Nouvelle Vague, out Nov. 14 on Netflix, is a movie about the making of a movie, as director Richard Linklater imagines how Jean-Luc Godard made his breakout 1960 film Breathless. Part gangster thriller, part love story, the low-budget feature from Godard starring Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo galvanized a movement of New Wave filmmakers in France with its experimental filmmaking, from chaotic jumpshots to the actors who learned their lines on the fly. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Reaction was mixed. In its original 1961 review after the movie came out in the United States, TIME wrote that Breathless had “no plot in the usual sense of the word” and that the “only real continuity is the irrational coherence of a nightmare.” Regardless, it was a hit: “Breathless would seem to offer little to the average star-struck spectator—it features a Hollywood reject (Jean Seberg) and a yam-nosed anonymity (Jean-Paul Belmondo). What’s more, it asks the moviegoer to spend 89 minutes sitting still for a jaggedly abstract piece of visual music that is often about as easy to watch as Schoenberg is to listen to,” wrote TIME. “Then why, in the last year, has this picture done a sellout business all over France?…the film’s heart-stopping energy and its eye-opening originality.”After six decades of making films, Godard died in 2022 at the age of 91. Here’s what to know about the legendary filmmaker and his revolutionary directing style. What does “Nouvelle Vague” mean? The title of the film is French for The New Wave, a period from the late 1950s through 1960s in which young filmmakers were eager to experiment with new ways of making movies during a very conservative era in history. At the heart of this movement was a publication called Cahiers du Cinema (which still exists). Godard was part of a group of young film critics there who had grown up with movies.“They took it over and were the Young Turks that were bashing the old French filmmakers, saying that they weren’t exciting—the old sea of cinema—when they wanted a new wave,” says Dudley Andrew, who edited Breathless: Jean-Luc Godard, Director.The rebellious spirit fit right in with what was going on in history at the time. “In the ‘60s, you had the sexual revolution and the anti-Vietnam War movement and all of these big movements to challenge the traditional ways of thinking, and that is exactly what the young French New Wave filmmakers were doing,” says David Sherritt, editor of Jean-Luc Godard: Interviews.There was a push to “get away from the multinational corporations that are dominating cinema now,” according to Wheeler Winston Dixon, author of The Films of Jean-Luc Godard. New Wave filmmakers were “rebelling against the studio system. They were rebelling against the big budget spectacles, the star system.”Godard decided to make Breathless because “he wanted to break into cinema and put his ideas into practice,” Dixon says.Working with GodardAs Nouvelle Vague shows, Godard was the kind of director who gave his actors a lot of power, at one point saying in the movie, “think about how you’d like to do it instead of me telling you how to do it.” The actors “would get a chance to argue back and say, ‘I’d rather say it this way,’” according to Andrew. But he also just gave actors a gist of what the scene was and let them improvise. “He more or less asked the actors to make up their own dialogue,” says Dixon.Any lines Godard wrote in advance he did the night before shooting, or the morning of the shoots. By filming without sound, he could call out lines to the actors while the camera was rolling.And he really did wheel his cameraman Raoul Coutard in a covered wheelbarrow-like cart—with a hole cut open for the camera lens—so that he could discreetly film city scenes without attracting attention from passersby. Sometimes he’d even use a wheelchair to move his cameramen.As Vincent Palmo Jr., one of the Nouvelle Vague screenwriters, says: “He wanted to shoot on the Champs Élysées, and he endeavored to be as inconspicuous as possible because they couldn’t control traffic, and they couldn’t pay for extras, and they didn’t have sync sound which would have been a big giveaway that filming was happening. Classic solution.”However, as the movie shows, he did not do more than a couple of takes. “You lose the authenticity, you’re not spontaneous,” says Michèle Halberstadt, producer and co-writer on Nouvelle Vague, who worked on King Lear with Godard.There was no fancy lighting like in a Hollywood studio production. In Nouvelle Vague, Godard’s team figures out what time the city lights in Paris turn on at night so that they can film a scene at that exact moment, solely using the light from the lamps.What Godard was likeHalberstadt worked with the filmmakers to make sure the dialogue contained as much of his real words from interviews and books as possible, arguing, “The idea was that we would not put any words in Godard’s mouth.”Many of the most quotable lines of the movie are things that he really said, like, “all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun” and “to direct is to aim for intellectual and moral anarchy.” “He would say things to shock you,” says Halberstadt. For example: “a film should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not necessarily in that order.”“A lot of the times he said things that were really hard to figure out, and he seemed to enjoy that,” says Sterritt. “He seemed to treat giving interviews as a kind of a game with the interviewer, where he would play with words.” Nouvelle Vague screenwriter Holly Gent says there was some strategy behind his cryptic statements. “I also wonder if Godard liked to speak in quotations as a way to keep the distance between his creative process and being questioned too much about it. Directing is such a hot seat. Maybe he wanted others to decide for themselves. There’s a respect for the audience in that, I think.”Viewers will see that as Godard throws shade, he is also wearing shades. His character wears them throughout the entire movie as sunglasses were part of Godard’s signature look. Godard was never a commercially successful filmmaker, according to Sterritt. But he still made movies into his 90s, and Halberstadt said he loved his camera phone.Halberstadt hopes Nouvelle Vague encourages other young, aspiring filmmakers to take risks and take advantage of “the freedom of being young.” Godard and his crew “had a noisy camera. Today, you have a very silent phone. It’s even easier.”Gent adds: “Maybe in this day and age, it reminds someone to go ahead and seize an opportunity even if it feels imperfect or difficult. Not just making movies, but you know—maybe follow your own path and get there how you get there.”