David Remnick: Richard Linklater is one of the most admired directors working in film today, but moviegoers may like him for very different things. You might love the stonerish early comedies set in Austin, Slacker and Dazed and Confused, or the romance trilogy that started with Before Sunrise, starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. Then there are crowd pleasers like School of Rock and the more recent Hit Man. Boyhood, a coming-of-age story, was filmed over a 12-year period. This month, Richard Linklater has two new films coming out almost simultaneously, which is pretty unusual for Hollywood. Our film critic Justin Chang wrote about both in The New Yorker. [music]

Justin Chang: I think that there is a casual mastery that he's achieved. I think it's on display in these two movies, in Blue Moon-

Larry: We have to celebrate. This is the greatest musical in the history of American theater.

Richard Rodgers: No, no, no. I'm not drinking with you, Larry.

Justin Chang: -and Nouvelle Vague.

[music]

Speaker 1: [French language]

Justin Chang: Blue Moon is a portrait of the great lyricist Lorenz Hart, his final days, and the final days of his collaboration with the great composer Richard Rodgers. Rodgers and Hart wrote some of the most famous songs in the American songbook, in musical theater history, songs we still listen to today and are loved. The second film that Richard Linklater has coming out this fall is Nouvelle Vague. The Nouvelle Vague is, of course, what we know as the French New Wave.

The movie returns us to those days in the late '50s when the French New Wave, this explosion of creativity in French cinema, was just a scrappy thing getting off the ground. At the center of the movie is Jean-Luc Godard, who hasn't made his first film. The movie recounts the making of that first film, Breathless, which becomes one of the most celebrated debuts in film history.

Rick, there's a real serendipity, I think, to these two movies coming out together, which we'll get into, but let's go one by one. I'll start with Blue Moon. The movie takes place over one night, and it's the night that Hart basically sees his legacy with Rodgers eclipsed in the public imagination, because Oklahoma has just opened on Broadway. From that point on, of course, Rodgers and Hammerstein being the most famous names on Broadway. This is such a perverse premise for a film-

Rick: [laughs]

Justin Chang: -about a great artist. It's very affectionate toward him, but it's so much more about his failure in a way than about his success, or at least it seems that way to me. What did you think when you first read Robert Kaplow's script?

Rick: This is like 13 years ago, like, "Robert, what are you working on?" "I'm writing about Lorenz Hart." I'm like, "Oh, God, I love Lorenz Hart. What is it?" "I'm setting it on the opening night of Oklahoma." I'm like, "Oh my God, that is so perverse." He knew the story that Hart did actually go, and he was trying to be a good sport, but logic tells you he's just dying inside. My tagline for this movie, that they're not going to use on any posters, but it's my tagline, is called "Forgotten but not gone."

Justin Chang: [laughs]

Rick: There he is. It's so heartbreaking, awkward, but to do a film about the end of someone's career in that great age, where there were so many show tunes. He was so prolific. They did a thousand songs. They had a great quarter-century run. As Rodgers tells him, it's not the work, it's his alcoholism, it's his life. He's just made himself impossible to work with. You can see the frustration. From the very beginning, I described this as like, "Oh, this is kind of a little howl into the night from an artist who's being left behind," not just by his partner, but by the times.

Larry: I'm telling you, I swear to God, our best work is still ahead of us.

Richard Rodgers: Yes, the new Connecticut Yankee.

Larry: Yes, yes, and bigger stuff.

Speaker 2: Hey, get up.

Richard Rodgers: All right, I'm coming.

Larry: Marco Polo is going to be a show about joy, but a hard-earned joy, an unsentimental joy.

Richard Rodgers: Something wrong with sentimental?

Larry: Well, it's too easy.

Richard Rodgers: Oklahoma is too easy? The guy actually getting the girl in the end is too easy? You've just eliminated every successful musical comedy ever written, Larry.

Larry: It's too easy for me.

