Linklater is best known for his walk-and-talk Before trilogy, titles like Dazed and Confused and Boyhood, and for his naturalistic filmmaking. Linklater, who was previously at the fest with 2006 sci-fi thriller A Scanner Darkly, said of what Breathless meant to him, as a filmmaker, that “It represented freedom and the notion of the personal film.”

" If they want the new wave, let's give them a tidal wave". If Godard once envisaged submerging cinema with his first film, it was indeed a tidal wave that overturned the Cannes 2025 Festival competition with the screening of Richard Linklater's new film, soberly named Nouvelle Vague, which is competing for the Palme d'Or.