Richard Linklater, left, Margaret Qualley, centre, and Ethan Hawke, right, on the set of Blue Moon.sabrina lantos/Sony Pictures Classics
“There’s something poignant about an artist’s life,” the director Richard Linklater says. “Athletes know they have limited careers. Artists think they can go forever. But they can get put out to pasture, too.”
It’s Tuesday afternoon during the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. Linklater, 65 and shaggy-haired, is sprawled on an office sofa wearing a beige, lightly rumpled linen suit. He speaks with a soft Texas lilt and a perpetual air of gentle fascination with life. (If you close your eyes, he sounds just like Owen Wilson.)
We were discussing his two TIFF films, Nouvelle Vague and Blue Moon. One is about an artist at the beginning of his career, the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard; the other showcases an artist at the end, the lyricist Lorenz Hart. Both are unconventional biopics – they use a specific moment in their subject’s lives to get at their larger story. Both films took a dozen years to develop.
Richard Linklater during the Toronto International Film Festival at InterContinental Toronto Centre on Sept. 7.Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images
Blue Moon, due in theatres Oct. 24, takes place on one significant evening in Hart’s life: March 31, 1943, when Oklahoma! opened on Broadway. Hart (Ethan Hawke, one of Linklater’s most steadfast collaborators) attends – and critiques – the performance, then hits the after-party at Sardi’s to drown his acid-tongued sorrows. Because that night was a nail in his coffin.
Before it, Hart and his composer partner Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott) were a formidable duo. They met when Rodgers was 16 and Hart 23, and for 25 years, they wrote timeless hits, including Blue Moon, The Lady Is a Tramp, My Funny Valentine and Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered. Linklater’s screenplay refers to Hart’s lyrics as “words that will cheat death.”
But Hart is as much a ne’er-do-well as he is a genius; he’s drinking too much and missing deadlines. For Oklahoma!, Rodgers worked with a new partner, Oscar Hammerstein. That duo would go on to write Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I and The Sound of Music. Hart would be dead inside a year.
“This story is a little howl into the night,” Linklater says. “An artist is being left behind. By his partner, and by the culture.” The intelligence, romanticism and wit of his lyrics are being supplanted by “people roaring at third-rate jokes,” and Hart knows it. (Little Stephen Sondheim, Hammerstein’s protégé, makes an appearance, too.)
Linklater has worked with people like Hart – inspired artists who just couldn’t maintain it. “I’ve had to cut loose collaborators I used to rely on because their lives got out of hand,” he says. “Usually it’s alcohol. It’s a terrible position to be in, but I had to be responsible.” He won’t name names, but he acknowledges most of them didn’t forgive him.
Richard Linklater speaks onstage during Netflix's Nouvelle Vague Canadian premiere on Sept. 9.Kennedy Pollard/Getty Images
So as much as Linklater empathized with Hart, those experiences also helped him direct Scott as Rodgers begins to pull away from his old partner. “I could say to Andrew, ‘I’m with Rodgers here, tragic Larry brought this on himself.’”
The Godard of Nouvelle Vague, which opens Oct. 31, is Hart’s polar opposite: cocky, dauntless, exhilarated, surrounded by like-minded artists (François Truffaut, Agnès Varda, Roberto Rossellini, Éric Rohmer.) He is full of grand pronouncements – “Artists and criminals both want to surprise” – as he makes his first film, Breathless, in 1960 Paris. Determined that it be “insurgent,” he shoots 58 scenes in 20 days, using a hand-held camera without synced sound, to “seize reality at random.” Day one, he shoots for only two hours, because his inspiration runs out; day eight, he doesn’t shoot at all.
Linklater filmed Nouvelle Vague in period black and white, in the same locations Godard used. He had reams of documentation: photos, memoirs, interviews, camera reports. “But what Godard did in 20 days so effortlessly, we did in 30 days by recreating every square inch of what they had in front of them,” he says, grinning. “It was 180 degrees different in terms of rigour.”
Make no mistake, Linklater has done some pretty revolutionary work himself: He followed the same characters for three films in his Before trilogy; he shot one film, Boyhood, over 12 years; and he’s in the early phase of a 20-year shoot for Merrily We Roll Along, another film about artists and compromises. His scripts are unconventional, and he often hires fledgling and non-professional actors to fill indelible roles.
“I have a little bit of Warhol in me,” Linklater says. “I love actors, and I’ve worked with some of the best. But for a given part, if a non-actor is just right and can bring themselves, you can get a very effective performance. I’m not saying they could go do Shakespeare in the Park. But anybody can be an actor, for a while.”
Richard Linklater at the premiere of Nouvelle Vague during TIFF at Princess of Wales Theatre on Sept. 9.Michael Loccisano/Getty Images
Unlike Godard, whose contemporaries pelt him with advice, Linklater began his career on his own, in Austin, Tex., making short films and one Super-8 feature before his proper debut, Slacker, in 1990. His next film, Dazed and Confused (1993) made him an indie god – an inspiration for almost everyone who’s picked up a camera since.
But he’s averse to becoming “an old bear dispensing wisdom,” he says. “My only advice is, you don’t know what you don’t know. You’re going to make mistakes, but they’ll be yours. You’ll surprise yourself in interesting ways. The volatility of making that first feature – it’s very self-defining. You don’t realize it at that time. You think, ‘It’s the first of many.’ But it will set a tone.”
Linklater knows he’s at neither the beginning nor the end of his career – he’s in the glorious middle, and happy there. “Blue Moon is a mature work I couldn’t have done 30 or even 20 years ago,” he says. “For Nouvelle Vague, I consciously went back in time to my ‘beginner’s mind.’ I was 28 again, making my first film. And also cinematically going back in time, erasing any innovations after 1960. It was kind of great to feel that I do actually know what I’m doing.”
At one point in Nouvelle Vague, a character rhymes off a list of what Godard should do: “Be fast like Rossellini, musical like Orson Welles … wounded like Nicholas Ray, effective like Hitchcock, profound like Bergman and insolent like no one else.” I ask Linklater which of his contemporaries – Martin Scorsese? Lynne Ramsay? Paul Thomas Anderson? – and which of their qualities he might list. “Oh, I’d have to think about that,” he says. “I’m not spontaneous. I’m a writer.”
Okay, what does he think his seminal quality might be? Be chill like Linklater? “Thanks for the compliment, but if anyone thinks my work is relaxed, I’m playing a trick on you,” he says. “I want you to think it’s real and spontaneous, but it ain’t. We worked hard – we worked hard – to get that feeling.” As all true artists do.