Richard Linklater had no trouble finding inspiration for the chaotic behind-the-scenes drama depicted in his new Netflix film. He lived through similar madness while making his own breakthrough feature, a 1990 cult classic that influenced Kevin Smith’s Clerks.

In an interview with ScreenRant‘s Tatiana Hullender, the director of Netflix’s Nouvelle Vague referred back to his own movie Slacker as the one film of his that most influenced his latest work, a fictionalized depiction of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s world-changing first feature Breathless:

Well, I think the most influential film of my own on this was obviously my first film. And I define that not as my first film, really, but the first one where I had a crew, [Slacker]. I finally had a lot of people after I’d worked kind of alone for a long time, so it was the first time I had to explain myself to a lot of people.

Godard famously flew by the seat of his pants while making Breathless, often making up scenes on the fly. Linklater can relate to this unorthodox, rather daring approach to filmmaking, because he himself employed something like it on Slacker:

I was making a film that was pretty unconventionally-scripted. It wasn’t a script. People were wondering about me, so I brought all that anxiety. It was maybe a strange confidence and belief in yourself mixed with incredible anxiety and volatility that it could all fall apart while making your first film.

Linklater can also relate to being a young, unproven director, as Godard was when he made Breathless. “I was about the same age as Godard, in my late twenties, making my first film,” he said. “That infused this film for sure, but in a good way.”

Slacker exerted its own profound influence on 1990s indie cinema, helping launch a subgenre that would come to be known, appropriately, as “slacker comedy.” Kevin Smith’s Clerks and Mallrats, as well as Linklater’s own Dazed and Confused, were later examples of the form, which invariably detailed unambitious, bored people enduring seemingly dead-end circumstances, with occasional help from cannabis.

Godard’s Breathless was an even more influential film in its own time, serving as a seminal example of the movement that would come to be known as Nouvelle Vague, or the French New Wave, a cycle of daring features made by highly film-literate directors bent on shattering all the rules of commercial cinema.

ScreenRant’s review of Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague calls it, “an ode to the French New Wave” that is also a “charming hangout movie.” The review notes how palpable Linklater’s love for Godard’s style of cinema becomes over the course of his movie, saying:

Even from behind the camera, you can tell Linklater is delighted and that kind of joy is infectious as the director advocates for the freedom of the artist and contemplates how the most beautiful works can be born from chaos.

Nouvelle Vague’s overall 89% Rotten Tomatoes score places it among the best-reviewed films of Linklater’s career. 89% also happens to be the RT score boasted by Linklater’s other 2025 feature, the theatrically-released Blue Moon, starring the director’s frequent collaborator Ethan Hawke.

Big things were seemingly in store for Linklater’s Godard film from the time of its premiere at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, when it received an 11-minute standing ovation, the fifth-longest of this year’s event.

Nouvelle Vague stars Zoey Deutch as Jean Seberg, Guillaume Marbeck as Jean-Luc Godard, Aubry Dullin as Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Adrien Rouyard as Francois Truffaut. It premieres on Netflix November 14.