Richard Rodgers: Did you hear the audience tonight?

Larry: Yes.

Richard Rodgers: 1,600 people didn't think it was too easy. You tell me 1,600 people were wrong?

Larry: I'm just saying.

Rick: Oklahoma, it's not just a huge success, but it changes Broadway history. It's a before and after, like, "Oh, musicals are just going to be different," to see yourself go extinct. There's a little bit of Salieri aspect. Although Larry Hart's a genius.

Justin Chang: That's right.

Rick: Salieri was a mediocrity, as he called himself.

Justin Chang: There's such a fascinating conversation that the movie is having about art versus entertainment, art versus commerce, what the public wants versus what it needs. Larry represents perhaps what it needs in the sense of-- I don't know if it's about moral betterment, but just aesthetic betterment, perhaps.

Rick: Exactly.

Justin Chang: Whereas Rodgers makes the case for, "No, there's a place for sentiment. There's a place for emotion." You should note, of course, Ethan Hawke plays Larry. When you read this, did you have him in mind for this from the beginning as well to play Larry Hart?

Rick: It wasn't what it is now. It wasn't a full script. It was just almost long monologues. I think Robert was really wondering what it is, and I was immediately like, "No, this is a film." Most people would say, "Oh, this should be a play," but I'm like, "No, no, no." I don't think Ethan immediately even thought I was offering it to him to play Hart. He's an unlikely choice. He's a foot taller than Hart. He was too young at the time, all that stuff, but it's such a wicked piece of writing, and it's such a hard thing to pull off. Ethan is in that phylum of actors who probably has the quickness, because it's hard.

It's hard to portray a genius. You can only portray a genius with a little bit of that yourself. I knew Ethan could do it, having worked with him a lot. This is the ninth time we've worked together. We hadn't worked together in 10 years. We realized that, since we finished Boyhood. It's like, "We haven't really rolled camera." We've been developing a few things, and we talk a lot. We've been working on this all these years. We'd have readings and go through it, but I was like, "Yes, it's time to make this. Darn it, let's do it."

Justin Chang: It is interesting because so many of your films do have this lengthy gestation. It has to get done in 15 days, 30 days, what have you. Is it weird to live with a project for that long? I know you lived with both Blue Moon and Nouvelle Vague and many of your other films, just thinking about it constantly, and then suddenly it's like you have to get it right in this very finite amount of time.

Rick: That time is really valuable. Those years of thinking about a film, you're really aesthetically dialing in on what the film is. I think the most important film you make is the one you make in your head. You're really finding the movie. You're finding the tone, the look. Everything about it, I have to feel my way through it.

Justin Chang: I want to go back a little bit, too, to Ethan Hawke. This is such an unusual performance from him in the context of your work. It's so different from many of the films you've made together. Whether that's Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight, and Boyhood, certainly, where we think of it as-- I don't know if I'd call it naturalistic, but it's certainly a more naturalistic register than this. This is very stylized. This is someone who is a real person, so there is a precision that he has to achieve. Did you direct Ethan differently than you have done in the past?

Rick: Most to me, performances and my rehearsal process, I think you're building a performance. It's additive. With Ethan in this part, it was deductive, strangely. It was like we're taking away everything, where he's just nothing but a brain. What is Larry Hart? He's not really a body. [laughter] No one's interested in that, unfortunately. Poor Larry. He's a brain, he's a mouth, he's a wit. It's like, "Ethan, that gesture you just did, that's really Ethany masculine. That's all that. You're playing this gay guy in 1943 who doesn't have typical relations." The closeted of the time. It's a portrait of that time, which is very, very different.

Ethan was up for it. It was, I think, the hardest thing either of us have ever done, because it's not really fun. It's fun to build and go somewhere. It's tougher to tear down. I was a naggy director, like, "Ethan, you did that thing again. Let the words carry it. You don't have to add--" I was just riding his ass about stuff, but I thought that's what it required. I didn't see any other way around it.

