Filmmaker Richard Linklater doesn't speak French, but that didn't stop him from directing a movie that's almost entirely in French. Nouvelle Vague focuses on the beginning of the New Wave of cinema, specifically Jean-Luc Godard and his landmark 1960 movie Breathless.
"I know that sounds insane," Linklater says, "but me not having the language wasn't even in my top 10 concerns about if I could pull off the movie."
Linklater says he'd speak English on the set and rehearse in English, which meant that the cast and crew understood about "80 plus percent of what I [was] saying." The result, he says, is a film that emphasizes the visual.
Godard's Breathless (A Bout de Souffle) broke many filmmaking conventions. The handheld camera allowed Godard to film in the streets of Paris, with unsuspecting pedestrians as extras. The film didn't have a script — Godard would occasionally feed lines to his actors, and other dialogue was later recorded and synced to the visuals. The scenes were unrehearsed, spontaneous, and didn't follow a production schedule.
"What we're watching in the film is this kind of revolutionary moment, but I think only one guy knows it," Linklater says of Godard. "He's kind of flummoxing everybody around him of what he's doing, because he believes if you're going to do something different, you have to do it differently. ... He created this unique environment where that could happen."
In addition to Nouvelle Vague, Linklater has another film out now, which also focuses on a brilliant, but difficult artist. Blue Moon tells the story of lyricist Lorenz "Larry" Hart, who, along with composer Richard Rodgers, wrote some of the best known songs in the American songbook, including "Blue Moon," "My Funny Valentine" and "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered." But when Hart became an unreliable songwriting partner, Rodgers instead teamed up with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein. Blue Moon is an imagined version of what happened on the opening night of Rodgers and Hammerstein's first show together, Oklahoma!.
Linklater is working on a film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's musical Merrily We Roll Along, which, like his 2014 film Boyhood and the Before trilogy, will take years to complete. His previous films also include Dazed and Confused and Slacker.
Interview highlights
On what defined the French New Wave
To me, the Nouvelle Vague really means personal filmmaking. It would be the archetype for the independent film. Freedom, personal expression. In a great way, I think it lowered the stakes of movies. The movie didn't have to be about some big epic story or some great genre piece. You could make a film about your own childhood. You could make a film about a love affair. You could make a film about a trip you took. It could be about your own life, kind of like maybe the Beat writers. You can just write a novel about a trip you took across the country. You could make it about really just carving out the life right in front of you that is worthy of your artistic attention.
On capturing the familiar shots of Breathless but from a different angle
It was fascinating to be under the hood of another movie to this degree, but we're reproducing these moments usually from the other angle. ... Our goal was you could put up the film and our film and they would be totally in sync just from a different angle. So that was the obsessive goal. We couldn't have made this film more different than the way they did it. We were replicating something and they could just show up on a Paris street and shoot. We had to build it. We had to create it. It's 64 years later, it looks different. But we were back at a lot of the locations, but it was really thrilling just to be making a film in 1959. That's what we wanted this film to feel like. It's using the language of that time, the look, the feel, everything about it we were trying to replicate.
On telling the story of lyricist Larry Hart (played by Ethan Hawke) in Blue Moon
Poor Larry ... if you were gay, it was an underground kind of world. Your sexuality was against the law. You could be arrested the way it was treated. No one was really out. ... It was a bad time to be born. But it was for his gift in this world of lyrics and to write so many songs, he was at the right time when they were doing so many shows. He and Rodgers wrote 1,000 songs. Could you imagine? He got paid to write 1,000 songs for theater and film, too. So, it was an incredible time to practice his art. That was the good news for Larry. The bad news was on his personal front. He really struggled and probably never had, as he says in Blue Moon, a love of his own. So that's the sad part. But that's where those heartbreaking lyrics come from.
On Rodgers and Hart's plays falling out of fashion, while Rodgers and Hammerstein thrived as a team
No one's putting up those Rodgers and Hart plays anymore, whereas someone's going to do South Pacific again, Oklahoma!'s playing always, Sound of Music. These last forever just because of that combination that the stories are intertwined in the music. And it's just a new kind of musical. Poor Larry, he realizes the times are leaving him behind. ... Artists are vulnerable to tastes changing and your thing is no longer what's en vogue and you're out of a job. It's kind of sad. No artist kind of proceeds through life thinking they have an expiration date.
On his film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's musical Merrily We Roll Along, a project slated to take 20 years to complete
Everything's a leap of faith and belief. ... You cast lifers — Ben Platt, Beanie Feldstein, Paul Mescal. You look at people and go, "You're doing this for the rest of your life. You're not going to suddenly quit acting and quit being a performer." ... We've shot, like, three of the nine episodes. So it's a fun thing we come together and do. It's weird, but it's really pretty exhilarating. So if I had to analyze it, I think I love living inside a project for a long time. I must. But really just storytelling. It's how to tell that story effectively… So much of filmmaking is problem solving. That play notoriously didn't work for about 40 years. And more recently, there's been some excellent productions. This London based one that came to Broadway and was a big hit and they've cracked it to a large degree, but I still think it would benefit from the reality that a film would give. And Sondheim agreed.
Lauren Krenzel and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
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