🎧 Zoey Deutch on Playing Jean Seberg in ‘Nouvelle Vague’
Plus: The movies that went up and down during the regional film festival rush
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Zoey Deutch had been waiting nearly a decade to cut off her hair. Not because of some deep need for a pixie cut, though it’s a fantastic look on her. But Richard Linklater had told her on the set of their first movie together, 2016’s Everybody Wants Some!!, that he’d want Deutch to play the actress Jean Seberg in a film about the making of 1960’s Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard’s revolutionary French New Wave movie about a small-time crook (played by Jean-Paul Belmondo) and his American girlfriend (Seberg).
So while Deutch had spent that time filming other movies (including the Netflix hit rom-com Set It Up with Everybody Wants Some!! co-star Glen Powell), producing for the first time on multiple projects (like this year’s The Threesome) and even making her Broadway debut in a revival of Our Town, the idea of playing Seberg — pixie cut included — never left her mind.
“I didn’t hear anything about it for another couple of years,” Deutch, now 30, remembered in our recent conversation at the Middleburg Film Festival. “I honestly thought I had maybe made it up until somebody five years later said, ‘Hey, I bumped into Richard Linklater, he said, you’re playing Jean Seberg.’ And I said, ‘I am?’”
It took a while for all the pieces to fall in place, as is often the way with indie film. Still, the result at long last is Nouvelle Vague, a black-and-white recreation of the tumultuous 23-day shoot of Godard’s Breathless, that casts Guillaume Marbeck as the filmmaker and Aubry Dullin as Belmondo alongside Deutch’s Seberg. Breathless, with Godard’s striking filmmaking style — including his use of the jump cut, an abrupt transition where the scene appears to almost stutter — was a breakthrough moment for everyone involved. Seberg, who was 22 at the time of its release, parlayed its success into stardom in France. Before Breathless, the American actress, who died under tragic circumstances in 1979 at the age of 40, had only made two films, both with the tyrannical Otto Preminger. So on Godard’s improvisational set, she found herself both insecure and liberated.
“Everything she had learned is the opposite of what Godard is asking her to do,” Deutch, who has filmmaking in her blood as the daughter of director Howard Deutch and actress-director Lea Thompson, says of Seberg. “She’s very skeptical of this process, understandably so. She’s very famous in France and for the way that she speaks French, but at the time, she was just learning the language. So to be asked to improvise a movie with no script, in a language you’re just learning — it’s very, very intimidating.”
Nouvelle Vague, one of several Netflix awards contenders on the streamer’s slate this fall, is frank about the pitfalls of Godard’s improvisational style, leaving the cast and crew sitting around in cafés for hours while the director tried to come up with his next idea. But Linklater also pays tribute to the magic that emerged around that movie, despite everything. As he wrote to the cast before production began, “Never forget that filmmaking itself is optimistic.” That’s an idea that Deutch felt while making Nouvelle Vague and has kept with her ever since, as she takes on new projects both as an actress and a producer.
“I do personally feel like I’m in a different chapter,” Deutch told me, in a conversation that happened after a screening of Nouvelle Vague, and which you can hear on today’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast. “I’m super excited and I feel very inspired. It’s cool when you do something for a long time and then all of a sudden it feels brand new to you.”
Hear much more from Deutch on today’s podcast, which also includes a check-in between me and Christopher Rosen about what we encountered at the Middleburg and Montclair Film Festivals over the weekend. It’s a busy time for regional film festivals all over the country. Still, as Chris and I discovered in our conversation, some of the buzz remains remarkably similar from place to place.
Don’t forget that Chris and I will be going live on Substack tomorrow at 6 p.m. PT/9 p.m. ET for a watchalong of a modern classic: Nancy Meyers’ Something’s Gotta Give. It’s our tribute to the great, recently departed Diane Keaton and an opportunity to ask the question we pose so often: Why don’t they make movies like this anymore? Subscribe to Prestige Junkie After Party for just $5 a month so you can join us and watch live. We’ll see you there, but you bring the popcorn.