Film actors will always say they're not really challenged that much. That's why a lot of them do stage. Ethan's like, "Yes, wow. To be doing something that's just bumping me at the absolute limit of my talent." [laughs] I said, "Me, too." It's a good place to work from. That's where we strive to be, but when you're there, it's uncomfortable.

Justin Chang: This is a good point to segue to Nouvelle Vague, but I was thinking about this, watching the film, again, like, "Oh, Godard is like the original slacker figure of the French New Wave." It's funny, not a slacker in the sense that we often, I think, incorrectly assume, and that I think your films are corrective to, which is this idea that slackerdom or slackerism equates to laziness. It's not. He's actually working quite hard, but he is projecting this in Nouvelle Vague.

The Jean-Luc Godard that we see is just running so counter to what we think of as the norm of any kind of film director. He's probably surprising himself as well. In a way, what you do with time is interesting because it's sitting in a moment and not crowding something with plot. There's a certain harmony to that, I think. Sitting with the quotidian, sitting with the things we don't think make a movie.

Rick: In Nouvelle Vague, that was the idea, that we're just going to drop in on Godard trying to make his first movie. Godard is so interesting because his cinematic brain is just so different than everyone else. I think he's driven by the idea, "If you're going to do something different, you have to do it differently." He'll call. The first day of production is rolling on great. Everybody like, "What next?" He says, "No, that's it for the day. I'm out of ideas."

Jean-Luc Godard: [French language]

Speaker 3: After only what? It's been two hours, right?

Jean-Luc Godard: [French language]

Rick: There's a cinematic revolution going on, but for those there, it certainly didn't feel that way. Films are funny. You can be on sets where everybody thinks it's going great. They're applauding after the actors finish their take. Then at the end of the day, it's like, "God, this film doesn't work at all." Then there can be other films where madness, no one knows what's going on, and then it be good. It work.

I told the crew this, "This isn't a film about icons, but this guy maybe doesn't know what he's doing. This is not an icon. None of you guys are. You're just all youngsters with this opportunity." I couldn't help but relate to making my first film when I had people around me. It's exhilarating. It's what you want to be doing, but it's also terrifying. It's also really humbling. I think you only make your first film once. This is really just a portrait of someone making their first film. It just happens to turn out to be one of the most influential films ever made, but no one knows it except maybe one person.

Justin Chang: Breathless, Godard's 1960 film, one of the great debuts now in cinema history. It's funny, Godard and his friends are joking, comparing it to Citizen Kane or something.

Rick: It's no Citizen Kane.

Justin Chang: It's no Citizen Kane, yet, as I was thinking about it, it's like, "It is one of the few debuts that could actually stand unembarrassed next to Citizen Kane."

Rick: I know. You can say that about every movie, but that movie, I know it so well now, I can tell you how many takes they did of every scene. We had the real camera from it. It was our camera in the movie. It was so fascinating to be so close under the hood of another movie like this. It's a film from 1959. This film was made in '59 that we're making. It's going to look, sound, and feel like a film from that era, which I know people have tried a lot.

I was talking to a cinephile friend of mine two years before, and he's like, "Yes, that never really works, does it, when people try to--" I was like, "Yes, you're right. It doesn't work when you try to do that." I took that as a challenge and like, "Let's try it. Let's see if we can pull it off." There was two levels at work. One was erasing film history beyond that point. At this point, if you see the way they shot those films, it's pretty simple, especially Godard. It's in the editing room. They just follow the action as best they can. They didn't have cranes. They didn't have much money, shooting off balconies.

It was really the spirit of the characters, the story, but the techniques they were pretty limited. Then, in my own mind, I just approached it like, "I'm 28, making my first film." Again, we took a really simplistic, fun-- Naive is maybe even the word. It was really magical to look up and look across the room, and there's Roberto Rossellini, and then there's the entirety of the Nouvelle Vague. It was very emotional, actually, to have reconstructed this moment in time that means so much to-- It certainly meant so much to everybody working on the film, and I think cinephiles everywhere.

