Steve-O 'Crash and Burn' tour brings 'naughtier' stunts to Canada: 'I really treasure my Canadian passport'
"I always love going to Canada. I really treasure my Canadian passport so much," Steve-O told Yahoo Canada about returning to the country for his tour. "I always have, but more and more, I just really value my Canadian citizenship."
Steve-O was born in the U.K. to a Canadian mother and American father. As he journeys through Canada, Steve-O is also travelling with his special road buddy, his dog Moon Pie who, unlike Steve-O's beloved dog Wendy, isn't afraid of the tour bus.
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This time around, for the Crash and Burn tour, Steve-O is leaning into the fact that the famous stunt performer turned 50.
"I would say that this show's really about me confronting middle age," Steve-O said. "I actually turned 50, and as unlikely as it seems that Steve-O would have made it to 50, I'm actually in really good physical shape and seeking to beat myself up as much as ever."
"Not all the ideas I came up with for this tour proved to be very good ones, there were a lot of really outrageously hilarious fails, and for everything that failed I doubled down on something else to make sure that I could bring a worthy show."
But if you still think age could be a barrier for Steve-O, he's promising an even "naughtier" show this time around.
"I go out of my way to create even naughtier content than I could create for Jackass," Steve-O said. "Because that's always my motivation, to just be naughty and break rules and the crazy stuff."
If you haven't seen Bucket List and you're questioning what a Steve-O comedy show will be like, you're not alone.
"People don't really know what it's going to be and I've never been particularly upset about that," Steve-O said. "I think that's fine, and if anything, I viewed it as a benefit for people to come to my show with some low or no expectations."
"Because I just believe so much in what I'm doing that if people come, they don't know what they're going to get, maybe they're not sure how great it's going to be, then the consensus is pretty much always, wow that was a lot better than I expected."
But after seeing multiple Steve-O shows, there's something special about his live, multimedia experience, whether you've been a fan since the beginning of Jackass on MTV, or even if it was never your thing.
Firstly, you realize that as raucous as Steve-O is, he really takes the time to craft an impressive show.
Secondly, the energy in the room is absolutely magnetic. It's a collective bonding experience for the audience, alongside Steve-O, to laugh, gasp, and even cringe and shield their eyes from some of his stunts. It's an experience unique to Steve-O, making his shows unlike anything else you'll see.
But throughout the years there have been headlines threatening that Steve-O's latest, greatest stunt will be his last. While he's toyed with the idea, Steve-O's keeping the door open, even to when he's a 90-year-old man.
"I've gone back and forth on that. I've treated this show as if it's going to be my last real physical stunt thing," Steve-O said. "I don't want to commit one way or another to whether I'm going to keep doing stunts or not."
"[But] I kind of turned the corner a little bit. I imagined what a 90-year-old Steve-O would have to say to me. And I pictured this 90-year-old Steve-O just saying, 'Dude, stop being such a little bitch. F**king go for it. Make your own rules.' ... If I was to think the [show] I'm working on now, there's going to be a bunch after it, it would probably be too daunting. So, yeah, I think as a tool for raising the bar, just viewing every project [as the] last one is helpful."
Tickets are currently on sale for Steve-O's Crash and Burn comedy tour. Purchase tickets for a tour date near you here.
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Vox
a minute ago
- Vox
The scandalous literary classic we've never stopped arguing about
is a senior correspondent on the Culture team for Vox, where since 2016 she has covered books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater. When Lolita first appeared 70 years ago, in 1955, it was so controversial that no American publisher was willing to touch it. Today, Lolita is hailed as a classic, a masterpiece, one of the great novels of the English language. Yet Lolita also comes with a sense that it is still, perhaps, too controversial to touch. A book about a man who kidnaps and repeatedly rapes his 12-year-old stepdaughter, all told in ravishing rainbow-streaked prose? 'They'd never let you publish that now,' writer after writer has declared. In a development that seems almost too on the nose, it was recently reported that Jeffrey Epstein kept a prized first edition of the novel in his home, under glass. 'I love that book,' someone told me recently when he saw me rereading it. Then: 'Am I still allowed to love that book?' Next Page Book recommendations — both old and new — that are worth your time, from senior correspondent and critic Constance Grady. