Quentin Tarantino once defined the “hangout” film as “movies that you hangout with the characters so much that they actually become your friends,” and he declared his friend Richard Linklater its master.
While a guest on this week’s episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, we asked Linklater what he thought of the subgenre Tarantino had tagged his films with. “Maybe he got that from me,” chuckled Linklater. “I often describe my own films as ‘Hey, ‘I’m going drop a camera on 1976 or wherever I am, and just kind of hang out.”
He continued: “It’s not inaccurate. That is the tone, I want the viewer to feel like they’re transported to a place and that they are participating in some way, and that there is a relation with the character.”
Linklater, like many cinephiles, has long held a reverence for the French New Wave — that time when cinema felt young, new, and full of possibilities. And the idea of transporting back to what it felt like to be in that moment was something he found appealing. But to accomplish that, he had to throw his reverence for that moment in history, and the great filmmakers in it, out the window. According to Linklater, that’s where most period films fail.
“I’ve always just rolled my eyes at most ‘important’ historical films,” said Linklater. “They’re stepping out of a painting or a sculpture or something. I just keep coming back to the word self-important. And I am like, ‘No, life’s never been like that,’ life is going on all around you. The greatest moments in history were preceded by someone just having a sandwich.”
The director wanted to invite the audience to just come “hang out while they were making ‘Breathless,” which was only possible if the attitude of his camera, like the characters, is oblivious to the fact it is witnessing the making of what would become a groundbreaking film that would change film history and launch Jean-Luc Godard’s career.
In particular, Linklater needed to knock his Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) off his pedestal, instructing his ensemble that their characters were dismissive of the young director. “‘This guy is nobody. He’s an obscure film writer. You can’t even make your way through his writing for ‘Cahiers du Cinéma.’” And to those playing the “Breathless” crew he instructed, “‘He probably doesn’t know what he’s doing, and the film probably won’t work. But you’re her, and hey, you need a job, it’s only 20 days, he has some charisma, and who knows, it might be good, Jean Seberg’s in it, and she’s known.’”
Linklater believes films about historical figures can suffer from their star power. He acknowledges and rattles off the great performances given by A-list stars in biopics but admits that for him, there’s always something distracting about the layering of icon on icon.
“I always remember the feeling I got watching ‘Gandhi’ 42 years ago now, and if you didn’t know London theater, you didn’t really know who Ben Kingsley was. I was a kid in Texas and I knew a lot about Gandhi at that time, and watching it just going, ‘Oh, that’s Gandhi,’ because I didn’t know who the actor was,’” said Linklater. “ I heard Dustin Hoffman wanted to play Gandhi. And he probably would’ve been pretty good, but I was transported.”
It was that feeling the director wanted for “Nouvelle Vague.” Linklater was very conscious of the cinephile audience who would be drawn to his film — people like himself who think of Godard, Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin), François Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), and Claude Chabrol (Antoine Besson) as these iconic figures in cinema — which is why he believes his ensemble of fresh-faced French actors was the most important ingredient.
“There’s the physical resemblance, but that’s the obvious part. The much more important part is their personalities and who they are,” said Linklater. “Aubry, who plays Belmondo, he had this light, airy [quality], quick smile, happy — he struck me as Belmondo, like, ‘I don’t care much. I’m here, but I’m floating through. I’m a boxer. I’ve got all these things, ladies love me.’”
Linklater auditioned Belmondo’s real-life grandson, who he said is a good actor and would have been fine, but Dullin embodied the spirit and just “felt right.” Linklater said it often came down to what the actors felt like in the room during auditions, and he could really tell he had caught lightning in a bottle when he got them in the room together.
“I remember sitting down with the actors who would play Godard, Truffaut, and Suzanne Schiffman (Jodie Ruth-Forest). Once I had the right actors, we were sitting there reading a scene, and I videotaped it and showed it to [my producer] and said, ‘See how special this is?’ And they’re like, ‘Oh my God, I see what you’re talking about. It’s them, it’s them!’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, it’s them. This is what we’re going for.’ [You] just feel like you’re there with them.”
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