Nouvelle Vague, the centerpiece of the 2025 American French Film Festival, celebrates French New Wave.
Like a running flip book of vintage black-and-white postcards, Nouvelle Vague captures 1959 Paris, reimagining the making of the French New Wave anchor, Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle, known in English as Breathless. Written by Vince Palmo & Holly Gent-Palmo, and directed by Richard Linklater, the film is a whimsical, imaginative homage to the groundbreaking classic. The English script was translated into French with adaptations and dialogues by Michèle Halberstadt & Laetitia Masson. Nouvelle Vague is the centerpiece of the 2025 American French Film Festival taking place October 28-November 3 at the Directors Guild of America.
Along with his contemporaries, directors François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Pierre Melville, and Louis Malle, Godard was a driving force of the French Wave movement. Breathless debuted in Paris in 1960, when Godard, 30, was illustrating how the art form could break free of the traditional auteur constraints of the big studios system. The French New Wave was about working in low budget/no budget freedom, individuality, and creative work-arounds. Cameras were lighter, for running shots on city streets where unknowing passers-by were de facto extras. Forget about take-after-take and endless hours of coverage—one take, maybe two, and all’s good. And natural light is fine. So are jump cuts and improvised storytelling. The hard left turn would prove a revolutionary pivot for cinema. (Could we have had The Blair Witch Project without the French New Wave?)
In Breathless, a petty thief, Michel, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, commits a crime and hides out in his American girlfriend, Patricia’s, apartment. As he waits out the police, Michel tries to get enough money for the pair to escape to Italy. Patricia (played by Jean Seberg), a journalist, finds out what a heinous crime he committed, and starts to question their alliance. In the Nouvelle Vague re-creation, we follow along as film-critic-turned-director Godard negotiates how best to tell this story, working on a shoestring budget with mischievous actors and a cranky producer shadowing him. The film follows the classic shot-for-shot, in a world-within-a-world tableaux of the original Breathless.
To capture Godard, the screenwriters relied on their devotion to the director. Palmo remembers, “I had read a Truffaut biography and I remember talking about it with Rick—how Truffaut set up his own production company, Les Films du Carrosse, and the dream was to be writing a script, while shooting a movie and editing another movie and to keep that groove going forever. That led to reading Truffaut’s and Godard’s criticism which led to books about the French New Wave. But Holly and I kept coming back to Godard and how he absolutely had to direct—that intention of his. It reminded us of Me and Orson Welles—a way to tell the story of something formative for a future legend, while they were young and driven and on the verge. We like putting-on-a-show stories and how galvanizing it can be to be part of a group of like-minded dreamers. We also had Godard truly wanting to have directed by age 25, like Welles.”
Going through the process of filmmaking with Richard Linklater many times over the years, we had a shared love for the process, and that love became Nouvelle Vague.
- Holly Gent-Palmo
“We must have 50 books on Godard and the New Wave we’ve collected over the years,” adds Gent-Palmo. “Vince is a completist and really reads them all and knows so much. I’m a skimmer who will latch on to one detail and fall in love. There’s a balance between those methods—a sort of, seeing the forest or the trees. Vince shows me every tree and I don’t let him get lost in the forest. One thing I’ve learned about Godard is how much of his myth was gleefully self-created. There’s something so charming about that to me.”
Nouvelle Vague (French pronunciation: [nuvɛl vaɡ]) was quite literally a labor of love that was years in the making. Linklater, Gent-Palmo, and Palmo had all been fans of Jean-Luc Godard, in their own respective ways, when they met 33 years ago on Linklater’s Dazed and Confused—at that time, Gent-Palmo and Palmo were on the crew. A collaborative friendship between the three WGAW members spawned work on several more movies, as director and writers.
Palmo remembers, “Holly and I first started work on this script in 2011, and I told Rick while playing tennis one day: ‘Hey, Holly and I are writing something about Godard and the making of Breathless.’” Years would go by, and the team would revisit the project now and again. The script would go from 160 pages to a trim 95.
“We honed the script down at the end, and that was so fun,” says Gent-Palmo, “Distance from a project can change your POV—there’s a certain perspective that time sometimes gives you. Collaborating with Rick is having a friendship with him. You talk about all sorts of things, and somehow it all informs the project eventually. Scripts and stories are borne of things you’re interested in, that you’ve experienced, that you’ve studied. Going through the process of filmmaking with Rick many times over the years, we had a shared love for the process, and that love became Nouvelle Vague.”
Of course, Paris of 1959 is a main character in Linklater’s black-and-white world. No detail would go overlooked. “Rick would send us images every day of shooting and we were constantly bowled over,” says Palmo. “We've watched the movie many times, line by line, while refining the subtitles, and we could not be happier with the look of the film.”
“Making a film is lightning in a bottle, and you don’t know while you’re making it how it will come together,” adds Gent-Palmo. “Rick’s vision for this script still sort of blows my mind. The first line of our script was, Technical Note: This is the story of Godard making BREATHLESS told in the style and spirit in which Godard made BREATHLESS. When I wrote that, I had absolutely no concept how true it would be. It’s pretty thrilling. It’s really thrilling, actually.”
The American French Film Festival screening of Nouvelle Vague will take place Oct. 30 at 6 p.m. followed by a conversation with Richard Linklater and actors Guillaume Marbeck and Zoey Deutch.
