Guillaume Marbeck, pure Godard
Guillaume Marbeck plays Jean-Luc Godard in Richard Linklater’s new film Nouvelle Vague, a kind of obsessively accurate making-of of À bout de souffle (1960). Blending an undramatic reflection on the past, timeless musings on authorship and cinematic genius, and a hangout movie spread across the Haussmann boulevards, Linklater’s film circles around one of cinephilia’s founding myths (sacred monsters, neighborhood cinemas, film stock, “all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun,” etc.), probing how much of that mythology still “holds” in an era shaped by a radically different image culture. Alongside Zoey Deutch (as Jean Seberg) and Aubry Dullin (as Jean-Paul Belmondo), Guillaume Marbeck – a newcomer appearing out of nowhere – approaches the Godard monument without hubris, portraying him as a mercurial, spirited presence bluffing his way through youth. We spoke with Marbeck over Zoom about this first experience in the film industry and about the “heavy legacy” of the incomparable JLG, filtered through Linklater’s relaxed, all-American sensibility.
How did you end up playing Godard in the film?
Nouvelle Vague is my first film. I’m still amazed that I’ve made my debut in a Richard Linklater project. In 2023, I received an email out of the blue. Before that, I had uploaded photos and videos of myself on every casting-database website in France. Stéphane Batut [casting director] found my profile there and reached out. He thought there was a physical resemblance between me and Godard. So he asked me to audition for the role of Jean-Luc Godard during the shooting of À bout de souffle. You can imagine how that landed – I had never acted in a feature film before, only in a few shorts. I thought it must be a prank, that they would eventually choose someone far more established or much more experienced. I passed the first audition, and then six months later Stéphane called to tell me that Richard wanted to see me again. I went through a second audition that lasted eight hours, for which I had to learn 25 pages of dialogue in three days. At the end of it all, they handed me the script and sent me home with it.
I noticed you appeared in a few smaller projects around 2014–2015, and I even found an old YouTube clip of you talking about how your hair adapts to any haircut. I was curious what happened in the ten-year gap since then.
That’s actually the video Stéphane Batut saw first. Chronologically: I went to film school until 2017. Then I studied acting for two years. And all the way up to Nouvelle Vague, I tried pretty much every job in the film world. I worked on set, in production, in distribution. I needed those experiences to understand how the industry works – how a film gets made from start to finish. My goal is to make films – good films, hopefully. So I figured that if I understood every stage of the process, maybe I’d get there eventually.
So you always wanted to work in cinema, not in theatre, for instance?
Yes, exactly – only cinema. And maybe that’s why acting always scared me, and I saved it for last. In front of the camera, everyone is looking at you, you have to manage your vulnerability… It always felt like the riskiest position in filmmaking. So I postponed it as much as I could. But eventually I discovered I enjoyed it, and I decided to put some material online, hoping I’d land a good project. Which is exactly what happened.
What were things like on set?
It was great. In the film, we see Jean-Luc – who will later become Godard – but for now, he’s just a young guy. He doesn’t quite know how to make his film yet; he asks Rossellini or Jean-Pierre Melville for advice. That’s exactly how I felt on this shoot, caught in the same dynamic. Whenever I had a moment, I’d run to Richard and ask him all sorts of questions about cinema. Richard is the kind of filmmaker who invites his collaborators into the process. He’s not a dictator. He’ll ask you, “So, how do you see this scene?” He has his own idea, but he also expects yours – and then he chooses. But in the end, it’s still his film. Usually we’d do one, two, maybe three takes, and then he’d say: “OK, I’ve got what I need, but let’s keep going just for fun.” He’s not a filmmaker who takes himself too seriously, and that allowed us to enjoy the process. Maybe that’s why the film feels light, almost improvised at times.
So there was room for freedom, for personal input in this collaboration?
A lot of freedom, yes – especially in the preparation stage, during rehearsals. We improvised, suggested changes, and tested ideas. Sometimes they were accepted, sometimes not – that’s normal, not every idea is good. But I think it’s important, when you’re creating something as a group, that people feel comfortable enough to share. Otherwise, frustration builds up, and you lose that joy of making something together, which also means understanding other people’s visions.
