It’s rare for a filmmaker to have two films out at the same time, especially one of the prestige of Richard Linklater, and especially two that took him so far out of his literal comfort zone. Both Blue Moon and Nouvelle Vague (which premieres on Netflix this Friday) were filmed outside of the U.S., in Ireland and France respectively.
Both films are portraits of a seminal moment in art. In Blue Moon, Ethan Hawke plays Lorenz Hart, one of the greatest lyricists of the 20th century, on the night his creative partnership with composer Richard Rodgers finally collapses. Nouvelle Vague, by contrast, is about beginnings, as critic-turned-filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) prepares to redefine cinema through his debut feature, Breathless. Linklater said, “There’s kind of a trilogy, together with Me and Orson Welles: two beginnings and an end of significant 20th century artists.”
However, his latest films also mark a new era for Linklater. They both represent a new comfort with formalism that marks a late career development for a filmmaker best known for a free and easy style. A new gear, even.
“A new gear?” Linklater laughs. “I’ll take it.”
Austin Chronicle: Do you have to remember what film you’re talking about on any one day?
Richard Linklater: No, I’ve been amazingly compartmentalized and able to do this.
Austin Chronicle: It’s interesting. You make two films out of the country and one of them is your first foreign language film. When did you make the decision: ‘OK, this has to be in French, and I have to work out how to direct in French.’
Richard Linklater: Thirteen years ago, when I first read what [scriptwriters Holly Gent and Vincent Palmo Jr.] were writing, the early drafts of this script that they had shown me, I just saw the whole finished film. It looked like the films I fell in love with from the Nouvelle Vague. They were black and white, 1.37 aspect ratio, French obviously with English subtitles. It looked like one of those films, and I never really questioned it from then on. I don’t know if I communicated it very well as we got close to production. I’d be telling people and they’d go ‘Oh, really? I didn’t know that.’ ‘Oh, yeah.’ You get these little impulses early and you tend to stick with them, the vibe of the movie, the texture.
Austin Chronicle: So how good is your French? Or rather, how good was your French when you started this?
Richard Linklater: Pretty nonexistent. I don’t really have a facility much with foreign languages. I don’t know, maybe it’s the Texan in me.
But that was the least of my worries. Honestly, this sounds insane but I was making an English-subtitled movie. We had the script, everything was in English, we had it translated to French by my producer, Michèle [Pétin], So there were two productions going on at the same time but in a visual medium. I just wanted it to feel the way the Nouvelle Vague films felt. It will be subtitled but with the sound of French. To me, it was almost like a score, the language, how it sounded.
I did care a lot about the French performances. We really rehearsed a lot, the same way I would normally do it. I put it through the same process: We’d rehearse in English, and then kick it all to French. Refining dialogue, getting the right words right for the time period – that was Michèle and [Camille Arpajou], my script supervisor, dialing in the final little things.
In France they really like the French performances, so I give the credit there to my rehearsal atmospheric, rather than parsing every syllable of an actor. So I think that proves what gives a believable performance.
Austin Chronicle: You do something very unnatural to allow the rest of the film to be natural, which is the actor looking to camera, character name underneath. It’s such a cinematic conceit, but it means that at no point does anybody go ‘Oh, look, Claude Chabrol!’ There’s none of that.
Richard Linklater: I really didn’t know how to handle that. I had this idea in pre-production. ‘Is it going to be a little guessing game? You know four or five, but is that Jean Cocteau?’ I didn’t really want it to be that. And it gave them all their due, and it runs the gamut – you have Jean Cocteau and you have José Bénazéraf, who’s the sleazy car dealer in Breathless who’s Godard’s friend who’s kind of a porn merchant. For this moment, they’re all alive in our space. They’re all treated equal. They all get their little title card. And I thought it was kind of a Nouvelle Vague notion to look right at the camera, so we started doing these things while we’re shooting, and introduce them just before their first scene, not all up front. It seemed like a Nouvelle Vague idea. What would Rivette do? What would Godard do?
