‘Nouvelle Vague’ Director Richard Linklater Dumps On Trump Tariff Threat, Gushes Over Godard: ‘He Had Such An Interesting Brain’

A new hangout movie from the man who knows them like the back of his hand, Richard Linklater’s “Nouvelle Vague” chronicles the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless” and pays tribute to the French New Wave in a way that recalls his previous films like “Slacker” and the “Before” series. Premiering Saturday in Cannes, it marked the culmination of a years-long journey that the Austin filmmaker said he always dreamed would end with them here. 

“It’s exhilarating for this film, certainly, to be here,” Linklater said alongside stars Guillaume Marbeck and Zoey Deutch at a press conference on Sunday. “All roads lead to Cannes if you’re lucky. We got lucky.”

As it was a French production, Linklater was asked about the recent social media posts by President Donald Trump where he said there would be tariffs on films shooting on “foreign lands” without offering any specifics. The director, for his part, didn’t seem worried.

“The tariff thing, that’s not going to happen, right?” Linklater said. “That guy changes his mind like 50 times in one day,” Linklater said. “It’s the one export industry of the U.S., it would be kind of dumb to… Whatever, we don’t have to talk about that.”

What Linklater did have time to talk about was his love of Godard, as the influential late filmmaker “had such an interesting brain” and “it’s amazing he got to make films.” Making “Nouvelle Vague” was about learning as much as he could about how the French master worked.

“It was almost therapeutic, or cathartic, to get to know a film so well,” Linklater said. “It was pretty magical, like they did those two scenes in one day?!”

While he acknowledged that taking on the project was a “crazy leap,” he felt that he had been working long enough that this was the right time to try something like this.

“If you do it long enough, you should make a film about making films,” Linklater said. “It felt like an important moment in cinema history, so it was fun to dial down on one film and learn so much about it

Linklater said he initially thought that French audiences would “hate that an American director did this,” before recounting how the more the film got underway, the more he felt the shared passion people had for it. He said, though he doesn’t speak French fluently, that the language barrier didn’t prove to be an issue as they all spoke in the visual language of film. He also said it was not about mimicking Godard. 

“You can’t imitate Godard, but you could feel the style of the time.” 

When asked more about how cinema has changed in the many decades since, Linnklater did say that there remain challenges, but that he considers good art to be something that endures. He specifically praised the “Letterboxd generation” and young people taking an interest in film.  

“It always feels under attack,” Linklater said. “It is tough, it’s a struggle, but it always has been….There’s something perpetual.”

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