‘I Have A Lot Of Hope’

Richard Linklater, the director of the Before trilogy, Boyhood, Dazed and Confused and upcoming Blue Moon, was at the Cannes Film Festival for the premiere of his new movie Nouvelle Vague, which tells the story of the making of one of Jean-Luc Godard’s most iconic movies, Breathless, or A Bout de Souffle in French, starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg and released in 1960.

Nouvelle Vague stars Zoey Deutch in the role of Seberg, Aubry Dullin as Belmondo and Guillaume Marbeck as Godard. The film earned an enraptured 10-minute ovation inside the Théâtre Lumière on Saturday night.

“I’ve made a lot of films, and I always felt, you know, if you do it long enough, maybe you should do one film about making films, so I thought this would be mine,” Linklater said during the press conference.

He added: “It’s not about making one of my films, but making a film that inspired me and many generations of filmmakers. A Bout de Souffle is an important film, if you think of the history of cinema, it’s been 130 years since the factory doors opened for the Lumière brothers, in 1895 and A Bout de Souffle is exactly the middle point, 65 years ago. So what was modern is now half the cinema history, but it’s forever modern and forever inspiring for new generations of filmmakers. So it felt like an important moment in cinema history.”

One of the many beautiful ways Linklater paid tribute to Breathless in Nouvelle Vague was also by making his own film “Like it was made in 1959 too.”

Later on, Linklater also talked about the theatrical experience and the new ways of consuming movies, especially with the arrival of so many new streaming platforms.

He said, “When you’re making a movie, you envision it with an audience, in like what we were privileged to have last night, an appreciative audience, in a theatre, a community. It’s a communal enterprise, both making and watching a film, that’s definitely the ideal. I have a lot of hope. There’s a young generation coming along that loves movies. In Austin where I live, the Austin Film Society that I started 4o years ago, we have two screenings, we show so many movies, and it’s all young people coming to the movies.”

Linklater added: “I call them the Letterboxd generation, they’re all online, it means a lot to them, they go to the movies, they talk about them, they have a big community. I’m really into film societies, campus screenings, where I saw the New Wave films in those local cinemas. I think that’s a big revival, certainly in the U.S. that I’m aware of, that’s kind of my world. I am optimistic, cinema is optimistic.”

Linklater also explained that cinema has always felt under attack. He said, “It is tough, it’s a struggle, but it always has been. Cinema and art commerce, there’s always a threat. But we, the audience, like stories being told to us, we like the format, feature films, there’s more indie films than ever being made, it’s just harder to get them seen, but we adapt.”

He added: “Most people see films with DVDs later, movies have long lives, you’re not going to see everything in the theatre, there’s not one purity, I want to get people off purity. You talk to the greatest filmmakers, Martin Scorsese, he watched a movie on a black and white TV growing up, that’s where he fell in love with cinema. It wasn’t always a movie theatre. Quentin Tarantino it was the video store. Cinema grabs you wherever it grabs you. You find it where you find it, but the cinema is the Church. But you can be worshipful wherever you are.”