What’s a movie or book that inspired you to travel?
The film that most directly inspired me to travel was François Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows). It drew me to Paris in the early 1990s, not simply as a tourist, but in search of Truffaut’s city.
I watched many of his films in small Parisian cinemas, in French, and then read his book on Alfred Hitchcock and The Letters of François Truffaut. Between them, these films and books supplied me with addresses scattered across Paris: cinemas, streets, homes and locations associated with Truffaut’s life and work. I visited them one by one, turning Paris into both a film set and a literary map.
It was travel inspired not merely by scenery, but by the desire to step inside another person’s imaginative world.
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