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Richard Linklater’s latest film Nouvelle Vague is not so much a re-enactment of cinema history, but a celebratory tribute act – joyously reliving the spirit of the early French New Wave, as it re-imagines 1959 Paris and the chaotically innovative shooting of Jean-Luc Godard’s epoch-making Breathless (A Bout de Souffle). Most of the cast are newcomers, but there’s one familiar face: American actor Zoey Deutch. She plays Jean Seberg, already a Hollywood star when Godard cast her as expat student and newspaper vendor Patricia. Seberg’s stroll with Jean-Paul Belmondo on the Champs-Elysées, in T-shirt, slacks and ballet flats, is one of the legendary duets of French cinema.
Deutch has Seberg’s style down impeccably: her awkward American-accented French, her balletic bounce in that scene, her exuberant shout of “New York Herald Tribune!” On a Zoom call from Los Angeles, Deutch – Seberg’s blond gamine cut now grown out into symmetrical black bangs – admits that when Linklater first suggested she might play the role, she knew nothing about Seberg, or about Breathless. That was way back in 2014, when they were shooting Linklater’s college baseball comedy Everybody Wants Some!! “I was 19,” says Deutch, “and I know there are plenty of 19-year-olds who are cinephiles and know a ton about that world, but I didn’t.”
Nouvelle Vague is in French: Deutch spent two years learning the language, and perfecting Seberg’s distinctly transatlantic delivery. But on first watching Breathless, Deutch admits, she didn’t quite get what was so extraordinary about the film, since its innovations – its improvisatory openness and staccato rhythms – had long been absorbed into the language of mainstream cinema. “I was mystified. I don’t think I understood how punk rock it was at the time.” If anyone still doesn’t understand, she suggests, they should watch Godard’s film alongside Linklater’s as a double bill: “You get how different and bold Breathless was when you watch it with ours.”
Iowa-born Seberg was discovered as a teenager and, inexperienced though she was, twice played lead for the notoriously demanding Otto Preminger. She was Joan of Arc in his 1957 Saint Joan, for which Seberg said she was “burned at the stake by the press”, then starred in Bonjour Tristesse, in which her ingenue energies impressed critics, including Godard’s comrade-in-arms François Truffaut.
Linklater’s film shows Seberg at a turning point: living in Paris, sceptical about Godard’s potential as a director, but eager for new possibilities. In Nouvelle Vague, Deutch’s Seberg may be mystified and infuriated at Godard’s unpredictability and gnomic pontifications, but she gives as good as she gets, mischievously deflating him, often to his delight.
“She acknowledged his genius,” says Deutch, “and was so grateful for this opportunity that changed her life. But she said in later interviews that he really viewed her more as an idea than a person, ‘He wasn’t interested in who I was, just in what I could represent.’ I think that’s very deep – and certainly the experience of a lot of young women in this business.”
Seberg’s post-Breathless career was busy but variable, most famously starring in 1964 melodrama Lilith, as a patient in a mental hospital who becomes the object of obsessive desire for a staff member, played by Warren Beatty; and appearing with Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood in the 1969 musical Paint Your Wagon. She also made two features directed by her second husband, French novelist Romain Gary, which both objectified her cruelly, 1968’s Birds in Peru making her the centre of a tawdry concoction of Euro-erotica.
Her later life was depicted in the 2019 biopic Seberg, starring Kristen Stewart. When she died at the age of 40 in Paris in 1979, it was presumed to be suicide, after a brutal harassment campaign by the FBI in response to her support of the Black Panther Party. At a press conference afterwards, Gary said the FBI had planted false rumours in the press saying that Seberg’s pregnancy by a Mexican revolutionary called Carlos Navarra in 1970 was actually by a Black Panther.
Deutch studied much of this, although none of it fed directly into Nouvelle Vague. “I always want to look at the big picture,” she says, “but Rick [Linklater] was very insistent in reminding us that we were depicting a moment in time.” The director would say to Guillaume Marbeck, who plays Godard: “You’re not an icon yet – these people are just young, ambitious, kooky artists doing their thing. They are not who we know them to be now.”