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. We certainly read Lolita very differently than we used to. For decades after its publication, readers both nodded to the horror at the center of the novel but also believed it was a little unsophisticated to dwell only on the assault. In pop culture, Lolita became synonymous with a teenaged seductress who deserves whatever she gets. Today, however, the received wisdom is that Lolita is not a romance but a horror story. In the 70 years since its publication, Lolita — lovely, sensual Lolita; obscene, monstrous Lolita; bleak, tragic Lolita — has become a barometer of sorts for cultural change. Vladimir Nabokov's novel is so multifaceted that it reflects the priorities of its readers back at us, showing us what we value and fear most at any given moment in time. We're still arguing over Lolita today, and our debates mirror the contours of our current culture war: a horror at an abuser's attempt to cover up their abuse; a terror that all that is pleasurable will be moralized into oblivion. What kind of book could plausibly be experienced both as an erotic comic romp in the 1950s and a searing dismantling of rape culture on its 70th birthday? Only ever Lolita. How did they ever publish Lolita? Lolita was born a scandal. Initially, Nabokov planned to publish the novel anonymously, with the only clue to his authorship the presence of a minor nonspeaking character whose name, Vivian Darkbloom, anagrammed to Vladimir Nabokov. But Lolita was so characteristic of Nabokov, with its dense wordplay, its butterfly motifs, its musical language, that Nabokov's friends convinced him that everyone would know he wrote it anyway. Four American publishers, likely fearing expensive obscenity lawsuits, turned down Lolita. Nabokov sent the manuscript went off to Paris's Olympia Press, which knew how to publish obscene novels, and there it became an underground cult object: the book too scandalous to be published in the US, the literary novel from the pornographic publisher. In 1958, when it finally came out in the US, it shot to the top of the bestseller lists and transformed Nabokov from an obscure Russian-born writer of tricky novels into a wealthy household name. Not to say that Lolita is not a tricky novel. Lolita is narrated by one Humbert Humbert, a smooth-talking charmer who confesses to us early on that he is sexually obsessed with little girls between the ages of 8 and 14: 'nymphets,' he calls them. His landlady's 12-year-old daughter Dolores Haze — nicknamed Lolita by Humbert — is just one such nymphet, and Humbert is so obsessed with her that he decides to marry her mother in order to have more access to Dolores. After Mrs. Haze dies, Humbert seizes the moment to kidnap Dolores, taking her off on a demented road trip back and forth across America, going from one motel to the next, debauching her all the way. Critics were puzzled by why Nabokov lavished some of his richest, most pleasurable prose on such an appalling story. Humbert is such a strange, unstable figure that the term 'unreliable narrator' was coined in part to describe him. He narrates his depravities in luxuriant, beautiful sentences full of wordplay and neologisms, funny and mordant. He plays constantly for our sympathy: at one moment calling himself a monster, the next swearing he loves Lolita with a deep and undying passion, the next informing us with an air of triumph that it was she who seduced him. You can tell, reading Lolita, that Humbert wants you to like him. It's harder to tell if Nabokov wants you to like Humbert, too. Early critics by and large agreed that Lolita was a masterpiece (with some notable exceptions). But they were puzzled by why Nabokov lavished some of his richest, most pleasurable prose on such an appalling story. How was anyone supposed to read it? One of the most influential early readers who laid the blueprint for how Lolita would be received was legendary literary critic Lionel Trilling. For Trilling, the pleasure of the novel was the point. He was part of a generation of young, au courant critics who carefully prized such pleasure, who took it as a point of pride that they were not dreary old Victorian killjoys who feared every book might corrupt the morals of the young. If it was pleasurable to read Humbert's words, to fall into his point of view and learn to see the world as he did — well then, that was the correct way to read the novel. It didn't mean that you condoned child sex abuse. It meant that you understood allegory. Trilling eventually concluded that Lolita was, in a generic sense, a story about love: following in the literary tradition of courtly love, it was about a forbidden romance so scandalous that it could never end in marriage, like the love between Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, married to another man, and Vronsky. Readers were no longer shocked when novelists broke the taboo of adultery, Trilling reasoned, and so Nabokov had to be extreme with Lolita. 'The breaking of the taboo about the sexual unavailability of very young girls has for us something of the force that a wife's infidelity had for Shakespeare,' Trilling wrote. 'H.H.'s relation with Lolita defies society as scandalously as did Tristan's relation with Iseult, or Vronsky's with Anna. It puts the lovers, as lovers in literature must be put, beyond the pale of society.' Trilling's argument lived on, in an ever-more-flattened form, for the next 50 years or so. It was, in fact, the idea that Lolita was about not love but horror, that the pleasure of Humbert Humbert's prose was not to be trusted, that was the dissenting view. As Lolita entered into popular culture, it was largely understood through the lens of forbidden romance and adolescent lust. 