![]() ![]() Karina’s mother had to come from Denmark to sign the contracts, since the actress was only nineteen and, according to French contract law, still a minor. Karina took the lead in Godard’s second film, Le Petit Soldat ( The Little Soldier), but not before asking him, as Brody reports in Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, “whether she would have to get undressed.” (“No,” Godard assured her “it’s a political film.”) Le Petit Soldat was the first of seven Godard films in which she would star, including some of his best known: A Woman Is a Woman, Band of Outsiders, and Pierrot le fou. ![]() You just saw a little bit of a shoulder, but I had a big bathing suit underneath.” (Karina had been in a bathtub, covered in bubbles.) “I wasn’t nude,” she told him. “But I saw you in a soap like that,” he said. Godard, according to Karina’s own account in Vogue earlier this year, protested. Because Belmondo grabs the cash while the woman is undressing, the part would have required Karina to, in Godard biographer Richard Brody’s delicate language, “bare her breasts.” Karina refused. Godard spotted Karina in an ad for soap, got her contact information, summoned her to his office, and offered her a small role in Breathless: the ex-girlfriend from whom the lead, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, steals money. ![]() Truffaut had just released The 400 Blows Godard, who had a few shorts to his name, was playing catch-up. Godard, ten years older, was a contributor to the influential film journal Cahiers du cinéma alongside other future auteurs of the French New Wave: Jacques Rivette, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol. Karina was Danish, a model, not yet twenty she’d hitchhiked to Paris at seventeen and learned French by going to the movies. The director was casting his debut feature, Breathless. The first time Jean-Luc Godard asked Anna Karina to take her clothes off, she refused. Jean Luc Godard and Anna Karina, Une Femme Est Une Femme (1961). ![]()
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