Richard Linklater on His Two New Films, “Blue Moon” and “Nouvelle Vague”

0:02This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

0:11This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm 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. And then there are crowd-pleasers like School of Rock and the more recent Hitman. 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.

0:50Our film critic, Justin Chang, wrote about both in The New Yorker. I think that there is a kind of casual mastery that he's achieved and I think it's on display in these two movies in Blue Moon we have to celebrate this is the greatest musical in the history of American theater no no I'm not drinking with you Larry and Nouveau Vague

1:30Blue 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 Rogers. 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. And the Nouvelle Vague is, of course, what we know as the French New Wave. and 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 and at the center of the movie is Jean-Luc Godard, who hasn't made his first film.

2:22And 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. And 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 Rogers eclipsed in the public imagination because Oklahoma has just opened on Broadway. And from that point on, of course, Rogers and Hammerstein being the most famous names on Broadway. This is such a perverse premise for a film about a great artist.

3:03And it's very, 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? This is like 13 years ago. I'm like, Robert, what are you working on? I'm writing about Lorenz Hart. And 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. And he knew the story that Hart did actually go and he was trying to be a good sport. But I mean, just logic tells you he's just dying inside.

3:39And my tagline for this movie that they're not going to use on any posters, but it's my tagline. It's called Forgotten, But Not Gone. There he is. It's so heartbreaking, awkward, but to do a film about the end of someone's career in that great age of, you know, where there were so many show tunes. He was so prolific. I mean, they did a thousand songs. They had a great quarter century run. As Rogers tells him, it's not the work. It's, you know, it's his alcoholism. It's his life. It's his, you know, he's just made himself impossible to work with, and 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, you know, not just by his partner, but by the times.

4:29And I'm telling you, I swear to God, our best work is still ahead of us. Yes, the new Connecticut Yankees. Yeah, yeah, and bigger stuff. All right, I'm coming. Marco Polo is going to be a show about joy, but a hard-earned joy, an unsentimental joy. Something wrong with sentimental? Well, it's too easy.

4:53Oklahoma's 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. It's too easy for me. Did you hear the audience tonight? Yes. 1 ,600 people didn't think it was too easy. You're telling me 1 ,600 people are wrong? I'm just saying. You know, Oklahoma is, it's not just a huge success, but it changes Broadway history. Like, it's a before and after. Like, oh, musicals are just going to be different. To see yourself sort of go extinct, you know, there's a little bit of Salieri aspect. Right. Although, Larry Hart's a genius, you know.

5:36That's right. Salieri was kind of a, you know, a mediocrity, as he called himself. Yeah. 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. And Larry sort of represents perhaps what it needs in the sense of like for I don't know if it's about moral betterment, but just aesthetic betterment, perhaps. Exactly. Whereas Rogers makes the case for no, there's a place for sentiment. There's a place for emotion. emotion. I should note, of course, Ethan Hawke plays Larry. And when you've read this, did you have him in mind for this from the beginning as well to play Larry Hart?

6:17It 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. I mean, most people would say, oh, this should be a play. But I'm like, no, no, no. But I don't think Ethan immediately even thought I was offering it to him as to play hard. He's kind of an unlikely choice. He's a foot taller than hard. 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.

6:54I say it's hard to portray a genius. You can only portray a genius with a little bit of that yourself. But I knew Ethan could do it having work with them a lot i mean this is the ninth time we've worked together um we hadn't worked together in 10 years so 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 so like even we've been working on this all these years would have readings and go through it but um i was like yeah it's time to make this darn it let's let's do it it is interesting because Because so many of your films do have this lengthy gestation, and it has to get done in 15 days, 30 days, what have you.

7:34Is it weird to live with a project for that long? And I know you lived with both Blue Moon and Nouveau Vogue 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. 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 know you're really finding the movie you're finding the tone the look everything about it i have to feel my way through it i want to go back a little bit too to ethan hawk 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, and 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.

8:28This is very stylized. This is someone who is a real person, and so there is a precision that he has to achieve. Did you direct Ethan differently than you have done in the past? You know, 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. I mean, what is Larry Hart? He's not really a body. 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.

9:13That's all that. You know, you're playing this gay guy in 1943 who doesn't have typical relations. And he's very, you know, the closeted of the time. It's a portrait of that time, which is, you know, very, very different. And 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. And like, I was a naggy director. Like, Ethan, you did that thing again. You don't have to let the words carry it. You don't have to act. You know, I was just riding his ass about stuff. But I thought that's what it required.

9:52I 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. And Ethan's like, yeah, wow. To be doing something that's just bumping me at the absolute limit of my talent. 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.

10:16Richard Linklater, talking with The New Yorker's Justin Chang. More in a moment.

10:35This is a good point to sort of 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 because – and it's funny, not a slacker in the sense that we often, I think, incorrectly assume and that I think your films are a corrective to, which is this idea that slackerdom or slackerism equates to laziness, and it's not. It is there's – 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.

