François Truffaut once ordered a hitchhiker out of his car for admitting he did not care for movies. That uncompromising devotion to cinema began in a miserable Paris childhood: born to an unmarried mother in 1932 and hidden from society, he lost his beloved grandmother at eight, was shunted into a frigid home with his mother and stepfather, and escaped by sneaking into movie theaters, setting himself a curriculum of three films a day and three books a week. This episode traces how a juvenile delinquent rescued from military prison by critic André Bazin became the most feared critic in France, was banned from the Cannes Film Festival, and then won its top directing prize a year later with his fiercely autobiographical 1959 debut.

Along the way we explore the auteur theory he championed, the birth of the French New Wave, his disastrous English-language adaptation of a dystopian novel about burning books, the 20-page letter that ended his friendship with Jean-Luc Godard, and the Antoine Doinel cycle that let actor Jean-Pierre Léaud age on screen over two decades. We close with his death from a brain tumor at 52, and the lifelong atheist’s surprising request for a grand Catholic requiem mass as one final act of directing.

• How Truffaut hired a private investigator and discovered his biological father was a Jewish dentist
• Why André Bazin pulled him out of military prison and handed him a pen at a new film magazine
• The 1959 debut shot on the streets of Paris with natural light that launched the French New Wave
• His famous argument that film glorifies whatever it shows, making a true anti-war movie impossible
• The blurred lines between his leading actresses, his romantic life, and his films