Filmmaker Richard Linklater believes Trump’s proposed tariffs on films made outside the US are “not gonna happen”.
The director was speaking at a Cannes Film Festival press conference for his French-language feature Nouvelle Vague, about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless.
“That man changes his mind 50 times,” Linklater joked about President Trump. “Film is the number one export industry of the US.”
US actor Zoey Deutch, who plays Jean Seberg, added: “It would be nice to make more movies in Los Angeles and Hollywood, that has the biggest history of studios and the cultures and the crews. It would be so beautiful.”
The cast also includes Guillaume Marbeck as Godard and Aubry Dullin as Jean-Paul Belmondo.
Linklater later added that he was “optimistic” about the future of film. ”Cinema is optimistic. It has to be. It always feels under attack,” he said.
“I’ve had movies out for over 30 years now, and it’s always just, ’things are terrible, things are tough, it’s a struggle’, but it always has been. Cinema is our commerce. There’s always a threat.
“But there’s something perpetual that we as an audience like stories told to us.”
French fears
Linklater also admitted that he thought the French industry would reject a US filmmaker making Nouvelle Vague.
“Ten years ago, when we were thinking about this movie, I’m not kidding, I imagined a film with subtitles, and I thought they’ll hate that an American director did that,” Linklater said at the film’s press conference.
“[I thought they’d say] ‘We’ll never show this film in France. We’ll show it all over the world but never in France’ because they’ll just hate it. But as I got closer to it and I found enthusiastic partners, I realised how much it meant to them.”
Linklater said he knew “enough French” to make the film, which chronicles the making of Godard’s 1960 classic.
“[Nouvelle Vague] is a visual medium. It didn’t require me to know any [French] at all,” he said. “The French language is the language of cinema. It just sounds beautiful.”
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