“If you do it long enough, I always thought you can make one film about making films. This is mine,” said Richard Linklater at the Cannes press conference for his latest film Nouvelle Vague, a love letter to French New Wave.
Nouvelle Vague tells the story of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. Shot on film in the 4:3 aspect ratio and told entirely in French, it stars Guillaume Marbeck as Godard, Zoey Deutch as Godard’s star Jean Seberg, and Aubry Dullin as Jean-Paul Belmondo. Breathless, considered on of seminal film of the Frenc New Wave, follows Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a small-time criminal on the run after killing a policeman, and his romantic entanglement with Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), an American journalism student in Paris.
“Ten years ago, when we were thinking about this movie, I was thinking they’ll hate that an American director did it,” said Linklater of making a movie about the cornerstone of French cinema as a filmmaker from Austin, Texas. “We will never show this film in France. We will show it all over the world but never in France.” On Saturday night, the film received a 10-minute standing ovation at its premiere, one of the most electric of the fest thus far.
Linklater is best known for his walk-and-talk Before trilogy, titles like Dazed and Confused and Boyhood, and for his naturalistic filmmaking. Linklater, who was previously at the fest with 2006 sci-fi thriller A Scanner Darkly, said of what Breathless meant to him, as a filmmaker, that “It represented freedom and the notion of the personal film.”
The director added: “I felt like I was 28 years-old making this film. I had to erase my experience and get back to my first film mentality. [Making this movie] was like going back in time.”
“If Nouvelle Vague is not exactly Breathless, it’s a loving homage to the crazy way Breathless was made — back when you could shoot movies fast, cheap and out of control, and somehow change cinema in the process,” reads The Hollywood Reporter review of the film.
When asked about the tariffs that U.S. President Donald Trump has threatened for films “made in foreign lands,” which have been discussed heavily at the Cannes film market, Linklater dismissed the possibility of anything coming to fruition. “That’s not going to happen, right?” he said. ”That guy changes his mind like 50 times day.”
Deutch added that she would like to see filming come back to Los Angeles. ”It would be nice to make more movies in Los Angeles with the history and the studios and the culture,” said Deutch, adding she had just completed a movie in the city, calling the experience “magical.”
Linklater, who filmed Nouvelle Vague in France with French producers, added: “I really admire the French film industry in the way they are so focused and take care of their industry. They make sure it’s healthy, and they nurture it. And our country, the U.S., could use a little bit of that.”
