Quentin Tarantino<\/a> once defined the \u201changout\u201d film<\/a> as \u201cmovies that you hangout with the characters so much that they actually become your friends,\u201d and he declared his friend Richard Linklater its master.<\/p>\n While a guest on this week\u2019s episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast<\/a>, we asked Linklater what he thought of the subgenre Tarantino had tagged his films with. \u201cMaybe he got that from me,\u201d chuckled Linklater. \u201cI often describe my own films as \u2018Hey, \u2018I\u2019m going drop a camera on 1976 or wherever I am, and just kind of hang out.\u201d<\/p>\n More from IndieWire<\/strong><\/p>\n He continued: \u201cIt\u2019s not inaccurate. That is the tone, I want the viewer to feel like they\u2019re transported to a place and that they are participating in some way, and that there is a relation with the character.\u201d<\/p>\n Linklater, like many cinephiles, has long held a reverence for the French New Wave \u2014 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\u2019s where most period films fail.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve always just rolled my eyes at most \u2018important\u2019 historical films,\u201d said Linklater. \u201cThey\u2019re stepping out of a painting or a sculpture or something. I just keep coming back to the word self-important. And I am like, \u2018No, life\u2019s never been like that,\u2019 life is going on all around you. The greatest moments in history were preceded by someone just having a sandwich.\u201d<\/p>\n The director wanted to invite the audience to just come \u201chang out while they were making \u2018Breathless,<\/a>\u201d 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\u2019s career.<\/p>\n 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. \u201c\u2018This guy is nobody. He\u2019s an obscure film writer. You can\u2019t even make your way through his writing for \u2018Cahiers du Cin\u00e9ma.\u2019\u201d And to those playing the \u201cBreathless\u201d crew he instructed, \u201c\u2018He probably doesn\u2019t know what he\u2019s doing, and the film probably won\u2019t work. But you\u2019re her, and hey, you need a job, it\u2019s only 20 days, he has some charisma, and who knows, it might be good, Jean Seberg\u2019s in it, and she\u2019s known.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s always something distracting about the layering of icon on icon.<\/p>\n \u201cI always remember the feeling I got watching \u2018Gandhi\u2019 42 years ago now, and if you didn\u2019t know London theater, you didn\u2019t 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, \u2018Oh, that\u2019s Gandhi,\u2019 because I didn\u2019t know who the actor was,\u2019\u201d said Linklater. \u201c I heard Dustin Hoffman wanted to play Gandhi. And he probably would\u2019ve been pretty good, but I was transported.\u201d<\/p>\n It was that feeling the director wanted for \u201cNouvelle Vague<\/a>.\u201d Linklater was very conscious of the cinephile audience who would be drawn to his film \u2014 people like himself who think of Godard, Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin), Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), and Claude Chabrol (Antoine Besson) as these iconic figures in cinema \u2014 which is why he believes his ensemble of fresh-faced French actors was the most important ingredient.<\/p>\n Aubry Dullin as Jean-Paul Belmondo in \u2018Nouvelle Vague\u2019\u00a9Netflix\/Courtesy Everett Collection<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s the physical resemblance, but that\u2019s the obvious part. The much more important part is their personalities and who they are,\u201d said Linklater. \u201cAubry, who plays Belmondo, he had this light, airy [quality], quick smile, happy \u2014 he struck me as Belmondo, like, \u2018I don\u2019t care much. I\u2019m here, but I\u2019m floating through. I\u2019m a boxer. I\u2019ve got all these things, ladies love me.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Linklater auditioned Belmondo\u2019s real-life grandson, who he said is a good actor and would have been fine, but Dullin embodied the spirit and just \u201cfelt right.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n \u201cI 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, \u2018See how special this is?\u2019 And they\u2019re like, \u2018Oh my God, I see what you\u2019re talking about. It\u2019s them, it\u2019s them!\u2019 And I\u2019m like, \u2018Yeah, it\u2019s them. This is what we\u2019re going for.\u2019 [You] just feel like you\u2019re there with them.\u201d<\/p>\n To hear Richard Linklater\u2019s full interview, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on\u00a0Apple<\/a>,\u00a0Spotify<\/a>, or your favorite podcast platform.<\/p>\n Best of IndieWire<\/strong><\/p>\n Sign up for Indiewire’s Newsletter<\/a>. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source ca.news.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Quentin Tarantino once defined the \u201changout\u201d film as \u201cmovies that you hangout with the characters so much that they actually become your friends,\u201d and he declared his friend Richard Linklater its master. While a guest on this week\u2019s episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, we asked Linklater what he thought of the subgenre Tarantino had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2158900,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[367018,367017,318878,321294],"class_list":["post-2158899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-jean-luc-godard","tag-jean-paul-belmondo","tag-quentin-tarantino","tag-richard-linklater"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/In-\u2018Nouvelle-Vague-Richard-Linklater-Invites-You-to-Hang-Out.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2158899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2158899"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2158899\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2158901,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2158899\/revisions\/2158901"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2158900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2158899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2158899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2158899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/span><\/div>\n