Richard Linklater’s Uncompromising Artists

Zoey Deutch, who plays Seberg in “Nouvelle Vague,” said that Linklater had first approached her about the project in 2014, while she was shooting a role in “Everybody Wants Some!!” She didn’t hear anything until years later, when “Nouvelle Vague” was finally beginning to come together. “I don’t think that people were aligned with him on my casting. For whatever reason, he really protected that,” she said. “He’s very decisive, and when he has an idea, and he wants to do something, he does it.” She described Linklater’s process as one of patient, continual nurturing. “He’s so chill,” she said, with a laugh. “He’s constantly watering all these little things, and then maybe in fifteen years it’ll grow.”

On the evening of my visit to Austin, offerings at A.F.S. Cinema included the Diane Keaton drama “Looking for Mr. Goodbar,” from 1977, on a 35-mm. print, and the recent documentary “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley.” Linklater and his longtime partner, Tina Harrison, opted to see “Harvest,” a medieval folk drama directed by the Greek filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari. Linklater knows Tsangari well. In 1989, Tsangari was on a fellowship in Austin, and randomly met Linklater while he was auditioning actors for “Slacker.” She wound up working as a production assistant on the film and appeared in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it role (“Cousin from Greece,” per the credits). Decades later, after directing films of her own, Tsangari co-produced and appeared in Linklater’s “Before Midnight,” which was filmed in Greece.

A.F.S. Cinema was quiet, typical for a Tuesday night, but Linklater said that business had been healthy of late. He was heartened to see so many young people showing up—not just for new releases but for repertory titles, too. “I think something’s locked in with young people, like, the culture of cinema,” he said. “It’s super encouraging.” He reminisced about going to see movies in New York in the late eighties, at now defunct repertory houses like the Thalia SoHo. But he isn’t a purist about theatres, and his passion is bound up with an unmistakable pragmatism about the film industry and its never-ending commercial and technological flux. Linklater’s most recent two features before “Nouvelle Vague” and “Blue Moon” were Netflix titles: “Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood” (2022) and “Hit Man” (2023). Both were in theatres for only a week or so, before being released on the platform. Netflix’s involvement with “Hit Man” drew grumbles from some industry observers, and some opined that the film, a romantic comedy starring Glen Powell, would have made a killing in theatres. Linklater didn’t disagree, but he placed the blame on the studios that had passed on the film to begin with. “They’ve abdicated a kind of filmmaking,” he said, in an interview with IndieWire. “They’re not interested in adult entertainment.”

I winced when I heard that Netflix had snapped up “Nouvelle Vague”; it seemed wrong that an ode to cinema’s past glories might wind up as just another rectangle on a platform menu. I wondered whether Linklater thought that some Netflix viewers, after streaming the movie, might be sufficiently inspired to sign up for the Criterion Channel? Linklater chuckled at this idea and offered his own counter-perspective. “When you break it down, it’s, like, O.K., black-and-white French film. How long does that stay in American theatres?” he said. Netflix had offered the best of both worlds—access to a nation-wide streaming audience, plus a level of theatrical play commensurate with what the movie would have received from a traditional art-house distributor anyway. “Blue Moon,” as it happens, does have a traditional art-house distributor, Sony Pictures Classics. Thus, even in terms of release strategy, the films are in conversation about how the arts and artists evolve.

Premature obituaries for filmmaking and exhibition are nothing new. Linklater observed that the film industry has been in a state of existential crisis since at least 1948, when the Supreme Court brought the vertically integrated Hollywood studio system to an end. “You’re under threat all the time,” he said, almost cheerfully; for him, this is what has made film so adaptable and resilient. Cinema, Linklater felt, would survive whatever was thrown at it. He tentatively suggested, in another political segue, that America would survive, too. “I think we have one more chance, if we’re lucky,” he said. “If we get that wrong, then we’re truly fucked.”

Still, the political fatigue he had alluded to earlier remained there in his tone, and he admitted that withdrawing into the isolation of his work had definite appeal. Among his current projects, one—about the thinkers of the transcendentalist movement (another group of anti-establishment artists)—has been in the works for decades. (It was already percolating when Nathan Heller profiled Linklater for this magazine, in 2014.) He’s also a third of the way through filming a screen adaptation of “Merrily We Roll Along,” Stephen Sondheim’s 1981 musical about three friends whose relationships and creative dreams steadily stagnate across two decades, from 1957 to 1977—or, rather, from 1977 to 1957, given that the show unspools in reverse. Linklater decided to shoot the movie over an actual two decades, allowing the lead actors—Paul Mescal, Ben Platt, and Beanie Feldstein—to age naturally onscreen.

Most filmmakers would have opted for the more efficient and certainly more insurable solution of digital effects. But a slow-rolling “Merrily” is right in Linklater’s wheelhouse, and not just because it’s more or less “Boyhood” with songs and period décor. Sondheim’s musical was critically pummelled on Broadway and closed after just sixteen performances, and the chronicle of ruptured bonds seemed to backfire offstage, too, rupturing Sondheim’s celebrated partnership with the director Hal Prince. But, in the years since, “Merrily” has been revised, revived, and reassessed, and Linklater appears to have undertaken the film in a particularly redemptive spirit. A project this ambitious could be pulled off only by the most willing of collaborators, united in a spirit of ironclad commitment.

If all goes according to plan, Linklater will be around eighty when “Merrily We Roll Along” is finished. “We’re pushing fate on that one. I got lucky on ‘Boyhood’—nothing bad happened,” he said, with a laugh. “They could work around me, you know. I could keel over and someone could take my place.” As with “Boyhood,” working on “Merrily We Roll Along” has forced Linklater to keep switching between his back and front burners, to sometimes deliriously strange ends. Early last spring, he found himself wrapping up “Merrily” sequences set in New York in 1959 and then diving immediately into “Nouvelle Vague” and its re-creation of 1959 Paris. “One set to the other, isn’t that crazy?” he said. “When is that ever going to happen again?” ♦