Austin Chronicle: You look at the French New Wave, and there are the unifying elements, but there are distinctive elements of style that set Rohmer apart from Chabrol or Truffaut. So as you’re looking at that and asking what’s the general feel, and what are things that you’re going, ‘I like it but that’s specific to one person that it doesn’t feel organic’?
Richard Linklater: We lump these things together but they should be no more lumped in than anything or anybody else at any other time. To me, they’re all joined by geography – they’re all in Paris at this time – and I think they’re joined by the film stocks of that time and what the films look like at their budget range. But you get very different artists, ultimately, and they’re truly friends. This movie concentrates mostly on the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd, but not far away on the Left Bank you have Demy, Varda, Chris Marker, Resnais. You have all those guys and their films are very distinct too – some more political, more heady. Last Year at Marienbad is very different to 400 Blows, but they’re all of a time, so that’s what we’re really celebrating here.
Some were friends for life, but they drifted and had their little spats and conflicts. Maybe it’s frustrating when you realize, ‘Oh, we’re not all the same.’ You shouldn’t be the same. Nobody’s the same, especially Godard, who was the most unlike anybody else, but he’s the most personally critical too. He remained a critic to the end. He rubbed people the wrong way. He said things friends wouldn’t say in public. He couldn’t help it, whatever his neurodivergences are.
Austin Chronicle: You get the feeling that, early in his career, Godard is a character that Jean-Luc Godard puts on. There’s a distance. The constant shades. The wild coolness of the man. So when you’re doing a film that’s a portrait of a time and a portrait of a man, and there is this façade he puts there, how do you approach that?
Richard Linklater: I think it is a portrait. There’s a reason we spend that time with [photographer Raymond Cauchetier] taking the photos of everyone. You’re seeing the iconography being built, and you even see when [filmmaker Richard Balducci] comes in with the idea, ‘Hey, I’m going to leak a story that you robbed a garage at gunpoint,’ and Godard kinda likes that.
He’s aware of his self-image and he’s hiding behind that. We’re seeing him create the persona as we go. He always spoke in these inverted rhymes, and his brain was so unusual, but I think there’s probably a shyness there.
You see a lot of musicians adopt a character before they’re gonna be a public persona, but it’s not them, whether that’s changing your name or dressing outrageously. I think Godard found his little thing, and he looks better with those shades. You see him without those glasses, and there are a few pictures of him, he looks a little strange. His face was kind of angular, and the shades kind of round him out. I think he looked in the mirror and went, ‘These shades make me cooler.’ And those shades were prescription, too, by the way. He needed glasses, so I think he just went with those.
Austin Chronicle: ‘How cool can I look?’
Richard Linklater: Why not? It’s the jazz age. It was kind of a shades era.
Austin Chronicle: It’s also rare that you have a director who realizes they have to be a personality in that way.
Richard Linklater: I know. And at that point too, there really weren’t famous film directors. In cinephile circles, they knew who they were but no one knew what Howard Hawks looked like. The only famous one was Alfred Hitchcock, and that was by the late Fifties, Sixties, when he had his TV show. I grew up not knowing what a filmmaker was.
I think [the Nouvelle Vague directors], they were making a row. They’re making a big deal out of filmmaking, and they were making a new kind of film. You look at the Nouvelle Vague and they look pretty cool behind the camera. … It was unique. The people behind the camera looked almost as cool as the people in front of the camera.
Austin Chronicle: I think in part with the Cahiers crew, they lived in a world of journalism and photojournalism. They know, OK, we need the shot.
Richard Linklater: Yeah, and they documented the process through those Cauchetier photos. Part of why those things are so iconic is that they had those really great photos from those films. Those exist along with the films now and really capture the time and place. They’re beautiful and say a lot. A totally unique little time.
And the Nouvelle Vague was famous, too. It was probably the closest cinema came to punk rock. There were these new artists doing something completely new, in opposition to what came before. In fact, they were very reverent of what came before, especially from other countries. They didn’t like the status quo of their own country, but they still revered people like Melville and Bresson.
