On a visit to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum the other day, the eighty-seven-year-old French director Claude Lelouch used the occasion to demonstrate his filmmaking technique. Moving through the small rooms of an apartment that looked much the same as it did in 1902, when it was occupied by a Jewish immigrant family, Lelouch put his iPhone on video mode and panned the interiors, zooming in on details that intrigued him—a wall calendar, a worktable covered with cutout dress pieces, battered linoleum on the kitchen floor. The tour had given him an idea for a new movie, he said later; the phone video was a visual note to self. But the footage could have been the real thing: Lelouch shot bits of his most recent picture, last year’s “Finalement,” on an iPhone. That’s a far easier lift than the 35-mm. film camera he shouldered sixty-some years ago as a young director who long served as his own cinematographer.

Lelouch was in town for the release of a restored version of “A Man and a Woman,” his most famous movie, which had just opened at Film Forum. Dressed for the day’s raw weather in a zippered wool jacket and a gray tweed cap, his look was less Oscar and Palme d’Or winner than outer-arrondissement working stiff. As the son of an Algerian Jew who settled in Paris in 1933, he was curious about the Jewish immigrant experience in the U.S. He continued his Lower East Side immersion at Russ & Daughters, where, over a plain bagel and smoked fish (and through a translator), he explained that he was literally born to cinema: his father, an early home-movie adopter, filmed his son’s birth, a ritual that wasn’t as much of a thing in 1937 as it is today. During the Nazi Occupation, when Lelouch and his mother were in the South of France and were hunted by the Gestapo (wartime circumstances had separated his parents), she would stash him in movie theatres during the day while she looked for new places to stay. “I was a rather turbulent child,” he recalled. “The only thing that would calm me down was cinema. So cinema became my nanny.” It also became his teacher. He made his first movie shortly after the Liberation, at the age of seven, when he filmed some classmates fighting. His dad’s camera was now his. He was hooked.

“A Man and a Woman,” starring Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant, was Lelouch’s seventh film. The year was 1966, and because he’d previously directed six “clumsy” movies that “hadn’t done very well,” his career was on the ropes. “It was our good luck not to have money” for a flashy wardrobe and elaborate sets, he said. “That allowed me to focus on the actors’ eyes. It’s the only part of the body that doesn’t lie.” The result was a love story told more through gazes than through dialogue—and a huge international hit that Pauline Kael memorably dubbed (not in these pages) “probably the most efficacious make-out movie of the swinging sixties.”

Fortune might have swung differently had Lelouch not decided, at the last minute, to change the final shot of the film. His screenplay had ended with Aimée’s widowed script girl returning to Paris from Deauville after a tryst gone sour with Trintignant’s widowed racecar driver. The last shot was meant to be Aimée getting off a train at the Gare Saint-Lazare and setting forth on her own—“a woman alone,” as Lelouch described what he hoped would be a resonant ending. Because of budget limitations, he had put Aimée on a train fifty kilometres outside Paris and then sped back to the city by car to film her stepping onto the platform, vérité style. Unbeknownst to Aimée, he had decided to bring Trintignant to greet her at the station, in character. Would the lovers make up? “I filmed everything like a journalist,” Lelouch said. “I told Jean, ‘Let’s see what happens. Maybe she’ll walk right by you. Maybe she’ll come to you. We’re going for the truth.’ ” The director’s luck held: Aimée leaped into her co-star’s arms, a swoony finale that surely boosted the movie’s box-office more than, say, a slap across Trintignant’s face.

Back to 2025: Lelouch said that he’s preparing “what will surely be my last film. I’m going to make it in a very different way. I’m going to shoot the first ten minutes, then I’m going to edit them, do the sound work. And if I like those ten minutes I’ll write and shoot the next ten minutes, twenty, thirty, and I’ll stop when I don’t like it anymore.” He has a notion of the film’s arc, “but maybe the story will take me elsewhere,” he said. “I want to give myself every possibility.” He expects to be ninety by the time he finishes—if he chooses to finish, that is. He added, “It’s a film about luck.” ♦