Fahrenheit 451 (1966) on Netflix
In a future state, firemen burn every book they find and Guy Montag is one of them. His neighbor Clarisse, a school teacher, asks whether he has ever read what he burns.
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Trailer
Plot summary
A totalitarian government outlaws literature and sends out a force called the Firemen to destroy every book they can find, with the right to search anyone, at any hour. Guy Montag is one of them. His neighbor Clarisse, a young school teacher whose unorthodox views may already have put her on the government's radar, asks him whether he ever reads what he burns. Curious, he starts hiding books at home and reading them, beginning with Charles Dickens's David Copperfield. His wife Linda has no patience for it; she wants only to be popular enough to join The Family, an interactive television program that calls its viewers cousins.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Fahrenheit 451 (1966)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Charles Aznavour said he was François Truffaut's first choice to play Guy Montag, with Jean-Paul Belmondo second, but the producers refused both men because they were not familiar enough to English-speaking audiences; Oskar Werner got the part.
- The part of Clarisse was offered to Jean Seberg and Jane Fonda before Julie Christie played her; Truffaut cast Christie as both Clarisse and Linda after deciding the two women were two sides of the same coin, an idea that came from producer Lewis M. Allen.
- François Truffaut kept a diary during the shoot and called Fahrenheit 451 his "saddest and most difficult" film-making experience, mainly because of intense conflicts between him and his star Oskar Werner.
- The production was run in French because Truffaut spoke virtually no English, and he co-wrote the screenplay with Jean-Louis Richard; he disliked the stilted English dialogue and preferred the film's French-dubbed version.
- Ray Bradbury recommended Bernard Herrmann for the score; asked why he chose Herrmann over Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, Truffaut replied, "They'll give me music of the twentieth century but you'll give me music of the twenty first!"
SPOILER
The closing scene, in which the Book People recite the books they have memorized, was shot at Black Park near Pinewood during a rare, unexpected snowstorm that fell on Julie Christie's birthday, 14 April 1966.- Fahrenheit 451 was François Truffaut's first color film and the only film he made in a language other than French.
