and the film was made on the streets instead. Truffaut filled the film with homages to such American directors as Nicholas Ray and Sam Fuller. During the shooting Truffaut realized that he didn't like gangsters and tried to make their character more and more comical. Pierre Braunberger initially didn't like Boby Lapointe's songs and said that he couldn't understand what Lapointe was saying. This inspired Truffaut to add subtitles with a bouncing ball. Filming style The film's script changed constantly during shooting. Truffaut said that "In Shoot the Piano Player I wanted to break with the linear narrative and make a film where all the scenes would please me. I shot without any criteria." Truffaut's stylized and self-reflexive melodrama employs the hallmarks of French New Wave cinema: extended voice-overs, out-of-sequence shots, and sudden jump cuts. The film's cinematography by Raoul Coutard was often grainy and kinetic, reflecting the emotional state of the characters, such as the scene in which Charlie hesitates before ringing a doorbell. Among the film references in Shoot the Piano Player are nods to Hollywood B movies from the 1940s, the iris technique from silent films, Charlie being named after Charlie Chaplin, and having three brothers (including one named Chico) as a reference to the Marx Brothers. Moreover, the film's structure and flashbacks resemble the structure of Citizen Kane. Truffaut later stated, "In spite of the burlesque idea to certain scenes, it's never a parody (because I detest parody, except when it begins to rival the beauty of what it is parodying). For me it's something very precise that I would call a respectful pastiche of the Hollywood B films from which I learned so much." This was also Truffaut's first film to include a murder, which would become a plot point in many of his films and was influenced by Truffaut's admiration of Alfred Hitchcock. Truffaut stated that the theme of the film is "love and the relations between men and women" and later claimed that "the idea behind Le Pianiste was to make a film without a subject, to express all I wanted to say about glory, success, downfall, failure, women and love by means of a detective story. It's a grab bag." Like The 400 Blows, Shoot the Piano Player was shot in Dyaliscope, a widescreen process which Truffaut described as being like an aquarium that allows the actors to move around the frame