Richard Linklater’s New 89% RT Netflix Film Was Impressed By His Personal ’90s Comedy Traditional That Led To Clerks

Richard Linklater had no bother discovering inspiration for the chaotic behind-the-scenes drama depicted in his new Netflix movie. He lived via comparable insanity whereas making his personal breakthrough function, a 1990 cult basic that influenced Kevin Smith’s Clerks.

In an interview with ScreenRant‘s Tatiana Hullender, the director of Netflix’s Nouvelle Imprecise referred again to his personal film Slacker because the one movie of his that almost all influenced his newest work, a fictionalized depiction of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s world-changing first function Breathless:

Nicely, I feel essentially the most influential movie of my very own on this was clearly my first movie. And I outline that not as my first movie, actually, however the first one the place I had a crew, [Slacker]. I lastly had lots of people after I’d labored sort of alone for a very long time, so it was the primary time I needed to clarify myself to lots of people.

Godard famously flew by the seat of his pants whereas making Breathless, usually making up scenes on the fly. Linklater can relate to this unorthodox, reasonably daring strategy to filmmaking, as a result of he himself employed one thing prefer it on Slacker:

I used to be making a movie that was fairly unconventionally-scripted. It wasn’t a script. Individuals had been questioning about me, so I introduced all that nervousness. It was perhaps an odd confidence and perception in your self combined with unimaginable nervousness and volatility that it may all disintegrate whereas making your first movie.

Linklater also can relate to being a younger, unproven director, as Godard was when he made Breathless. “I used to be about the identical age as Godard, in my late twenties, making my first movie,” he mentioned. “That infused this movie for certain, however in a great way.”

Slacker exerted its personal profound affect on Nineteen Nineties indie cinema, serving to launch a subgenre that might come to be identified, appropriately, as “slacker comedy.” Kevin Smith’s Clerks and Mallrats, in addition to Linklater’s personal Dazed and Confused, had been later examples of the shape, which invariably detailed unambitious, bored individuals enduring seemingly dead-end circumstances, with occasional assist from hashish.

Godard’s Breathless was an much more influential movie in its personal time, serving as a seminal instance of the motion that might come to be often called Nouvelle Imprecise, or the French New Wave, a cycle of daring options made by extremely film-literate administrators bent on shattering all the foundations of economic cinema.

ScreenRant’s assessment of Linklater’s Nouvelle Imprecise calls it, “an ode to the French New Wave” that can be a “charming hangout film.” The assessment notes how palpable Linklater’s love for Godard’s model of cinema turns into over the course of his film, saying:

Even from behind the digital camera, you’ll be able to inform Linklater is delighted and that sort of pleasure is infectious because the director advocates for the liberty of the artist and contemplates how essentially the most lovely works will be born from chaos.

Nouvelle Imprecise’s total 89% Rotten Tomatoes rating locations it among the many best-reviewed movies of Linklater’s profession. 89% additionally occurs to be the RT rating boasted by Linklater’s different 2025 function, the theatrically-released Blue Moon, starring the director’s frequent collaborator Ethan Hawke.

Large issues had been seemingly in retailer for Linklater’s Godard movie from the time of its premiere on the 2025 Cannes Movie Competition, when it acquired an 11-minute standing ovation, the fifth-longest of this yr’s occasion.

Nouvelle Imprecise 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.