For British followers of European cinema, Kenneth Rive is a name etched on the subconscious. Though few would be able to put a face to it, they have probably seen it, followed by the word "presents", in front of innumerable foreign films since the late 1950s - predominantly French movies but also those of Ingmar Bergman, Luis Bunuel, Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa. As founder of Gala Film Distributors, Rive is one of the most influential figures in British cinema. Now in his 80s, Rive introduced many of these directors to British audiences and counted many of them as friends. Closest to Rive was François Truffaut, four of whose films he is re-issuing this week.

A signed photo of a smiling Truffaut has pride of place amid the tarnished Baftas, framed awards and elegant stationery in Rive's decidedly low-tech office in Islington, and Rive speaks of the man and his films with a mixture of adoration and pride. "Oh, he was a very dear friend," says Rive. "My beginnings as a distributor were really picking up him and the rest of the nouvelle vague. I handled all his films except two. Even the ones I didn't like."

Rive met Truffaut just after the shooting of his feature debut, The 400 Blows. "I saw a rough cut and it made a deep impression on me. It was the sort of film you don't walk out on. At the end you waited for the credits and you sat there for another 10 minutes, and then you got up." Rive snapped up distribution rights to the film, which went on to win Truffaut the best director award at Cannes in 1959 and became a landmark film of its era.

Truffaut was renowned for his contempt for "impecunious middlemen", but Rive was obviously spared this. He witnessed the director's more controversial activities, such as Truffaut's closing down of the Cannes film festival in 1968 (he was part of the protest that led to the setting up of directors fortnight at Cannes). But whatever confrontations they may have had are long forgotten. "People tend to think he was dark in his personality but... how can I describe him? He always looked to me as if he was enjoying life. When I first met him, he was really struggling, he was always short of money. He invited me up to his apartment round the corner from the Champs Elysées for a snack. It was a tiny little place, didn't even have a bathroom. But it had a terrace on top where he used to sit. You could look across and see the Eiffel Tower. I think it used to inspire him."

Their friendship blossomed with their careers. Truffaut's next film, Shoot the Pianist, performed only moderately; but 1961's Jules et Jim was a great success, playing in London for more than a year. At the same time, an unprecedented number of European film-makers were coming on to the scene, and Gala took on most of them: Alain Resnais, Claude Lelouch, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer and Marcel Pagnol. And, beyond France, Fellini's La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2, Vittorio De Sica's Two Women - which introduced Sophia Loren to this country - and the entire catalogue of Ingmar Bergman.

Since many of these directors' films ran into trouble with British censors, Rive met a lot of them. "I was very proud to have met Jean Cocteau when we were having trouble with a release of Les Enfants Terribles. I went to see him in Paris and when I got there I thought I had the wrong address. It was a dirty old staircase, there was a pram in the hall, and the smell of cats was overpowering. When I got to the top, there he was with Jean Marais, both of them with cats on their shoulders and cats running around everywhere. He had some skin infection he'd picked up from them. He was very persuasive but wildly eccentric.

"Bergman was always difficult too. He refused to make any cuts to his films. Tremendously talented guy, but always peculiar. He always said he'd come to the premiere of his films but he never did. At the last minute he'd always disappear. He had terrible trouble with his bowels, though - perhaps that's why. He was always being taken short somewhere."

Rive's purchases seem prescient in hindsight, but, he confesses, it was less a matter of strategy than a combination of good timing and lack of choice. The son of a cameraman, he had grown up with cinema. As a child star in the 1920s, he appeared in high-profile German films such as William Dieterle's Behind the Altar, and Rasputin, starring Conrad Veidt. After the war, he became a projectionist at a "fleapit" in Tottenham Court Road, which he later bought. As an aspiring film exhibitor in the 1950s, there were few alternatives to such a move, he says, since the circuit for British and American films was a virtual duopoly between ABC and Rank Corporation. The only other option was the foreign market, which was also dominated by other distributors. "So where could I start? I thought: 'Nobody's showing any Soviet films, and they must have a market somewhere.' So I popped along to their embassy and I spoke to an attaché and he asked if I wanted to go to Russia. So off I went." Rive came back from Moscow with three films (including a Russian ballet film called Gala Festival, from which the company took its name), plus a five-year contract for the exclusive distribution of Russian films.

This success enabled Rive to expand his cinema chain along with the distribution side, giving Gala the clout to bid for those other European classics. "British cinema? It didn't exist. They made crap movies really. So did the Americans, apart from the big blockbusters, and that's why we survived so well in those days. People wanted to see something a bit more intelligent. There was some cachet to subtitled films. If you hadn't seen the last Truffaut, you hadn't lived. But America and Britain started to make some very good movies again, more art films, and that was it. People got fed up with subtitles."

Gala has still had successes since the 1960s, such as Claude Berri's Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources, Truffaut's The Last Metro, Kieslowski's Short Films About Killing and Love, and Erick Zonca's The Dream Life of Angels. But the golden age is over. Today, multiplexes, a dwindling art-house circuit, higher overheads and shorter cinema runs have made life hard for distributors of foreign films. And when a popular foreign film does come along, the independents are often outgunned by American companies. "If I'd had the money, I'd have snapped up Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," Rive says. "But we're just not big enough. We were in negotiations, but in the end it was too expensive. Columbia was big enough to take it on, and voila! - today's top foreign film in the UK."

Of course, with so many classics in Gala's back catalogue, Rive's future is by no means bleak. "I'm a great believer in DVD," he says. "There'll always be the first run in the big cities, but for the wider audience DVD and video are the only way they're going to get to see these films. But one way or another, people will always want to see them."

• The Truffaut tribute is at the Curzon Soho, London W1 (020-7734 2255), today and tomorrow.