Robert Bresson

Bresson rejected professional performers, whom he called "actors," in favor of non-professionals he termed "models." He believed trained actors imposed artificial emotion on a scene, so he directed his models to deliver lines in a flat, stripped-down manner, as seen in films like "A Man Escaped" (1956) and "Pickpocket" (1959).

Yes, the 1956 film is based on the memoir of André Devigny, a French Resistance fighter who escaped from Fort Montluc, a Nazi prison in Lyon, during World War II. Bresson himself had been held as a prisoner of war by the Germans, which informed the film's obsessive attention to the physical details of escape.

Bresson's last completed film was "L'Argent" (1983), an adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's short story "The Forged Coupon." It traces the destructive path of a counterfeit banknote through multiple hands, ending in murder and imprisonment, and was awarded the Best Director prize at Cannes.

Bresson believed that added musical scoring manipulated the audience and undermined the spiritual power of image and sound. When he did use music, he integrated it as a diegetic element coming from a source within the scene—such as a radio or a character playing an instrument—rather than as an emotional overlay added in post-production.