Godard wanted to hire the American actress Jean Seberg, who was living in Paris with her husband François Moreuil, a lawyer, to play the American woman. Seberg had become famous in 1956 when Otto Preminger had chosen her to play Joan of Arc in his "Saint Joan", and had then cast her in his acidulous 1958 adaptation of "Bonjour Tristesse". Her performance in this film had not been generally regarded as a success—"The New York Times"s critic called her a "misplaced amateur"—but Truffaut and Godard disagreed. In the role of Michel Poiccard, Godard cast Belmondo, an actor he had already called, writing in "Arts" in 1958, "the Michel Simon and the Jules Berry of tomorrow." The cameraman was Raoul Coutard, choice of the producer Beauregard. Godard wanted "Breathless" to be shot like a documentary, with a lightweight handheld camera and a minimum of added lighting; Coutard had had experience as a documentary cameraman whilst working for the French army's information service in Indochina during the French-Indochina War. Tracking shots were filmed by Coutard from a wheelchair pushed by Godard. Though Godard had prepared a traditional screenplay, he dispensed with it and wrote the dialogue day by day as the production went ahead. The film's importance was recognized immediately, and in January 1960 Godard won the Jean Vigo Prize, awarded "to encourage an auteur of the future". One reviewer mentioned Alexandre Astruc's prophecy of the age of the "caméra-stylo", the camera that a new generation would use with the efficacy with which a writer uses his pen—"here is in fact the first work authentically written with a "caméra-stylo".