There was one day-- This is Zoey Deutch's story, but it's all of our story because we were there. It was pouring rain where we're shooting the campaign premiere, the final scene of the movie, where he dies. The last image is her standing in the crosswalk. That is only about 200 meters from where Jean Seberg is buried.

Justin Chang: Oh my gosh.

Rick: She's in Montparnasse Cemetery. She's amazingly close to that location. It was lunchtime, it's pouring rain. We're maybe not going to get our day. We're on a tight schedule, budget, and everything. We all have umbrellas. Zoey says, "Let's go visit Jean," because we had been there before. I was like, "Yes, let's just go." At lunch, we walked over there. As we approached her grave, Zoey is Jean Seberg. She's in the dress at the end.

Justin Chang: Wow.

Rick: Her hair. She's a ghost walking. As we approach her grave, it just quits raining miraculously. Then, Zoey she got out ahead of us. As she goes up to the grave, the sun comes out. I don't believe in any of this stuff.

Justin Chang: Holy. Wow.

Rick: I'm just telling you what I witnessed with my own eyes. We walk back. We put our umbrellas down and go back. We shoot the whole rest of the afternoon, and we get the scene.

Justin Chang: That's incredible. You've had a really long career, Rick, and one that is nowhere near its end either. It's difficult. It gets more difficult by the day and by the year if you talk to filmmakers, especially independent filmmakers. I feel like you are a unique figure in having hit on something that works for you and you alone. You are one of the key figures, of course, of the Austin film world and the independent film scene that was certainly not fully there when you arrived in the '80s. Do you feel that you are finding a way amid the apocalyptic gloom that I feel hangs over the film industry at this point in time? Apocalyptic gloom that hangs over everything, especially the film industry.

[laughter]

Rick: My filmmaking grew out of my own little film community. It's a good world. I love the cinema world, the subculture of cinephiles. I didn't know many filmmakers, though. Myself and others we were the first wave of that. I think Nouvelle Vague, that moment in time, is so special because there was just such a high concentration of great filmmakers and films. You have to make that happen for yourself.

I think the American indie world that had come to be in the '80s and '90s, I was a beneficiary of what came before, and then a part of a good era after that. I can get films made under a certain budget. I have just enough, maybe I can attract some actors to work with me. I'm still doing that. That's how we got Blue Moon. No one got paid, but it was like, "Challenging material. Let's do this."

Even when I started, the early '90s, it was always gloom and doom. We were actually in a pretty good era. It was the last, what seems to me, the last great era of studios. They had bigger slates of films, and they took chances on young filmmakers. Come on. They gave me $6 million to make a film with no stars, at least at the time, "Hey, maybe it'll be the next American Graffiti." They could talk themselves into that. At some point, they're like, "No, we're not doing that."

When I started out, Slacker didn't cost-- It was like $23,000 budget. It made one point something million. Distributors happy. Everybody's happy. It was seen as a success. Now that just doesn't register. It's an artistic success, cultural success. I think it became so unaffordable. The modern world, we've just ground ourselves in the dirt because everything is so expensive.

The real expense in films is marketing. It's so expensive to break through the American consumer consciousness, because everybody's so distracted, to let them know your film even exists, where it used to be they could just put some full-page ads in the Weekly and boom, you're in the culture. Not anymore. These two films I have now they're both strange little indie films. I don't know where they fit.

Justin Chang: Rick, I'm very excited for these two movies to make their way into the world. Thank you, Richard Linklater. It's been a pleasure talking to you.

Rick: Thank you, Justin. It's really nice talking with you today.

[music]

Host: Richard Linklater's Blue Moon comes out next week, and Nouvelle Vague a week after that. You can read Justin Chang on the movies at newyorker.com.

[music]

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