The film is playful and free of pretension. Maybe precisely because it’s made by an American filmmaker who comes to Paris, immersing in a different culture he’s trying to depict and simulate. At the same time, he’s also trying – as much as possible – to get close, with almost documentary means, to the atmosphere of the ’60s and the historical reality of the period, despite the inevitable mythologising. He nails the aesthetics of the era, and the dialogue often works as a collage of quotations. How did you find the balance between creative freedom and the need to respect a specific historical context?
Each time, the goal was to get as close as possible to what we know actually happened. The film has several layers. There’s the realist layer – for example, when we looked at the original script notes, we’d discover that on a given day they only shot three setups. So we had to make a selection: which setup do we bring into our film? The one that made it into the final cut – the one circled on the page – or a take that didn’t work?
Then there’s the layer of the period itself and the real people involved – who they essentially were. If you make them speak too naturally, they become banal, and you lose their originality. And yes, sometimes Godard did speak through quotations; in real life, that’s how he talked – far more than most people. So in the film he uses a lot of quotes. But not all the time: if you listen to the full dialogue, there aren’t actually that many (laughs).
Godard is, of course, a central figure in cinephilia – a major artist of the 20th century. Did that “guru” aura looming over his legacy intimidate you?
Of course, playing Godard is intimidating, because there are plenty of people waiting to judge you, almost like in a Roman arena with thumbs ready to go up or down. They’re prepared either to destroy you or adore you. Even before I started working on the role, I knew there were a hundred ways this could go wrong. Throughout preparation, I kept telling myself I had to respect who he was – be accurate, neither too gentle nor too harsh, avoid caricature – and give the best performance possible so that people would forget they were watching an actor playing Godard. I wanted them to see Jean-Luc Godard.
It does feel like people want to protect this mythical figure from the “intrusion” of fiction, so to speak.
I think people don’t want to protect him, but rather the idea they have of him. It’s like a religion, an ideology, a cult – something much bigger than the man himself.
How did you approach the research for this period and this character? Were you already familiar with his work?
I studied film for three years in Paris and one year in New York, at ESRA. We had courses on the great filmmakers, so I had to go through Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, Varda, and so on. Even Richard Linklater – we actually studied him too, which made it surreal to later end up working with him. So I already knew the films, but I knew almost nothing about Godard’s life beyond them.
For research, I dove into all sorts of materials: documentaries, interviews, biographies, his film criticism, the short films he starred in, the ones made by his friends. All this helped me understand who he was at this point in his life – full of ideas about cinema, but all still in his head. He was the only one who believed in them; the people around him weren’t even convinced the film would be watchable. I discovered a young man who was funny, deeply invested in cinema, but also disillusioned with the industry. And on top of that, he’d just broken up with his girlfriend before the shoot, he was unsure about the ending, didn’t know whether the girl should die or whether the film should have a happy ending…
Beyond all that, the role was a major physical challenge for me: I had to act without my eyes, because I constantly wore sunglasses; I had to smoke hundreds of cigarettes on set; learn to walk on my hands; speak in the language of 1959; imitate his voice without overdoing it.
Did you and Linklater also consider other portrayals of Godard? Or did you rely solely on historical sources?
Richard’s intention was to include only things he knew for certain had happened. For example, we don’t know where he went whenever he left the set. No one knew where he spent his nights. If we don’t know, we don’t show it – that was Richard’s stance. Otherwise, the moment you venture into speculation, people will say: “We’d have liked to see Godard alone, outside the set…” Okay, but what would that have looked like? If you try to recreate it, the same people will say: “Wait, that’s definitely not how it was…” Inevitably, you get criticised for anything that isn’t documented.
For Richard, it was also important to make, once in his life, a film about the making of another film. It just happens that the film is À bout de souffle and the filmmaker is Godard, but his deeper intention was to show how a set actually works – its atmosphere, what it means to be part of a film crew. He wanted to pass on that to younger generations. The Nouvelle Vague context obviously interests him, but more as a bonus.
Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.
Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.