How I became Jean-Luc Godard
In Richard Linklater’s affectionate and stylish Nouvelle Vague, Guillaume Marbeck plays Jean-Luc Godard as he shoots Breathless, the film that kicked down the door for French New Wave filmmaking and changed cinema. Here – in his own words – Marbeck reveals how he got to the heart of Godard.
Before making this film I used to be a film student, and we had to learn every era of filmmaking in history – about Godard, [François] Truffaut, [Claude] Chabrol and all those great directors that changed the way movies are made.
When I watched Breathless (1960) the first time, I thought this is a movie I could imagine doing, with the technical means that we had, the size of our crew and the type of story that was told. It was a story possible to tell with not a lot of money and not a lot of people. This is why this movie was so important for cinema history. They were just shooting with unknown people, very fast for only 20 days. The story is just a guy who escapes police and finds himself in a hotel room. That’s not a big deal.
I never acted in a movie before. When I got an email from casting director Stéphane Batut offering me to audition for Richard Linklater, playing Godard, it felt like a scam.
I lost the glasses I had for the first audition. It’s very important, because glasses for Godard are like the mask of Spider Man. If you don’t have that, you don’t buy into the character. I called my friend I borrowed the glasses from and he told me, “Come to my store, grab some glasses, go to your audition.” I did, but he arrived 50 minutes late because of a plumbing issue. At the audition, there were 15 people staring. One of them, a crazy woman, said, “You’re late.” I said to myself the first impression is key so, I need to act like Godard. I said [huffily], “Yeah, of course I’m late. I needed the glasses.” I told the story, they were laughing, and we started like that.
Richard Linklater’s goal was for us not to think you’re portraying icons but people that became icons. Back then they were just Jean-Luc and Jean Paul [Belmondo]; there were no big names. He told the crew and people that were acting in this movie, “You’re looking at this guy and you’re not really sure he’s gonna finish his movie.” He wanted all of us to just feel that we are part of a great adventure that we desired for a long time. It was easy, because for a lot of us it was our first project. His advice was, “Always, remember, it’s really fun to make a movie.”
I’ve been a prop assistant, a camera assistant; I’ve been on movie sets. I got a sense of what a movie director could be, but every project you discover that the movie director is just another person that is different. Richard Linklater was a new one that I had to discover. The greatest thing I can keep from the experience is that he was asking questions a lot more than giving directions. By asking questions, he opens new opportunities. Because if you ask the question to every person in the room, “How can we make this thing better?” then you have a lot of insight from everyone, so you are making a movie with 100 brains. Movies reflect humanity, and if there is only one humanity in one movie, then it’s poor. But if you have several humanities, it’s something very special.
The hardest thing was the consistency. Maintaining those details of a gesture, voice, phrasing, and not losing that, and also not doing the same thing over and over during the whole movie, just because you nailed it into one field. I wanted to express different aspects of him. I tend to see in movies when some people are interpreting someone that existed; sometimes it’s very well done but it’s one note. I prefer when it’s going all over the place but stays in the reality of interpreting that person.
Everyone has an opinion on Godard. Either they love him, hate him or they’re indifferent, so it was a great responsibility to play him. But at the same time, all this that has been built around him, it became almost like a cult. I had to not take it too seriously, because he was not taking things too seriously. This is not just a guy that is intellectual. If you really know him, you know he’s reading sports news more than film news. He watched every match of rugby on TV. He’s really not just this intelligent guy with a cigarette.
A lot of cafés in Paris have pictures of the Breathless set. It’s part of the culture, but, at the same time, if you ask young people in the streets, there’s a good chance that if they are not working in the arts they don’t know who Godard is. It’s curious to see how for some people it’s a vivid a memory or thought, and for others it’s blank.
I was like an AI, hitting myself with all the information I could get. Interviews, short movies he’d been in with his friends, biographies, criticism that he wrote and memories from people that knew him. When you tell people in the industry, “I’m going to play Godard,” people say, “Oh, I have a story about him.” By doing this, I had a vision of who he was, in the eye of people. In the movie, you don’t get to know his personal life, what he does when he’s upset and what he really thinks.
I don’t know [what Godard would have thought of my performance], but this is the $8 million question. I tried to respect who he was, to not be too harsh or too gentle with him but to try to portray him with high fidelity. Some people that knew him told me that was the case, so I’m really happy about that, but I wish I could ask him that question and other questions that stay answerless.
As told to Lou Thomas
Nouvelle Vague is in cinemas, including BFI Southbank, from 30 January.