Stylish and experimental, Breathless heralded a new era of film-making when it was released 65 years ago. In 1964, its director told the BBC why he broke every rule he could.

Jean-Luc Godard was crystal clear about what he planned to do with his feature-length film debut, Breathless (À bout de souffle), which was released 65 years ago this month. He wanted to blow up the whole idea of what cinema was. In 1964, the director told the BBC's Olivier Todd: "It was a film which took everything the cinema had done – girls, gangsters, cars – exploded all this and put an end once and for all to the old style."

Stylish and semi-improvised, Breathless seemed revolutionary when it hit French screens on 16 March 1960. With its fragmented editing, offbeat dialogue and nonchalant approach to storytelling, it helped rewrite the language of modern cinema. As renowned US film critic Roger Ebert wrote: "No debut film since Citizen Kane in 1942 has been as influential."

On its surface, Breathless's plot resembles that of a hard-boiled crime thriller. It tells the story of amoral, impulsive petty criminal Michel Poiccard (played by Jean-Paul Belmondo) and his doomed relationship with the enigmatic Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), an American journalism student living in Paris. The film's plot plays out as Michel tries to evade arrest after murdering a policeman: he struggles to collect the money necessary to fund his escape and to convince the ambivalent Patricia to flee with him to Italy. But its director was not so much concerned with its crime narrative as he was with shattering cinematic conventions.

Born in 1930 to wealthy Franco-Swiss parents, Godard had spent the decade preceding Breathless's release immersed in cinema. At the beginning of the 1950s he had begun working as a film critic for the influential French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. When he started, French cinema was dominated by studio-produced literary adaptations which valued polished storytelling over innovation. Godard, along with his fellow cinephiles at the magazine, railed against these films, arguing that they failed to capture any real emotion or show how people really behaved.

At the same time, US films that had been banned during the Nazi occupation were being shown in French cinemas. Following the Second World War, France had signed the Blum-Byrnes agreements which had opened up its markets to US products in return for eradicating its war debt. This led to a flood of US films that were enthusiastically embraced by these young French critics. They especially admired westerns and detective thrillers – genres they regarded as critically underappreciated. It was Italian-born French film critic Nino Frank who coined the term film noir or dark film. The Cahiers du Cinéma writers also revered film-makers who could stamp their own unique creative visions onto Hollywood productions, such as Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks. They regarded these directors as the true "auteurs" or authors of those films, rather than the studio which produced them or the stars who appeared in them.

Throughout the 1950s, these critics would debate and discuss the shortcomings of French cinema while developing their own ideas of what it should be. Many of the writers Godard worked alongside at Cahiers du Cinéma, such as François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol, would also end up becoming directors and leading proponents of the influential movement that would become known as La Nouvelle Vague (The New Wave).

With Breathless, Godard saw his chance to put the ideas he and his friends discussed into practice. He explained to the BBC in 1964 that he purposely set out to break rules he felt were holding back cinema. "Conventions were exploded to make something with the remains, just as the debris is collected after an explosion. And when there is nothing useful left, we can start from scratch on fresh ground," he said.

The film's story was written by Truffaut, who based it loosely on a 1952 news article about a Paris criminal, Michel Portail. However, when Godard came to filming, he would pretty much abandon Truffaut's script. Instead, he got his actors to improvise scenes, or he would feed them lines from behind the camera while filming. This gave the dialogue a spontaneous and personal feel. But it meant that much of Breathless needed to be shot sequentially, so Belmondo and Seberg would know what had happened earlier in the story.

Due to its limited budget, Godard's plan was to make the cheapest film possible. So instead of shooting in a studio where he would be able to control the lighting, the sound and the set, he took to the streets of Paris with his cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, who filmed on location........

© BBC