In last year’s Nouvelle Vague (“New Wave”), director Richard Linklater, in his first feature film shot entirely in French, took pains to achieve historical verisimilitude in his fly-on-the-wall depiction of the making of the 1960 French New Wave film Breathless (À bout de souffle), perhaps the most influential film ever made. He shot it on 35mm black-and-white film using the aspect ratio—1.37:1—to match the visual aesthetic of late-1950s cinema. In post-production, he added digital grain, gate weave, and fine scratches. He combined this sort of archival patina with other artistic flourishes to make a film that looks beautiful. It sounds great too. The jazzy/poppy soundtrack transports the audience back to atmosphere of 1959 Paris.
Breathless was directed by Jean-Luc Godard—Nouvelle Vague’s protagonist—and starred Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg. Guillaume Marbeck is spot on in his portrayal of Godard, the intellectual who wears sunglasses everywhere. Zoey Deutch’s pixieish Seberg projects strength and humor as she struggles with the creative tension of an orthodox, established American star working with an unorthodox, first-time French director. Aubry Dullin, as Belmondo, is so full of natural charm that his scant acting experience isn’t noticeable. His spontaneity highlights why Belmondo was able to thrive within Godard's loose parameters.
The audience sees Godard as the self-absorbed, uncompromising person he was, but those traits are what allowed him to break every cinematic rule on the way to making Breathless. In developing the idea for the film, Godard tells its producer, Georges de Beauregard, that all it takes to make a film is “a girl and a gun.” The story he settles on is based on the true story in the film noir mode of a petty criminal with a beautiful American girlfriend who steals a car, shoots a cop, and goes on the run before his girlfriend turns him in.
Continuing the conversation with Beauregard, Godard reveals the essence of his auteur philosophy: “The instantaneous and unexpected are excluded in a formal narrative. It's time to explore that.” This departure from conventionality concerns his producer, who's not yet aware that his director plans to explore the lyricism left out of formal narratives by shooting the film without a script.
There's a 20-day window for shooting Breathless. Linklater shows Godard sitting in various cafes and restaurants in the mornings of those days as he smokes and writes the script (or tries to) for that day. Sometimes a day’s guerilla shoot only lasts five minutes. If the director can't come up with an idea, he tells the cast there will be no shoot. One day he ended the shoot at noon because he was hungry. Above all, Godard values spontaneity. He doesn't care about “continuity,” or other picky details film directors fret about. “Reality is not continuity!” he informs his concerned script girl when she has a quibble about a teacup in the wrong place.
But the Godard in this film is able, at the right moments, to shed the French-intellectual facade he presents with his shades, chain-smoking, and a stilted conversational style that consists mostly of quoting famous thinkers and giving stern philosophical pronouncements. When Jean Seberg cracks a light-hearted joke about her director learning how to direct as he makes the film, he laughs along with her.
Linklater's meticulous research has produced a piece of work that, on one level, is a step-by-step tutorial on Godard's approach to filmmaking. But Linklater has made a film that's educational and fun to watch. Nouvelle Vague may be only for hardcore cinema enthusiasts, but there's nothing didactic about it.
Godard's well-connected from the years he's spent as a film critic for the magazine Cahiers du Cinema. On a visit to the set of a Jean-Pierre Melville film, the director advises, “Keep your story telling easy. Lose the sub-plots.” “Even the one including you,” jokes Godard. “Of course not,” Melville replies, deadpan. It's breezy humor like this that keeps Nouvelle Vague floating above the self-seriousness that could bog down a film about a man as self-serious as Godard.
Godard’s shooting style meant no sound stages, only natural lighting, and mobile cameras. Filming was done without synchronized sound, allowing Godard to shout out directions to his actors mid-take. All dialogue was dubbed in post-production. Godard shot a maximum of two takes per scene, because repetition makes it “mechanical.” As he puts in this film, “Following the rules won't get me where I want to go.”
With Breathless, Godard rewrote the grammar and the spirit of modern filmmaking, unleashing a global movement that proved low-budget, independent films could defy traditional Hollywood studio practices and succeed. Godard’s use of the jump cut was a revolutionary move previously thought of as an amateurish mistake. In Bonnie and Clyde, director Arthur Penn used jump cuts to jazz up the pacing of some scenes, making them unpredictable and exciting. Martin Scorsese would later use jump cuts in Taxi Driver and Goodfellas to the same effect. Dennis Hopper employed the technique in Easy Rider to capture the psychedelic haze of the era. The disorienting feel of the jump cuts mimics the synapses misfiring under the influence of LSD.
Quentin Tarantino said that Godard did for movies what Bob Dylan did for music. While he didn't mimic his idol’s visual style, Tarantino did adopt his irreverent attitude. Tarantino's style reflects what Godard told his producer, Georges Beauregard: “The instantaneous and unexpected are excluded in a formal narrative.” This is evident in the many Tarantino scenes in which he stalls the narrative to give his characters time for idle chatter, such as, in Pulp Fiction, when Vincent and Jules argue about a foot massage as they're getting ready to carry out a hit.
Godard's influence hasn’t been universal. He used disruptive techniques like visible editing, narrative stalls, and breaking the "fourth wall,” to let his audience know they were watching a movie. But some top directors, like David Fincher, who's Godard's polar opposite, want the viewer to forget that the camera exists. Continuity errors make the meticulous director of The Social Network feel like he's got an itch he can't scratch. Fincher shoots an average of 25-50 takes per scene. Nouvelle Vague shows Godard having his cinematographer shoot a scene from a moving wheelchair. Fincher despises handheld cameras and Steadicams, relying instead on the precision of tripods, dollies and cranes.
Despite representing opposite ends of the cinematic spectrum, both Godard and Fincher have created exceptional films by mastering their chosen filmmaking approach. Godard is the Rolling Stones of directors, while Fincher is Steely Dan. The Stones are raw and unpolished while Steely Dan represents obsessive, studio- engineered perfection. It's no coincidence that, in 1968, Godard directed Sympathy for the Devil, an avant-garde documentary about the Stones.