Austin Chronicle: And you have these set visits. You have Godard saying, ‘We’re going to throw the establishment out’ in the same way the Left Bank philosophers have upturned our view of society. But at the same time he’s doing these set visits where he’s visiting the previous generation of filmmakers and he’s going to ask their advice.
Richard Linklater: You visit Melville and he has a long dolly track, he has a big old Mitchell camera, he had a big crew. Godard’s going to do none of that, and yet he’s looking for some inspiration. He has Rossellini in his ear. You know, Melville was watching his dailies. It’s amazing for a first film to have these people as your advisers, and to run into Bresson on the street, making Pickpocket. It just says a lot about the time and the place, why that is such a special moment.
Austin Chronicle: There’s been this thing of going, well, there are similarities between you and Godard because of Slacker, which was your second film …
Richard Linklater: Or 22nd. I’d made a ton of shorts, but as Godard said, ‘Shorts are anti-cinema.’ Yeah, second film, but first where I was working with other people. It had a crew staring at me, wondering what’s next, and that’s the frightening moment. And I did have a script that was hard to explain to everyone, didn’t make a lot of sense on paper, wasn’t a conventional script. It was trying to do something completely different. So, yeah, I could relate, but I was just trying to capture the exhilaration of making a first film – the terror and the exhilaration.
Austin Chronicle: But your cases are very different, because he’s still working within the established system, and you’re in the middle of nowhere. He’s in Paris, he can call on Melville, he’s got pretty conventional funding …
Richard Linklater: … Within the French industry, which is really remarkable. That little note we’ve got at the end, that 162 filmmakers made their first film, and by today’s standards that’s not that much because now there’s thousands of filmmakers every year make their first film, but back then within the established industry, the industry is greenlighting these films and giving them support. That’s the amazing number and says a lot about the time.
The good news is that he’s got the support of the industry. The bad news is that he’s got [producer Georges de Beauregard] on his set, questioning everything he’s doing. Whereas American independents don’t have that. You’re on your own, and you’re your own boss. So that’s even less conflict, more freedom, but they’re in the industry already. We’re all fighting for anything we can get.
Austin Chronicle: It’s the old rule of budget versus control.
Richard Linklater: It makes it a good example of art and commerce and methodology. I just stick with Godard: If you want to do something different, it’s OK to do it differently. That’s one of the things you have to break out of as much as you can.
Austin Chronicle: You mentioned these films with Me and Orson Welles as kind of a trilogy. You made that film when you were a lot younger, and now you’ve made these two films – one about the functional end of someone’s creative career, one about the very beginning. We’ve all got a few more years on the tires, so it seems like these would have been very different films if you’d made them 20 years ago.
Richard Linklater: Oh, I couldn’t have. I wouldn’t have. Both films don’t work on paper, and even [Blue Moon scriptwriter] Robert Kaplow said, as he sent me his first draft, ‘What is this?’ I said, ‘Well, I think that’s a movie.’ He says, ‘You’re the only person who would think that’s a movie. It’s one room.’ I go, ‘No, it’s very cinematic. Sardi’s is a big place. We can get around.’ I never thought of the constraints of it, I thought of the possibilities of it. It feels how life feels. You’re in a room for one night with all these people, you’re near this amazing guy who’s slightly off-putting and edgy, but 30 years from now you’ll be saying, ‘Hey, I sat next to Larry Hart one night.’ You would remember it.
The same with Nouvelle Vague. It would have been pretty daunting, making a French language film, the language barrier, but I was pretty confident. ‘No. The language will be a plus. It won’t mean anything.’
I think you just get a little more confidence of what you can pull off. Godard, in his movies, is sitting on a lot of insecurities. He’s masking it in various ways. I did feel like I was 28, 29 again, making the first film, but I was actually sitting on decades experience to think, ‘OK, I can work my way out of every jam. I can figure it out.’ It’s a more joyful process.
Nouvelle Vague is in theatres now and arrives on Netflix on Nov. 14. Read our review here.