Zoey Deutch was 19 when Richard Linklater, idly sketching ideas on a lunch container, told her she would be Jean Seberg.
It was a moment between shots on Linklater’s 2016 “Everybody Wants Some!!,” when Deutch first caught Hollywood’s attention as part of the film‘s stacked ensemble cast. “And in passing, casually, [he said], ‘I have a movie about ‘Breathless,’ I think I want you to play Jean,’” she told IndieWire at the Telluride Film Festival.
It was nearly a decade before Deutch would adopt Seberg’s game pixie cut to star in “Nouvelle Vague,” Linklater’s black-and-white homage to the French New Wave that recreates the 1959 filming of “Breathless” on the streets of Paris. The film, which premiered at Cannes and is now heading out on a busy fall festival tour, was written by Holly Gent and Vince Palmo, Jr. (“Me and Orson Welles”) with French screenwriter Laetitia Masson.
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It’s a light and tasty soufflé that chronicles Godard’s groundbreaking debut which he shot at top speed MOS (without sound) in mainly single takes, barking dialogue from his notebook to the actors, who had no script. Working on a Linklater movie, however, requires discipline.
“Rick is focused, but it’s fun,” said Deutch. “And he has cultivated these systems that are in place for it to be as calm an experience as possible. He requires rehearsal time, usually about the same amount of rehearsal as shooting days, which is rare.”
For “Nouvelle Vague,” Linklater gave the actors a rehearsal manifesto. “He typed up three different sections of what he wanted all of the actors to understand going into this movie,” said Deutch. “One of them was to be clear that we are making a movie, a love letter to cinema about Godard, but we are making it in the opposite style of how he made it. We are not hoping to just spontaneously get lucky. We are going to be precise and thoughtful and do all the research and create magic a different way.”
Would Godard approve? Impossible to know, but Deutch believes that Linklater is the only person who might get the master’s nod.
“They are two artists that have maintained their artistic integrity as filmmakers that do what they want to do and make movies that they want to make, not what other people want to see,” she said. “That is a rare quality. Even the greatest filmmakers of all time, most of them, waver at one point or another, and that’s OK. It is astonishing that [Rick] has never wavered from doing things that he wants to do for himself — not selfishly, but because that’s what you do. You make things that live inside of you that you have to get out and then it relates to other people. He and Godard share that quality.”
Three years ago, Linklater finally mentioned “Breathless” to Deutch again. “He kept saying, ‘Do not cut your hair quite yet,” she said. “‘What does that mean? You’re going to recast me?’ I didn’t know how real it was at all until I actually cut my hair.”
Two years prior to filming, Deutch began learning French. “It was a great gift that [Seberg] had a particular accent with her French-speaking,” she said. “When she was making ‘Breathless,’ she had just started learning French, so I didn’t have the daunting task of of trying to reshape my mouth to sound French. But that element of the process was the most helpful in creating an understanding of what was going through her head while she was filming.”
When Deutch watched “Breathless,” she found Seberg mysterious. Once she began production, that perception flipped on its head.
“It’s an odd movie,” she said, “I had a lot of questions, quite a few things that don’t make sense. Once I started acting in a language that I was just learning, I understood where that mysteriousness was coming from. It’s fear and it’s a defense mechanism you put on: ‘Instead of looking scared, let’s try mysterious. Let’s try looking like I’m not going to let you know what’s going on here.’ She’s improvising a movie in a language that she’s just learning with a director that’s giving her zero guidance. It’s an avant-garde style of filmmaking. She’d only made two movies before. Otto Preminger was the most rigid stylistically. It was the polar opposite.”
Preminger was notoriously cruel to Seberg. “She had already been traumatized by Hollywood in a major, major way, destroyed by the critics, destroyed by him,” said Deutch. “She comes to do this, and it’s scary. So the language barrier was a great window into what I would imagine she was going through.”
Linklater and Deutch agreed to not foreshadow Seberg’s later darkness. “We honor a specific moment in time of this beautiful, brave, gifted woman’s life that is oftentimes just thought of as tragic,” she said. “It was important to not read the last page. I would visit her grave in Montparnasse. We were shooting the last scene on the same street, and it was raining and I said, ‘Why don’t we go talk to Jean?’ So Rick and I walk over to Jean’s grave. We look up and the sun came out. The weather forecast said it was going to rain all day long. We were able to shoot that scene, and we felt like it was a little bit of her blessing.”
Deutch’s preparations also included visiting Chanel to be fitted for haute couture. “It was a little-girl fantasy dream come true to go to Coco Chanel’s apartment to get a custom dress made,” she said. “It felt like I was going back in time and and channeling her.”
Trained as a dancer and raised by industry parents (actress Lea Thompson and director Howard Deutch), Deutch has done it all: romantic comedies (“Set It Up”), thrillers (“Juror No. 2”), biopics (“Rebel in the Rye”), series (“The Politician”), and theater (“Our Town”).
Eastwood cast her in “Juror No. 2” after an audition eight years before. “I never heard anything back, and he remembered it,” she said. “So often we feel that these auditions go into the abyss and it can be painful. This is the universe reminding me: ‘If you stay the course, keep working and trying, you keep going.’”
“Our Town” was an “awesome and healing” experience, she said. “Making films is my life. It’s my favorite thing in the world. But I can get into the trap of being so hard on myself once the day is done. In theater when you go home at night and you go, ‘I didn’t quite nail that,’ you don’t need to torture yourself. You go, ‘Tomorrow is a new day, and I’m going to try that tomorrow night.’ It’s a metaphor for life. You have another shot. You don’t have to be like, ‘Oh, that happened, and it was horrible.’”
Now 30, Deutch is taking her career reins by moving into producing films like “Buffaloed.” “I wanted to generate things instead of waiting around for them to happen,” she said. “I started in comedy. I was highly sought out for the one-dimensional female character in the male-driven comedy. Then I overcorrected a little, and I decided to only play scammers and unlikable female characters. I’m now in this new phase where I’m coming into myself as a woman more. I want to make beautiful things like ‘Hamnet.’ ‘Nouvelle Vague’ is a beautiful movie about art and and staying true to yourself, and it’s joyful, and it’s fun, and it’s a celebration of cinema.”
Next up: She also produced “The Threesome” (Vertical, September 5) directed by Chad Hartigan, a smart take on how a ménage à trois really impacts its players. She shot the relationship drama in Little Rock, Arkansas right before “Nouvelle Vague.” She reached out to the director years ago, wanting to be in his orbit. When she heard another actress fell out of “The Threesome,” she messaged him on Instagram: “Can you meet me for coffee? I want to make this movie with you.” “I fought a little for that one,” she said.
She also stars in the upcoming Lionsgate thriller “The Anniversary” (October 29) and just finished a “wild” and untitled David Wain comedy (“Celebrity Pass Movie”) as well as a love story for Netflix, “Voicemails for Isabelle.” “It’s a story about grief and sisterhood and falling in love,” she said.
Netflix will release “Nouvelle Vague” in select theaters on Friday, October 31, and stream on Netflix starting on Friday, November 14.
