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As Richard Linklater basked in a rapturous ovation following the Cannes premiere of “Nouvelle Vague,” his look at Jean-Luc Godard and a movement in French cinema that changed the course of film history, it was impossible not to be reminded of the indie revolution he had played a vital role in three decades ago. It helped, of course, that the biggest rebel in that group of backlot iconoclasts, Quentin Tarantino, was standing just in front of him, leading the cheering.
“I’ve known Tarantino, like for 30 years or whatever. He’s one of my oldest film buddies, so to have him there was cool,” Linklater said the afternoon after “Nouvelle Vague” took Cannes by storm, earning some of the festival’s best reviews.
The film follows Godard as he bluffs his way through the making of “Breathless,” the crime classic that gave the New Wave an irresistible dash of cool with its handheld camera work and jump cuts. It was Godard’s directorial debut, and that made Linklater, who is meeting me at the rooftop restaurant of a hotel a few blocks from the Palais, think about his own first major work, 1990’s “Slacker.”
“I told Quentin last night that I felt like I was 28 years old making this film,” Linklater says. “I remember on ‘Slacker,’ I felt the pressure of, yeah, everybody’s looking at you like you don’t know what you’re doing. And you’re full of confidence and cinematic ideas and revolution, and then the real world is around you kind of going: ‘Oh yeah? So, what now?’ It’s an exhilarating, but fraught mindset.”
Godard and his contemporaries François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Agnès Varda, Éric Rohmer and others felt they were riding a tide of change, taking the kinds of movies that had come before them and scrambling them into something vital and new. The same thing was happening when Linklater came of age and other mavericks like Tarantino (“Pulp Fiction”), Steven Soderbergh (“Sex, Lies, and Videotape”), Paul Thomas Anderson (“Boogie Nights”) and Gus van Sant (“My Own Private Idaho”) were upending conventions and playing with form in innovative ways.
“I remember having discussions with various filmmakers like, ‘something new in the air,’ and it was culturally — you know, music, literature,” he says.
But Linklater isn’t so sure that the revolution that he and Tarantino were part of, one that saw the boundaries between the arthouse and the mainstream weaken, then collapse entirely in the 1990s, is even possible today.
“It still happens, but the mainstream doesn’t fully embrace or acknowledge it, and I think that’s why it’s gone now,” Linklater says. “But there’s always newness. It was probably the last time it got recognized. You could be on the cover of Time. Those institutions, those gatekeepers were ‘alternative curious’ in the ’90s.”
He thinks that money is the culprit.
“Our currency is financial success,” Linklater says. “If it hasn’t sold a million albums or grossed $100 million, they just go, ‘Is it important? Should we pay attention?’ Unless it’s got money all over it, nobody gives a shit.”
Linklater gets a little quieter, gazing out at the sea. Then he starts up again.
“It’s kind of cool to have been aware of something while it was going on and to be a part of something at a certain time or place, but these things don’t last,” he says.
He doesn’t seem sad about it. Just resigned and slightly quizzical. It’s not like the cultural shifts have kept Linklater from making his movies – shaggy stories of jocks and con artists, stoners and average joes – his way. Over the last 15 years, he’s directed 10 films, been nominated for Oscars (“Boyhood”) and dipped his toe into the streaming world (“Hit Man”). It’s an impressive output for someone who seems so laid back.
“I get so annoyed with Rick,” says Zoey Deutch, who plays Jean Seberg in “Nouvelle Vague.” “I’m like, ‘Explain to me how you’re the least neurotic, most prolific director, like you’re not tortured by anything.’ He was done editing our movie within a couple months, and then filming his next one. Most directors are tortured by their movies and exhausted, and have to check themselves into clinics to sleep. He’s so calm.”
Godard — cocky, ostentatiously brainy, slightly dictatorial — seems like the polar opposite of Linklater. Though Linklater did extensively research the New Wave and the making of “Breathless,” joking he “now has a Master’s Degree” in the movement, he didn’t feel a need to tailor his style to match that of his subject.
“I made the film, the only way I know how to make the film,” he says.
In “Nouvelle Vague,” Godard is shown shooting a few scenes on the fly, then calling it a day after two hours, so he can retreat to the nearest bistro for lunch. Though his movies have almost an improvisatory feel to them, Linklater believes in rehearsing extensively, often in the actual shooting locations, in order to get things right.
“What’s the cliché? For it to be loose, it’s got to first be tight,” he says. “That’s how I’ve worked for 36 years. Maybe it’s because I was a student athlete, but you don’t just show up and play the game. You’d get hurt. You practice, you work really hard, and then you let it go and just play. My movies are character-based. I want them to come to life. I want actors to give a lot. I want them to be believable. But there’s another kind of movie that you don’t need that — where you just fit your actors into your shots.”
Linklater also has a patience that few directors can match. He shot his coming-of-age drama, “Boyhood,” over 11 years so he could capture that film’s protagonist as he aged from a little kid into a college freshman in real time. He’s already filmed a third of “Merrily We Roll Along,” Stephen Sondheim’s musical about three college friends whose relationship deteriorates as they deal with personal and professional setbacks over the course of 20 years. Ben Platt, Paul Mescal and Beanie Feldstein are playing the trio.
“It’s a crazy project, but it has a guiding backbone,” he says.
When Linklater first decided to make the film, “Merrily We Roll Along” was a notorious theatrical flop. That’s changed with a recent Broadway revival, starring Jonathan Groff, Lindsay Mendez and Daniel Radcliffe, which was embraced by critics and audiences, while winning Tonys.
“Now people think it’s great on the stage,” Linklater says. “But for awhile, it was ‘Oh, that one doesn’t quite work.’ Everyone loves the score, but something about it is off. Either the actors are too young or too old for part of the show. And I thought, well, the way to fix that is to film it, you know? And Sondheim agreed.”
A publicist swoops in with the wrap it up sign, but Linklater doesn’t seem ready to end things. He’s still thinking back to what I asked about film revolutions. Could another confluence of art, chutzpah and, yes, commerce — like the ones he and Godard were lucky to be part of — come again?
“It’s an interesting question,” he says, still pondering it. “I think it can. I hope it can.”
English (US) ·