Why School of Rock director Richard Linklater is obsessed with new wave cinema

Sydney Morning Herald

15 hours ago

The year was 1960. Jean-Luc Godard was nearly 30; for at least 10 years, along with his fellow film critics and buffs clustered around the film magazine Cahiers du Cinema, he had been champing at the bit to make his own film. His comrade Francois Truffaut had managed to make The 400 Blows, which was shown at the Cannes Film Festival. Godard was poised to make a film – black and white, barely any script, shot from the shoulder – that would be a slap in the face to stolid French film culture. And then, finally, it happened. He made Breathless.
Richard Linklater's Nouvelle Vague recounts how Godard persuaded a producer to back him, then proceeded to spend a lot of time in cafes with actors Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg and his crew while improvising a film about a petty criminal's love affair with an American student. It manages to be energetic, nostalgic and inspiring all at the same time. Without a doubt, it was also the most fun anyone had at the last Cannes Film Festival, but not just because it was preaching to a receptive choir. It's a story about cinephiles, of course, but these swaggering flaneurs could be doing anything that involves wearing sunglasses indoors and smoking Gitanes.
'I am kind of obsessed with collective art,' says Linklater. 'It's about creativity and expressing yourself and doing something as a group. It's great when people come together and do something. Whatever it is. Get together and rob a bank!' Which, as he points out with a laugh, is absolutely the makings of a movie. 'And it's such an intriguing moment in history: the birth of the personal film, which is still kind of a radical notion.'
He told his own cast – including Guillaume Marbeck as Godard, Zoey Deutch as Seberg and Aubry Dullin as Belmondo – to forget the film's iconic status: that came later. At the time of filming, Godard and his team were busy throwing out the rule book.
'It turns out to be the most influential film of its time, but the vibe of it isn't that,' says Linklater. 'It's an origin story. There was always room for the new, the revolution. I can relate. My own first film [ Slacker, 1990] felt that way – and it's important for the artist to feel that way.' The aspiring revolutionaries expected their film to be bad but, somehow, everything came together: the score, the look and feel of it, the spark and freshness of Belmondo and Seberg.
Cinema was born in 1895. Breathless, Linklater points out, now marks its halfway point. The filmmakers identified with the New Wave were operating with tiny budgets. Cranes were out of the question; for aerial views, they made do with shooting from third-floor balconies. Dollies (for mounting cameras on wheels) were too expensive; Godard had to make a virtue of a hand-held camera's immediacy, while his famous jump cuts glamorised any awkward joins. Nouvelle Vague is shot in the same way. 'I'm using the syntax of the time,' says Linklater. 'No steadycam, no cranes, no dollies.'
He also has a cast of actors who, like Belmondo and Seberg, seem to have walked from nowhere straight into their roles. Marbeck is still wearing Godard's sunglasses, suit and tie in Cannes; he says he had studied Godard's work in film school, but had to work on his Swiss accent, spending days lying on his couch 'like with a psychiatrist' recording and repeating the lines until he mastered each tricky consonant. Dullin says he auditioned when he saw a casting call on Facebook for Belmondo look-alikes. 'When I was young, two or three people told me oh, you look like Belmondo. So I said 'why not?'' Deutch, who swapped her long dark hair for a blonde pixie cut, looks uncannily like Seberg in the film.
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The film was made in French with a French crew. Linklater is a fan of rehearsal; the script had every line in French and English and they would rehearse in both. 'It made it too easy for him!' snickers Marbeck. 'He didn't have to learn French!' Actually, nobody is sure how much French Linklater speaks; he says himself that he wouldn't want anyone to have to listen to him try.
He was an early convert to the New Wave, around the time he realised he would rather make films than write novels. 'I started a film society just to see the movies. And the spring of '88 I showed 17 Godard films! We lost a lot of money but I was doing it for my own education. I thought I had something to learn.' In a way, this film provides further education for a new generation.
'It's not talking down to people who don't know about it,' says Deutch. 'It's saying 'hey, come on, join the party!' Because that's what Rick does. He brings people in. There's nothing pretentious about him, as a person or a filmmaker.'
The French are famously chauvinist about their language and culture, but nobody involved seemed to mind a monolingual American telling their story – not this monolingual American, anyway. 'He is very French in a way, because he is very artistic,' says Marbeck. Dullin agrees: 'He is the least 'Texan' Texan guy! I think he loves France so much he understood it. It's not like a foreigner's view of France.'
Marbeck had seen some of Linklater's films – Boyhood, School of Rock, Before Midnight – without realising they were by the same director; now he sees the sensibility they shared, both with each other and with the early New Wave. 'He has an approach where the action is more important than his style. It's more about a feeling – and it's the same feeling. So I understand why he would want to make a film about hanging out with French people.'
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Despite being shot in shades of grey, Nouvelle Vague is a sunny film. Even Marbeck's version of Godard seems much more affable than the man we saw in later life. 'Part of that was me,' he says. 'And part of it is what Jean-Luc was at this time. Because he was hoping for cinema to save him, you know? Can you imagine, he's wanting to make his movie for 10 years. You want, you want, you want and now it's the time! Who wouldn't be happy? Even Godard, I think, would be happy.' Would he be happy with Nouvelle Vague? Probably not, but everyone else is.