By Miranda Murray
CANNES, France (Reuters) -Acclaimed U.S. director Richard Linklater initially thought his film about the French New Wave movement, “Nouvelle Vague,” would never be shown at theatres in France due to his nationality, he told journalists at the Cannes Film Festival.
“Ten years ago, when we were thinking about this movie, I’m not kidding, at the time I said I imagine a film with subtitles. And I thought, they’ll hate that an American director did it,” he said on Sunday, a day after the film’s red carpet premiere.
“We’ll show it all over the world, but never in France, because they’ll just hate it,” the director of “Boyhood” and “Before Sunset” recalled in the French Riviera resort town.
“But as I got closer to it and I found enthusiastic partners, I realised how much it meant to them,” he said.
“Nouvelle Vague,” shot in a black-and-white 4:3 format with all the actors speaking in French, follows director Jean-Luc Godard, arguably one of the most influential filmmakers of his generation, in the making of the seminal 1960 film “Breathless.”
French actor Guillaume Marbeck plays Godard, while Zoey Deutch and Aubry Dullin play the iconic duo Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo, respectively.
The making of the film was well-documented, which allowed Linklater to faithfully re-enact the 20-day shoot: “We had the camera notes, we had the reports. I never knew more about a film that I didn’t make,” he said.
The Oscar-nominated filmmaker, who shot “Nouvelle Vague” in France, also expressed his admiration for the French film industry and its focus on taking care of the sector.
“The U.S. could use a little bit of that,” Linklater said, adding that he didn’t think U.S. President Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs on foreign-made films would come into force.
“That’s not going to happen, right? The guy changes his mind like 50 times in one day,” Linklater said about Trump.
(Reporting by Miranda Murray and Rollo Ross; Editing by David Holmes)
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