Zoey Deutch on the Wild Ride of Richard Linklater’s ‘Nouvelle Vague’
It is into that heady world of Cahiers du Cinéma writers and burgeoning filmmakers that Seberg enters—and with something to prove, having recently made two flops, Saint Joan (1957) and Bonjour Tristesse (1958), directed by the notoriously ill-tempered Otto Preminger. “Eliminate the star part, and you’re always trying to prove something regardless of where you are,” Deutch notes, describing the specific actorly headspace that she occupied for the project. “Seberg was plucked from obscurity in Marshalltown, Iowa. Saint Joan was a giant bomb. Bonjour Tristesse was a little better, but Preminger still traumatized her.”
Insights from Linklater, plus a meticulous script (by Holly Gent, Vincent Palmo Jr., Michèle Halberstadt, and Laetitia Masson) and her own deep research, helped Deutch to understand just how new Godard’s off-the-cuff shooting style would have seemed to Seberg, especially after suffering Preminger’s rigidity. “It was emotionally raw, creatively loose, and deeply unconventional compared to her Hollywood filmmaking,” she explains. But that didn’t make it easy. “There’s a quote of hers saying, ‘Godard never told me what was going to happen from one day to the next.’ Not only did she not have the foundation to navigate these waters, there was also the language barrier. People don’t realize that she was learning French when she was making this movie. She felt insecure at times, with Godard’s abstract directions and lack of emotional guidance. But she really respected his intellect and artistry.”
To do justice to the multifarious demands of the part, Deutch approached her job almost clinically, reaching for a medical allegory that she holds close with all her work. “When you’re sick, you have to attack it from all angles. You’re like, ‘I have to go the homeopathic route and the pharmaceutical route. I should go see a chiropractor, and so on.’ You can’t just have orange juice if you really need to get better. That’s my metaphor for acting too. You need to use all your tools.”
For the purposes of playing Seberg, that meant working with a movement coach, Jean-Louis Rodrigue (together, they imagined Seberg as a snow leopard); creating a “memory board” consisting of both Seberg’s real memories and ones that Deutch imagined for her; and building a dream journal to navigate all the nuances of the character. She also studied French rigorously for two years, plotting out when Seberg might toggle between the two languages and paying specific attention to the dialect that Seberg used. An old interview in which she gives a tour of her Paris apartment was especially helpful for Deutch. “I got more of her essence at that specific moment, when she was claiming this new identity in Europe. I transcribed it and learned it like a monologue and listened to it nonstop. When we were shooting, I would listen to it every morning as almost a voice warm-up. Then there was watching as much New Wave cinema as I possibly could, as well as rewatching Saint Joan and Bonjour Tristesse repeatedly. Of course, the bible of this whole experience was Breathless itself.”