Zoey Deutch takes on Jean Seberg in Richard Linklater’s ode to ‘Breathless’

When making a movie about the behind-the-scenes saga of one of the most transformative and influential films of all time, one might not expect it all to hinge on a haircut. And yet for the team behind “Nouvelle Vague,” about the production of Jean-Luc Godard’s radically freewheeling 1960 feature debut, “Breathless,” it kind of did.

As the film’s director, Richard Linklater, puts it, “All the roads led up to the haircut moment.”

Linklater, himself a generationally influential filmmaker for movies such as “Slacker,” “Before Sunrise” and “Boyhood,” first worked with actor Zoey Deutch on the 2016 baseball comedy “Everybody Wants Some!!” It was then that he first mentioned to her the idea of playing Jean Seberg, the American star who took on the female lead in Godard’s Paris-set film about a doomed low-level gangster on the run from the police. (Having premiered earlier this year at Cannes, “Nouvelle Vague” will touch down at festivals in both Toronto and New York before coming to theaters Oct. 31, then on Netflix on Nov. 14.)

Seberg’s haircut in the original film, a super-short, blond pixie cut, rewrote fashion trends around the world and encapsulated a spirit of youthful, diffident insouciance. Working with colorist Tracey Cunningham and stylist Bridget Brager in Los Angeles, Deutch recreated the look. During a recent interview at Netflix’s offices on Sunset Boulevard with a straight-on view of the Hollywood sign, Deutch says she had no fear about the transformation.

“It was so much harder for everybody else around me,” says Deutch, 30, her hair currently at a sleek shoulder length and dyed a rich dark brown. “I found that people, women and men, were like, ‘How do you feel? Are you OK? This is so crazy. What’s it like?’ It was the focal point of every discussion. It was like a cool social experiment.”

For Linklater, it was worth the wait.

“You can imagine for months and months I’m in Paris, saying, ‘This is Jean Seberg,’ and people are seeing this dark-haired American,” recalls Linklater in a Zoom call from his home in Texas. “I was like, ‘She’s the perfect Seberg, trust me.’ And then in through the door comes the pixie-cutted Zoey as Seberg. And everybody was like, ‘Oh, OK. That’s her.’”

Deutch often brings a mischievous playfulness to her performances, a knowing sense that she gets it, regardless of the genre or situation. Which fits in well with the movie-mad world of Godard and the community of French New Wave filmmakers in “Nouvelle Vague.”

“Zoey’s a good old-fashioned chameleon,” says Linklater, calling her a “body-of-work actress” for the broad range of roles she is capable of, from the teen drama “Before I Fall” to rom-coms like “Set It Up” and even a legal thriller in “Juror #2.”

“You look at her films, she can be very different and not afraid to play an a— or someone who has very strong feelings, and so there’s a certain constant bravery to Zoey that I really admire.”

In the intervening years since shooting “Everybody Wants Some!!,” Linklater and Deutch have remained in-touch and he casually mentioned the Seberg project once or twice. A few years ago, on the off chance it might actually come to be, Deutch began studying the films of the French New Wave and learning to speak French.

“I thought just in case, let me be ready to be lucky,” she says, in Los Angeles for a day while on a break from shooting the upcoming “Voicemails for Isabelle” in Vancouver.

There was a television interview from August 1960 in which Seberg gives a tour of her apartment in Paris, speaking both French and English, that became a touchstone for Deutch. You can hear Seberg attempting to mask her natural Midwestern accent with a more mid-Atlantic flavor popular among performers at that time — and then also speak French on top of that.

“I was grateful that I got to play her at a moment in time when her French wasn’t perfect, because that was less intimidating,” says Deutch.

She adds, “I find her to be an incredibly mysterious person. And me not speaking French and having to learn the language helped me kind of step into her a little bit a lot more, between that and the hair. There’s a certain set of challenges with doing an entire movie in a language you don’t speak, but a huge gift because it helped me understand her essence.”

Originally from Marshalltown, Iowa, Seberg leaped to fame following an international talent search by director Otto Preminger for the leading role of his 1957 medieval epic, “Saint Joan.” The actor was physically harmed while shooting the film’s climactic burned-at-the-stake scene, then suffered terribly from the film’s bad reviews. Preminger cast her again in his 1958 “Bonjour Tristesse” and again psychologically tormented her during the film’s production.

After “Breathless” made her an international star, Seberg’s career continued to have its ups and downs, with her radical politics leading to her being put under surveillance by the FBI. In 1979, her body would be discovered in the backseat of her car in Paris, her death ruled a suicide.

“Is the rest of her life incredibly fascinating and intense and tragic? Yes,” says Deutch. “But Rick was really adamant on telling a story at a very specific moment in time. We’re not telling anything that happens after. Godard is not a legend yet. You don’t know who this guy is, what he’s doing. He’s not who he was later. Don’t read the last page of the book when we’re still on Page 1.”

