How Zoey Deutch Became Nouvelle Vague’s Jean Seberg

She was also “really, really, really, really” strenuous on herself. That self-flagellation continued even as Deutch breezed through a succession of high-profile gigs, among them the rom-com Set It Up, the influencer satire Not Okay (which she executive-produced as well), and the Clint Eastwood thriller Juror #2. She also worked with Linklater before, on his 2016 college jock comedy, Everybody Wants Some!!

Linklater fans often assume his movies are heavily improvised. “Like all great art, it looks like it’s so easy,” Deutch says, grinning. “But no, he’s meticulously crafted everything.” That’s an especially magical feat on Nouvelle Vague. The 28-year-old Godard shot Breathless (French title: À Bout de Souffle) guerrilla-​style on the streets of Paris, using real people as extras, barking instructions at his actors on the fly, changing scenes as inspiration struck him, and calling it quits for the day as soon as he ran out of ideas.

“Yeah, it was the total opposite of how we’re doing it!” Deutch remembers Link-later telling the cast and crew. She digs frantically through the papers on her desk until she finds a manifesto the director distributed to them. “Godard was going for spontaneity and immediacy,” she reads aloud. One way to achieve a similar effect, Linklater wrote, is to “fully examine the scene from every angle, find new elements if they are to be found, and know it so well, and be so relaxed with what we are doing, that it seems spontaneous and improvised, that the performance is without artifice.” Deutch loves that Linklater managed to inject a bit of the “hang out” vibe, perfected in early movies like Slacker and Dazed and Confused, into Nouvelle Vague. “There’s nothing pretentious about the movie,” she says. “You want to hang out with these people.”

Although the movie aims to be historically true, it required the occasional dose of imagination. Deutch remembered the way that Linklater sometimes took inspiration from his actors behind the scenes and reverse engineered it. Noticing a scene in the real Breathless where Seberg’s character is skipping, for example, Deutch had her version of Seberg skipping onto the movie set: “I really enjoyed that part. It made me feel like a little detective.”

She also felt deep empathy for Seberg, who at the time of shooting Breathless was not the outspoken political activist she would later become but a 20-year-old traumatized by her brief time in Hollywood, faced with a French enfant terrible determined to change all the rules of moviemaking. “Seberg definitely had mixed feelings about Godard,” Deutch says. “She acknowledged his genius, but I think she found him emotionally distant and manipulative. Later, she said something like, ‘He wasn’t interested in who I was, just in what I could represent.’ That is a very powerful analysis of a young woman in a man’s world.”