11:14And he's probably surprising himself as well. And so, in a way, what you do with time is interesting because it's like – it's sitting in a moment and not crowding something with plot. There's a certain harmony to that, I think. and, of course, sitting with the quotidian, sitting with the things we don't think make a movie, right? In Nouveau 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. And I think he's driven by the idea if you're going to do something different, it's okay to, you have to do it differently.

11:56You know, he'll call the first day of productions rolling her on great. Everybody's like, what next? And he says, no, that's it for the day. I'm out of ideas.

12:18There's like a cinematic revolution going on, but for those there, it certainly didn't feel that way. You know, films are funny. You don't know if they're in, you know, you can be on sets where everything everybody thinks it's going great. They're applauding after the actors finish their take. And then at the end of the day, it's like, God, this film doesn't work at all. And then there can be other films where madness, no one knows what's going on. And then it'd be good. It'd work. And 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.

12:51None of you guys are. You're just all youngsters with this opportunity. And I couldn't help but relate to making my first film when I had people around me. So, it's exhilarating. It's what you want to be doing, but it's also terrifying. It's also really humbling. So, I think you only make your first film once. So, 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 breathless godar's 1960 film one of the great debuts now in cinema history it's funny godar and his friends are sort of joking comparing it to sort of citizen kane or something and it's no citizen kane it's no citizen kane and and yet as i was you know thinking about it it's like it is one of the few debuts that could actually stand unembarrassed next to citizen kane and it's uh You can say that about every movie, but that movie, I know it so well now.

13:48I can tell you how many takes they did of every scene. We had the real camera from it was our camera in the movie. I was very, it was so fascinating to be so close under the hood of another movie like this. And I even said, like, this isn't a film, 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. And I was talking to a cinephile friend of mine like two years before. And he's like, yeah, that never really works, does it? When people try to. And I was like, yeah, you're right. It doesn't work when you try to do that.

14:25So I took that as a challenge and like, let's try it. Let's see if we can pull it off. So there was two levels at work. One was kind of erasing film history beyond that point. At this point, if you see the way they shot those films, it's pretty simple. especially good art. It's kind of in the editing room. But, you know, they just follow the action as best they can. And they didn't have cranes. They didn't have much money. So, they're shooting off balconies. And, you know, it was really the spirit of the characters, the story, but the techniques, they were pretty limited. And then in my own mind, I just approached it like, I'm 28, making my first film again.

15:07We took a really simplistic kind of fun, naive is maybe even the word. So 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 Nouveau Vogue. It was very emotional actually to kind of 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 kind of Zoe Deutsch'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 and the last image is her standing in the crosswalk.

15:55That is only about 200 meters from where Gene Seberg's buried. She's in Mount Purness Cemetery. She's amazingly close to that location. So it was lunchtime. It's pouring rain. We're maybe not going to get our day. We're on a tight schedule and budget and everything. We all have umbrellas and Zoe says, let's go visit Jean. Because we've been there before, you know. But I was like, yeah, let's just go. So at lunch, we walked over there and as we approached her grave, Zoe is Jean Seberg. She looks, she's in the dress at the end, her hair. She's a ghost walking out. As we approach her grave, it just kind of quits raining miraculously.

16:35And then as Zoe, she got out ahead of us and she goes up to the grave, the sun comes out. And I don't believe in any of this stuff. I'm just telling you what I witnessed with my own eyes. And we walk back, we put our umbrellas down and go back and we shoot the whole rest of the afternoon and we get the scene. That's incredible. You've had a really long career, Rick, and one that is nowhere near its end either. I mean, but talking about, you know, it's difficult and 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.

17:14And 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. And I'm just, do you feel that you are finding a way amid the sort of apocalyptic gloom that I feel hangs over the film industry at this point in time? Apocalyptic gloom that hangs over everything, but especially the film industry. 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 kind of a first wave of that.

17:55But I think Nouveau Vague, that moment in time is so special because there was just such a high concentration of great filmmakers and films. So you have to make that happen for yourself. I think the American indie world that had kind of come to be in the 80s and 90s, I was sort of 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. you know i have just enough maybe i can attract some actors to work with me and you know i'm still doing that that's how we got blue moon you know no one got paid but it was like challenging material let's let's do this i mean even when i started you know let's say the early 90s it was always gloom and doom and 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.

18:52Like, come on. You know, they gave me six million to make a film with no stars, at least at the time. And, you know, hey, maybe it'll be the next American Graffiti. You know, they could talk themselves into that. But at some point, they're like, no, we're not doing that. You know, when I started out, Slacker didn't cost, you know, 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. You know, it's like an artistic success, cultural success, but I think it became so unaffordable. The modern world, we've just ground ourselves in the dirt because everything's so expensive.

19:30You know, 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, you know, full-page ads in the weekly, and boom, you're in the culture. Not anymore, and I don't even know, These two films I have now, they're both kind of strange little indie films. I don't know where they fit. Well, 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.

20:04Well, thank you, Justin. Yeah, it's really nice talking with you today.

20:11Richard 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. I'm David Remnick. That's our program for today. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

20:47and Ursula Sommer, with guidance from Emily Botin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Guan, and Alejandra Dequet. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherena Endowment Fund.