Following its Cannes debut, Linklater’s French language Nouvelle Vague has been purchased by Netflix. More here.
“If you do it long enough, I always thought you can make one film about making films. This is mine,” the filmmaker said at the Cannes press conference for Nouvelle Vague, his new film which charts the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. It does so in black and white and entirely in the French language.
The film debuted at Cannes and Netflix has now opted to pick up the US rights for the movie, at a cost of $4m, a record outlay for a French language film in that territory.
While Deadline's report doesn’t confirm that the UK rights are also part of that deal, that has also been reported elsewhere although we wouldn’t take that as official confirmation just yet. Linklater’s last film, Hit Man was also picked up – albeit some time afterwards – by the streamer after being announced just prior to Cannes in 2023.
Nouvelle Vague ‘tells the story of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, which follows Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a small-time criminal on the run after killing a policeman, and his romantic entanglement with Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), an American journalism student in Paris’.
Linklater’s ode to the French New Wave is shot on black and white film in the 4:3 aspect ratio and stars Guillaume Marbeck as Godard, Zoey Deutch as Godard’s star Jean Seberg and Aubry Dullin as Jean-Paul Belmondo.
Given how Godard and his contemporaries were devotees of the cinematic experience, often watching films in cinemas on loops repeatedly, we do wonder about the sanctity of this project heading to Netflix where any kind of cinematic run it receives will be fairly minimal.
Still, that’s the world we live in these days.
You can catch a brief teaser for Linklater’s film below. We don’t yet have release details for the project but when we do hear more, we’ll let you know.
