‘Nouvelle Vague’ Star Guillaume Marbeck on Playing Jean-Luc Godard

Guillaume Marbeck knew he needed the sunglasses.

He was running late for his audition to play Jean-Luc Godard in a Richard Linklater movie about the making of the French auteur’s seminal 1960 film Breathless, but he knew that he couldn’t attempt to play Godard without the filmmaker’s omnipresent eyewear. His friend, an optometrist, offered to let him borrow a pair that could double for Godard’s signature frames. But a pipe had burst in the optometrist’s apartment, setting Marbeck’s whole day behind.

By the time he made it to what was supposed to be a 10 a.m. audition, sunglasses firmly on his face, he recalls, “I got out of the elevator and I saw like 15 people looking at me like, ‘Who is this guy?’ The producer, Michèle Pétin, she told me, ‘You’re late!’ In my head, it went like, ‘What would Godard say?’ I thought, ‘He wouldn’t apologize, he would just explain that he needed his glasses.’ So, this is what I did.”

Marbeck ended up getting the role, his very first in a film.

In Nouvelle Vague, Marbeck plays the giant of independent cinema (Godard) and is directed by a giant of independent cinema (Linklater). A film school graduate, Marbeck’s longtime ambition has long been to direct, but he’s spent the past decade filling every job on set in an effort to learn filmmaking from the bottom up. “I wanted to know what everybody was doing,” he says. “So, if they were bullshitting me, I would know.” He has worked as an assistant in the prop and camera department, an editor, an on-set photographer and even as a scout for distributors. “The last job I didn’t do was doing acting,” says Marbeck. “And I ended up playing a director.”

Godard’s Breathless is about a smalltime crook (Jean-Paul Belmondo) who, while on the run for killing a police officer, starts a relationship with an American aspiring journalist (Jean Seberg). The film was a sensation, launching the French New Wave and gleefully breaking what were then thought to be the established narrative and stylistic rules of cinema. Linklater’s movie about its making is populated by the major players of the era, including François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol and Suzanne Schiffman.

In preparation for the role, Marbeck researched Godard’s work prior to Breathless — from short films to his film criticism for the famed French movie magazine Cahiers du Cinema. He also read and watched any available interviews from the years preceding the film and shortly after, but stopped himself from going beyond that. “I really wanted not to be polluted by his later work.”

Before filming, he only watched Breathless a couple of times but was conscious of not overdoing it for fear of tainting the spontaneity that is central to both the film and its making. “It’s great to have it really focused in the mind, but not too perfect.”

Something Marbeck learned during the research process that helped him unlock his own performance was that prior to Breathless, Godard had been dumped by his girlfriend. “When Godard was looking at a couple or people that were having fun or hitting on each other, he felt like, ‘Oh, shit.’ ” Marbeck came to understand Breathless as “a thesis on love. Something to make [Godard] believe that this can happen for [him].”

When it came to the costume, Marbeck says they tried to track down Godard’s preferred frame to no avail. The costume department presented him with an array of options, but nothing felt quiet right, leading producers to design a pair of custom shades with input from the actor. Marbeck got the glasses only two days before filming, remembering, “When I tried them on, I just cried.”

Nouvelle Vague premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and was acquired by Netflix as a potential awards contender. (It will screen at TIFF starting on Sept. 4). It was a full-circle moment for the actor, who used to walk the Croisette as a film scout, one of his many jobs in entertainment. “I was running around the festival, seeing 20 movies a day,” he says.

As for the sunglasses, after production, Marbeck handed them back into the costume department, but now he’d like to get them back: “I asked the producer, and I asked the costumes [department]. I asked everybody. And nobody knows where the glasses went.”