When Deutch worked with Linklater on Everybody Wants Some!!, she had the only significant female role in (unusually for the director) an aggressively male film, about college baseball players raising hell and “chasing chicks” in early 80s Texas. “I think he got a vibe that, at 19, I would be able to hold my own with all these macho dudes – like no one would push me around.”
You can well imagine that Deutch would be no pushover, as a Hollywood insider from birth. Her father, Howard Deutch directed the beloved Pretty in Pink; her mother is Lea Thompson, who starred as Lorraine in the Back to the Future trilogy. Thompson was also in Howard the Duck, a notorious flop based on the cult Marvel Comics character, a cigar-chomping, wisecracking waterfowl from another planet. When I joke that perhaps there was a family ban on mentioning that at table, Deutch plays scandalised: “Absolutely not! There’s just pure embracing of Howard the Duck.”
She remembers being very protective of her mother. “You have to imagine being a little kid and there’s strangers coming up, thinking that they know her and saying really inappropriate things, having no boundaries. And then also really lovely people who are just big fans and appreciate her work – but as a kid, you can’t separate the two.” She has continued to back her mother up, including professionally: in 2017, she and her elder sister Madelyn co-starred with their mother in Thompson’s directing debut The Year of Spectacular Men. A comedy-drama about a young woman navigating post-college adulthood, it was written by Madelyn and produced by Zoey.
There’s a brief interruption – a scratching at the door and: “Mabel, stop! Mabel!” Mabel, out of shot and otherwise inaudible, is Deutch’s dog. “Mabel is the star of my life,” Deutch says. Or one of them, at least: last September, she announced her engagement to actor, comic and YouTuber Jimmy Tatro.
Deutch, now 31, has had no shortage of roles since her debut at 15, in Disney’s kids-on-a-cruise-ship sitcom The Suite Life on Deck, although so far only a few have caused major ripples. Well established as a romcom stalwart, she has increasingly collected harder-edged roles: notably, in period gangster drama The Outfit, with Mark Rylance, and in Clint Eastwood’s courtroom thriller Juror No 2. She also made her Broadway debut in Thornton Wilder’s 1938 ensemble classic Our Town, the New York Times praising her “apple-cheeked and wild-souled” Emily. “I have loved this play so much that it stood on my nightstand for my whole life,” she says. “There are certain texts in all of our lives that just ground us. This was one of them.”
Then there was one of her tougher movies, last year’s Anniversary, with Polish director Jan Komasa. Given her sheer insouciance in Nouvelle Vague, Deutch’s ferociously intense breakdown scene here comes as quite a shock. Anniversary is a bleak dystopian parable about the emergence of a new authoritarian America. And indeed, this week in Sundance, where she is premiering a new comedy, Deutch spoke out against the brutality of ICE and expressed solidarity with the people of Minnesota: “I feel so proud to be an American, seeing the way communities and people are coming together during this time. But I feel so ashamed at the same time to be an American, seeing how our government is handling things.”
Nouvelle Vague has every likelihood of pushing Deutch definitively into the limelight. Seberg, playing Joan of Arc at 18, might not have been prepared for fame, but Deutch has been practising since the age of five, when she started acting classes. She was encouraged rather than pushed, she says, but admits it was her mother’s idea to enrol her for “kid improv”.
Deutch says: “At a young age, I learned that if you say ‘No’ to adults, they have to explain things to you. So ‘No’ got me more communication and more of an opportunity to be treated like an adult. And then my mother said, ‘What’s the opposite of no? Yes – yes and!’ So she put me in improv and it totally changed my life. I have ‘Yes’ actually tattooed on my foot, so that I can look down and say ‘Yes’ to the world.”
By way of illustration, Deutch hauls her foot into the Zoom frame to display it. After Nouvelle Vague, perhaps it’s time to get the other one tattooed with a bold “Oui!”