The teasing dynamic between Seberg and Godard (played by Guillaume Marbeck) is the core of “Nouvelle Vague,” with Seberg often exasperated by the emerging director’s unconventional ideas — and vocal about it. Deutch’s impressions of Marbeck’s deadpan Godardian grumble, sometimes affectionate, sometimes sarcastically biting, are a comedic highlight of the movie. Eventually the two come to appreciate each other.

In preparing for the film, Deutch realized she would in essence be playing three parts: the actual Seberg, the character of Patricia in “Breathless” and the moments when Seberg is popping through while playing Patricia.

The re-creation in “Nouvelle Vague” of one of the most famous scenes from “Breathless,” — Jean-Paul Belmondo and Seberg sharing a flirtatious stroll down the Champs-Élysées — required Deutch to exhaustively match the onscreen movements of Seberg as Patricia while also speaking as Seberg, since the film had its dialogue recorded later, essentially playing two characters at the same time.

While Seberg may have been plucked from obscurity and tossed into a literal trial-by-fire with her first two movies, Deutch was born in Los Angeles, the child of “Back to the Future” star Lea Thompson and veteran director Howard Deutch (“Pretty in Pink”). Still, she recognized something in Seberg’s struggles.

“There is a sort of collective unconscious understanding amongst anyone who’s been a young actress — you get it,” says Deutch. “No one’s exempt from the experience of what it means to be a woman in Hollywood at a young age, regardless of what year it is.

“But I have immense empathy and feel deep pain for her circumstances of not having a community around her that could help her, when she was 19, navigate in these in insane waters,” adds Deutch. “She’s an incredibly strong, brave, brilliant woman. It’s absolutely correct we have very different backgrounds and I feel for anybody that comes into this world and doesn’t have a foundation or a support system around them.”

The production of “Nouvelle Vague” had access to voluminous information on the production of “Breathless,” from many books and documentaries to the paperwork of the original shoot itself. The actual camera used by cinematographer Raoul Coutard to shoot “Breathless” is the one seen onscreen capturing the action in “Nouvelle Vague.”

While the film’s costume designer, Pascaline Chavanne, did deep-dive research into the origins of the clothes in the original film, some garments were provided by Chanel, including a reproduction of a cappuccino-colored striped dress that Deutch liked so much she wore it to the photo call for the film at Cannes.

The production had to recreate the iconic T-shirt worn by Seberg for the Champs-Élysées scene featuring the logo for the New York Herald Tribune. It has become one of the film’s most cherished images.

“There were places where we could be more fluid and interpretive, but that shirt was not one of them,” recalls Deutch, with genuine seriousness. “We wanted the ribbing to be perfect. We did so many different variations of it with the text and the size and getting it perfect.”

Deutch also reverse-engineered moments from “Breathless” that she would drop in elsewhere in “Nouvelle Vague,” such as skipping onto set or repeating a line with different inflections, to imply that Godard may have plucked them from the world of the film’s production and inserted them into the story. She observed this was a technique Linklater had used when they were shooting “Everybody Wants Some!!” to bring the unpredictable liveliness of the making of the movie into the movie itself.

“I basically just obsessively watched ‘Breathless’ and said, ‘What are some weird moments that I’m confused why they’re there?’” says Deutch, who sees Godard and Linklater as similar in spirit. “They are both directors of deep and true authenticity. And I liked the idea that both of them would do something like that because they’re present and they’re looking.”

Linklater describes making the new film as “a kind of séance” with the dead, noting that only two people portrayed in the movie are known to still be alive. Recreating a famous moment — such as when Seberg runs her finger over her lips as Belmondo had done — was deeply meaningful to him: an invocation.

“My favorite moments are when you finish a scene — an actor does something just great — and you’re the first one to know it,” says Linklater. “You’ve worked on it and you recognize it and you know what they just did was fantastic. And you can’t wait to edit it and put it in the movie.

“But then they say ‘cut’ and the real world quickly fills up that space,” he adds. “Magic just happened but then, OK, we’re moving on. Just the way life seeps back into the magic — what did it look like to everyone else there?”

“There’s always that layer when you’re filming a movie, it’s just people don’t know it’s there,” says Deutch. “No one ever watches the movie and knows that day you got into a fight with your husband or your dog died or it was raining and your mascara was smearing. No one has any context and no one really cares. Generally they see it for what it is. But you feel it and see it and remember.”

She’s articulating a mission statement as good as any. In combining the emotions of “Breathless” with the story of its creation, “Nouvelle Vague” finds a heart and meaning of its own: when people with ambition, talent and creative drive step into their own power.