Nouvelle Vague

By 1959, everyone had already made their first film—except him. When he finally did, Jean-Luc Godard left a lasting imprint on the history of cinema, just like the other “young Turks” of the Cahiers du Cinéma. Linklater conjures up the period leading up to the shoot of À BOUT DE SOUFFLE (1960), the entire twenty days of filming, the first day in the editing suite, and the film’s initial private screening among close friends. How does one go about filming something of this sort? By dismantling the myth, favouring a playful approach and concentrating on the sheer pleasure of filmmaking. The method is straightforward: to imagine the off-screen spaces of those indelible scenes, to render the Cahiers stars (the casting is superb) as warm, generous characters and to foreground the emotional currents that ran between them all. When JLG tells Georges de Beauregard he could only work with a producer who was also a friend, the film is also quietly declaring its own ethos: friendship is Linklater’s great affective utopia. This is the emotional prism through which he reimagines the preparations for this iconic debut film, without ever neglecting the precise framings that honour JLG’s directorial decisions. (Roger Koza)

Richard Linklater (selection): SLACKER (1990), DAZED AND CONFUSED (1993), BEFORE SUNRISE (1995), WAKING LIFE (2001), SCHOOL OF ROCK (2003), BEFORE SUNSET (2005), FAST FOOD NATION (2006), A SCANNER DARKLY (2006), ME AND ORSON WELLES (2008), BEFORE MIDNIGHT (2013), BOYHOOD (2014), LAST FLAG FLYING (2017), WHERE D’YOU GO, BERNADETTE (2019), HIT MAN (2023), BLUE MOON (2025)