The best movie about the making of a movie: Day for Night

Francois Truffaut's Day for Night (1973) is probably the best of all movies about the making of a movie; no other film gives as great a sense of what it's like to direct a film and of the complex internal dramas that take place throughout the process of a shoot. Of course there are exaggerations and extremely eccentric behavior, but it's like a compendium of all that can go wrong on a shoot - and of how every aspect of the process connects to the director. We see not only the interplay of often narcissistic and insecure people but also the culture of the staff and crew and even the extras - so much controlled chaos that we wonder how any film is ever completed. Yet we also see how hard they all work, how difficult it is or can be to stage a simple scene, the constant rewriting and revising to make the script better and the demand this puts on the actors and crew, the incredibly scary work of the a stuntman and of the camera crew on a crane, the monumental task of dealing with extras on a complex street scene. And then - to recognize, of course, that all the complexity we're seeing takes place not only in the movie being filmed (Meet Pamela) but also on the film we're watching (Day for Night); there's a movie outside the frame as well as within the frame, so to speak. Of course this is not a documentary; there are many story lines and some terrific long takes, notably the famous opening shot and the long series of takes in which one of the stars, drinking heavily, screws up each time - at first this is comic, soon it's nearly tragic. This might recall for some the recent film about that showed what it's like to be a working actor, Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood. The movie it most reminds me of, however, is the great Rules of the Game - many interwoven plot strands, much interplay between the luminaries and the workers, collision of social classes and social forces, face mixed with tragedy - so I was not surprised when one of the characters name-checks the Renoir film. Like Rules, Day for Night is totally engrossing - look, if you're even thinking about watching a Truffaut film you're probably interested in how a movie is made - funny and sad, especially in that it was probably his last great film - a fitting capstone.