Jean-Luc Godard, the man who revolutionized the New Wave of French cinema, has died by assisted suicide at 91, BBC News reports.
In a statement shared by his lawyer, the Franco-Swiss director chose to end his life after a long battle with "multiple invalidating illnesses".
His family said in a statement that Godard passed away at his property in the Swiss town of Rolle, on Lake Geneva, and revealed that he will be cremated and there will be no official ceremony.
The French paper Libération shared an unidentified source close to the family who said: "He was not sick, he was simply exhausted. So he had made the decision to end it. It was his decision and it was important for him that it be known."
Despite euthanasia being illegal in Switzerland, the practice of assisted dying - helping someone take their own life - is controlled in the country and allowed if proposed with the reason.
The legendary director began his career as a film critic before stepping behind the camera with his 1960's À bout de souffle (Breathless), starring the glamourous Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo.
The acclaimed film's script was semi-improvised, displaying Godard's sense of direction by his use of hand-held camerawork, and his swift and daring jump cuts.
According to the BBC, the director once said about the film: "It was a film that took everything that cinema had done - girls, gangsters, cars - exploded all this and put an end, once and for all, to the old style."
His rise to prominence as a pioneer of the 1960s French New Wave film movement, arguably being the most influential French filmmaker of the post-war era, influenced a generation of other directors from Martin Scorsese to Quentin Tarantino.
Tarantino named his production company A Band Apart, in reference to Godard's film Bande à Part. He also sang words of praise for the iconic director's impact on him in his field of work.
"Godard is one who taught me the fun and the freedom and the joy of breaking rules… I consider Godard to be to cinema what Bob Dylan was to music," the 59-year-old American filmmaker said.
In addition to this, Scorsese, 79, also named Godard's 1963 film Contempt, starring Brigitte Bardot, as one of his 10 favorite movies.
In a 2014 interview with Criterion, the Taxi Driver director wrote that the film was "one of the most moving films of its era" and that Godard was "the great modern visual artist of cinema".
The French President, Emmanuel Macron, took to Twitter after the announcement of Godard's passing and said that he "had the vision of a genius".
"He was like an apparition in French cinema. Then he became a master of it. Jean-Luc Godard, the most iconoclastic of New Wave filmmakers, invented a resolutely modern, intensely free art. We have lost a national treasure, a man who had the vision of a genius," he added.
According to Libération, Godard’s revealed his views on death during his 2014 appearance on Swiss TV at the Cannes festival.
The director shared that he would not want to continue living at any cost if he found himself in alarming straits, saying: "If I’m too ill, I don’t have any desire to be lugged around in a wheelbarrow ... not at all."
When he was asked whether he could envision choosing assisted dying, he replied: "yes", but added "for now", saying that the choice was "still very difficult".
Our thoughts are with Godard's family, friends, and fans at this time.
