To prepare for her role, Zoey Deutch spent roughly two years learning French from a professor at Stanford University. Photo / Jabin Botsford, The Washington Post
Zoey Deutch was sure she had imagined it.
She spent years ruminating over whether Richard Linklater truly had told her on the set of his 2016 comedy Everybody Wants Some!! that he thought she should play Jean Seberg in a film he hoped to direct about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. Deutch had been a fledgling actor at the time, worried he would cut her scenes from the project they were working on. Would he really have pitched her another?
It didn’t help that she never heard back from Linklater about what the Before trilogy and Boyhood director said in passing – until five years later, when someone told her they had learned from running into him that he wanted her to portray Seberg in a new film. She was delighted, and relieved.
“I didn’t make it up!” Deutch, 30, said in an October interview at the Middleburg Film Festival, where she accepted a breakthrough actor award. “Now having worked with him twice, I know this man only says what he means. And it’s good to listen to him.”
Nouvelle Vague, in theatres now and on Netflix starting November 14, transports viewers behind the scenes of the milestone French New Wave movie that put Godard on the map. It follows the avant-garde film-maker (Guillaume Marbeck) as he guides Seberg (Deutch) and Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) through the Parisian crime drama. Godard’s spontaneous directing style and headstrong nature frustrate some collaborators, including Seberg and anxious producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfurst).
Reached by phone, Linklater said it was a no-brainer to cast Deutch as his female lead. The actress, now known for films like the romantic comedy Set It Up and courtroom drama Juror #2, didn’t believe she resembled Seberg. While shooting Breathless in 1959, Seberg sported a blonde pixie cut, whereas Deutch tends to grow out her thick brown hair. But Linklater said he sensed a similar wit and feistiness in them.
“History projects some sort of victimhood on to Seberg,” Linklater said. “She actually had such strong convictions and confidence in herself – as much as she could, given her circumstances sometimes. Zoey had that quality. She made Seberg her own.”
As for the years-long delay in getting back to Deutch about the role? Well, this wasn’t an easy film to fund, Linklater said. Nouvelle Vague is not only in black and white, but is spoken almost entirely in French. Most of the cast members aside from Deutch are unknown, even to European audiences. French producers became more interested in the story after Godard died in 2022, according to Linklater, but he still had lots of persuading to do. Like the innovative artists depicted in his film – such as Claude Chabrol (Antoine Besson), François Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard) and Agnes Varda (Roxane Rivière) – Linklater fought for his vision.
“For me, it’s about artistic integrity and deep desire,” Deutch said. “It’s almost like a pit in your stomach. You’re like, ‘I have to do this.’ And if you have to, go do it.”
Godard had directed shorts and worked as a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma by 1959, but Breathless, which centres on a young French criminal and his American girlfriend, was his first feature-length film. Likewise, Seberg only had a couple of titles under her belt (Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan and Bonjour Tristesse) when she agreed to work with Godard. We meet the pair in Nouvelle Vague before they become New Wave icons, when they’re still just two strong-willed artists with ambitious dreams.
“Of course I was interested in and learned about her entire life,” Deutch said, alluding to Seberg’s political activism, which included support for the Black Panther Party, and the consequential FBI surveillance and smear campaigns widely believed to have contributed to her death by suicide in 1979. “But I was very focused on and narrowed in on this one period. It was such an honour and a joy ... to bring a little bit of levity and joy and humour and youth to this brilliant, talented and fierce woman.”
Deutch, raised in Los Angeles by director Howard Deutch and actress Lea Thompson, spent roughly two years learning French from a professor at Stanford University. In the final nine months, she also worked on nailing Seberg’s specific French accent, which was heavily influenced by her upbringing in Iowa. The modern actress’s high-pitched voice lends an ebullient quality to her Seberg. She commands the room with a unique presence, her short hair and American geniality surprising the French people around her. Deutch committed to the look, cutting and dyeing her long locks.
Godard achieved his naturalistic style by encouraging actors to be playful; in Nouvelle Vague, Seberg banters with everyone who crosses her path. In between Breathless takes, she teaches Belmondo how to dance. Her energy doesn’t fade whenever she’s fed up with Godard’s antics, which turns out to be often. Instead, she directs her rage over his haphazard use of time and resources toward her work. It invigorates her.
“I’m playing the sceptic,” Deutch said. It was difficult to inhabit, knowing Godard’s work would later be considered revolutionary. She pinpointed potential sources of Seberg’s doubts, whether stemming from her past work experiences or difficult relationships with stubborn men, and “created an inner life and world that felt more textured”.
“Rick was very encouraging of that, of bringing ourselves to the characters,” Deutch said. “He said, ‘You’re not doing an impression. You’re doing an interpretation.’”
Godard’s cast and crew took a massive leap of faith to work on Breathless.
In Nouvelle Vague, Linklater said, “We’re watching the birth of a radical artist, someone who transformed cinema with his own language – and no one knows it. There’s fun in that. A lot of the humour is derived from the fact that you’re just along for the ride. The thing about movies is, you don’t know until it’s all over whether it’s any good.”
Revisiting Godard’s debut reminded Linklater of working on his own first film back in the 1980s. He channelled that nervous energy into Nouvelle Vague but was grateful to feel that he had “the best of both worlds”, he said. “I could go back to a beginner’s mind but also be … sitting on a bedrock of security, having made 20-plus films over the years.”
A decade after last working with him, Deutch said Linklater’s process has remained the same – and still varies greatly from Godard’s. Whereas the French film-maker barely relied on a written script to make Breathless, instead suggesting new lines and actions to his actors while shooting, “Rick is someone who loves rehearsal,” Deutch explained. “Pretty much every word that’s on the page is in the movie. He’s very prepared.”
Deutch, on the other hand, has transformed as a performer since working on Everybody Wants Some!! She spent time learning how to slow down and be more present on set, not unlike Seberg’s journey in Nouvelle Vague. When you’re rushing, she said, “you’re in a heightened state of panic and anxiety, and it’s very difficult to connect”.
Seberg and Belmondo were able to deliver memorable performances in Breathless because of the palpable connection between them. While skipping down the streets of Paris, Deutch formed a similar bond to her French castmates and Linklater.
“All of that is just under a bubble of gratitude,” Deutch said. “It’s hard to put into words how grateful I was for this experience, and that he did give me that chance.”