sure, you can pop a pill for most maladies these days, but have you ever just tried watching Dumb and Dumber instead? From bad moods to hangovers to being laid up with a broken leg, there’s a film genre to help with most things, but according to Callum Turner, they are definitely not a substitute for therapy.
Despite the fact that there have been many fine movies made with therapists in them, Analyze This, for example, or Good Will Hunting, or even Stutz with Jonah Hill, Turner had something of a bad experience when seeking some counselling as his two worlds merged, resulting in his abandoning the idea completely.
Turner is certainly an actor who has had to deal with a dizzying rise to prominence over the past ten years or so, going from fashion model to the world of Harry Potter with the Fantastic Beasts franchise, big-budget HBO fare with the Austin Butler-starring Masters of the Air, and some fantastic word-of-mouth hits like last year’s A24 weepy Eternity.
So perhaps it’s no wonder that he sought some professional help to cope with being thrust into the spotlight. Unfortunately for him, it didn’t go the way he planned, as he told GQ, explaining: “I had a therapist once – I went twice – and, because I liked films, he said, ‘Your childhood is like (Francois Truffaut classic) The 400 Blows.’”
Despite the fact that Turner is a complete film obsessive with an encyclopaedic knowledge of movies from esoteric directors like Agnès Varda and Luchino Visconti, he wasn’t impressed at all, however, stating: “I was like, ‘Right. I’m not coming back.’… You can’t give me a film reference when I’m after serious psychiatry. I’m not looking for a film buff. I can talk about that with myself.”
That would definitely appear to be the case, given the insight into his film collection that Turner has given previously, movies that include works by French master Robert Bresson, Elem Klimov’s searing Come With Me, and Federico Fellini’s La Strada.
In picking out Truffaut’s The 400 Blows from 1959, Turner has highlighted one of the finest coming of age movies of all time; the director spinning a semi-autobiographical tale of a rebellious young man trying to make sense of his life in Paris as he clashes with authority figures in a movie that can be seen as a European equivalent to James Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause.
It was an immediate success in Truffaut’s home country and further afield, bringing in $30million at the box office, an enormous amount for the time, and getting nominated for ‘Best Screenplay’ at the following year’s Academy Awards. One of the most important examples of the French New Wave movement that saw young directors casting off the shackles of established cinema rules and experimenting with new styles of editing, camera work and narratives, the movie regularly features in lists of the best films ever made.
Turner meanwhile, continues to be linked to becoming the next James Bond, but will definitely be starring in One Night Only with Monica Barbaro and Stranger Things’ Maya Hawke about a world where sex is illegal, apart from one night of the year, and a major new sci-fi series called Neuromancer, which will hit Apple TV late this year.
