Bonjour Tristesse is a truly international production; an American screenwriter's adaptation of a popular French novel, filmed on location in the Riviera with a cast featuring two British actors (David Niven and Deborah Kerr) and an American (Jean Seberg), by a director born in Austria.
The film is based on the internationally-popular novel of the same name by Françoise Sagan, who was 18 when the book was released. The story is about a playboy and his daughter spending a decadent summer on the French Riviera, until a friend of the family arrives and attempts to reign in their behavior, with disastrous results.
The director is Otto Preminger, who came to Hollywood in the mid 30's, and after a tumultuous decade which saw him out of work for long stretches, scored a major triumph with the romantic mystery Laura. He worked on various thrillers and period pieces until he struck out on his own in the early 1950's, becoming the first big studio director to achieve independence producing his own films.
With this newly-found freedom, Preminger took on controversial subjects and persevered through numerous clashes with various censors , the ratings board, even the Catholic Church. His tenacity resulted in breaking taboos on drug addiction, adultery, rape, and homosexuality. He was also instrumental in ending the Hollywood blacklisting of Communist artists, by giving Dalton Trumbo (who had been writing under fake names and "fronts" for over ten years) full screen credit for his screenplay on the 1960 film Exodus.
Bonjour Tristesse was the second film Preminger made with Seberg, whom the director had discovered in an audition pool of over 10,000 actresses for his previous film Saint Joan, an adaptation of the George Bernard Shaw play about Joan of Arc. The reviews were terrible for the film and for Seberg, yet Preminger blamed himself and brought the young actress back for a second try. While Tristesse was moderately successful at the time (moreso in Europe), with the reevaluation of Preminger's career it is now regarded as one of his best films. Seberg's performance was notable enough that it inspired French film critic-turned-director Jean-Luc Godard to cast her in his iconic first film Breathless, and even claimed that her character was a "three years later" update of the one in Preminger's film.
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