previously referred as her brother. Ferdinand shoots Marianne and Fred, then paints his face blue and decides to blow himself up by tying sticks of red and yellow dynamite to his head. He regrets this at the last second and tries to extinguish the fuse, but he fails and is blown up. Cast Jean-Paul Belmondo as Ferdinand Griffon, a.k.a. "Pierrot" Anna Karina as Marianne Renoir Graziella Galvani as Maria Griffon Dirk Sanders as Fred Jimmy Karoubi as Dwarf Roger Dutoit as Gangster #1 Hans Meyer as Gangster #2 Samuel Fuller as Himself Princesse Aïcha Abadie as Herself Alexis Poliakoff as Saylor Raymond Devos as Man of the port László Szabó as Lazlo Kovacs, Political exile Jean-Pierre Léaud as Young Man in Movie Theatre Georges Staquet as Staquet Henri Attal as Gas station attendant #1 Dominique Zardi as Gas station attendant #2 Viviane Blassel Production Conception and casting In February 1964, while filming Bande à part, Godard announced that he had plans to adapt Lionel White's recent crime novel Obsession, which he described as “the story of a guy who leaves his family to follow a girl much younger than he is. She is in cahoots with slightly shady people, and it leads to a series of adventures.” Godard told France-Soir that whomever he would cast as the female lead depended on who he cast as the male lead. Had he cast Richard Burton, his first choice, he would have cast his wife Anna Karina alongside him and shoot the film in English to accommodate Burton. Otherwise, if he cast his second choice, Michel Piccoli, he would cast "a very young girl" such as Sylvie Vartan in the role, fearing that Piccoli and Karina would form too "normal" a couple on screen. Vartan and Piccoli proved unavailable, so Godard cast Jean-Paul Belmondo in the role of Ferdinand. The casting of Belmondo made financing for the film easier to obtain due to his star status after his role in Godard's Breathless (1960). In September 1964, at the New York Film Festival, Godard announced that Karina would star as Marianne alongside Belmondo. Godard later remarked to Cahiers du Cinéma that casting Belmondo and Karina ultimately changed the tone of the film, as "instead of the Lolita or La chienne kind of couple" that he originally envisioned, he now "wanted to tell the story of the last romantic couple, the last descendants of La