'Lolita' and 'nymphet' both entered the dictionaries to mean a sexually precocious girl. Stanley Kubrick's 1962 film adaptation made iconic the image of Dolores Haze licking a lollipop, sending the camera a piercing, erotically charged gaze over the rim of her heart-shaped sunglasses. The reading would persist unchanged for decades. In 1997, Adrien Lyne's adaptation played out the story in front of a vaseline-smeared lens, misty and nostalgic and lovely. Lana Del Rey would play repeatedly with Lolita imagery in her early career, singing about how romantic it was when she played Lolita to her older boyfriend's Humbert Humbert. It was, in fact, the idea that Lolita was about not love but horror, that the pleasure of Humbert Humbert's prose was not to be trusted, that was the dissenting view. James Mason and Sue Lyon on the set of Lolita, which was released in 1962 and directed by Stanley Kubrick. Seven Arts Production/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images In 1995, literary scholar Elizabeth Patnoe describes finding her classmates angrily, belligerently resistant to the idea that it might be possible to despise Humbert Humbert as an unrepentant child sex offender. The men in the classroom, she says, found Humbert relatable and worthy of compassion, and were shocked when she said she hated him because of what he did to Dolores. One accused her of having 'cheated the text.' At the time, to take a moral reading of Lolita was to be embarrassingly Victorian. It was to deny oneself the pleasure of Nabokov's language for no particular reason. Twenty years later, however, Patnoe's interpretation has picked up steam. It has become, for many readers, the dominant way to read Lolita: by understanding it as a book about the rape of a child, and Humbert as the monster who is trying to fool you. In this reading, the pleasure is a trap. Finding the pain under Lolita There's plenty of evidence within Lolita to suggest that we are meant to be looking beneath Humbert's playful sentences for the pain of Dolores Haze. Even as Humbert insists that it was Dolores who seduced him, he also tells us that Dolores finds her sexual encounters with Humphrey painful, that she cries every night when she thinks that he is asleep, that she hoards her allowance so that she can run away from him. (He steals it back from her, but she runs away from him regardless.) Dolores does seem to have a crush on Humbert when she first meets him, but it vanishes as soon as she is faced with the reality of what exactly he means to do to her. Under a reading that focuses on Dolores and her pain, even the novel's title and Humbert's repeated invocations of 'my Lolita' are an attempt from Humbert to control Dolores as brutally and totally as possible: He has taken even her name from her, and he has made us, his readers, complicit in it. There is also some evidence that Nabokov endorsed this reading of his book. Speaking to the Paris Review for a 1967 issue, Nabokov appeared appalled when his interviewer suggested that Humbert Humbert had a 'touching' quality. 'I would put it differently: Humbert Humbert is a vain and cruel wretch who manages to appear 'touching,'' Nabokov replied. 'That epithet, in its true, tear-iridized sense, can only apply to my poor little girl' — that is to say, Dolores, whose name means sorrow. In the same interview, however, Nabokov vigorously disavowed any moral or didactic reading of his novels. It's hard to know for sure what he made of Humbert's fans as they multiplied across the decades. It wasn't until the mid-2010s that a Dolores-centric reading of Lolita finally began to gain more traction. Related The Great Awokening is transforming America In the New Republic in 2015, Ira Wells tracked the public's eagerness to read Lolita as the story of a sexually appealing young girl against the language that suggested Dolores's tragedy. 'The publication, reception, and cultural re-fashioning of Lolita over the past 60 years is the story of how a twelve-year-old rape victim named Dolores became a dominant archetype for seductive female sexuality in contemporary America,' wrote Wells: 'It is the story of how a girl became a noun.' Probably the most high-profile of these essays came from the feminist critic Rebecca Solnit, in her 2015 LitHub essay 'Men Explain Lolita to Me.' 'A nice liberal man came along and explained to me this book was actually an allegory as though I hadn't thought of that yet,' Solnit wrote. 'It is, and it's also a novel about a big old guy violating a spindly child over and over and over. Then she weeps.' How Lolita survived Me Too The new Lolita takes were becoming mainstream just around the time of the so-called Great Awokening, those days in the late Obama era when it felt urgent and necessary to explore how misogynistic ideologies were encoded into works of art and popular culture. Gamergate and the Fappening ricocheted around the internet. Then in 2017, Me Too exploded into popular consciousness, and Lolita became, abruptly, very urgent indeed. In novels and memoirs of that time, changing the way you read Lolita became a metaphor for changing the way you think about consent. Related Reading Lolita in the wake of the My Dark Vanessa controversy When Me Too went mainstream, America began to reconsider old love stories and jokes, wondering if they were really so funny and romantic after all. (Listen, me too.) Almost immediately, commenters on the right began to declare that the left had, just like those killjoy Victorians, gone too far, become too moralistic: that they were destroying art and eroticism alike out of a desire to keep the world sanitized and safe and — using a word that had become a pejorative rather suddenly — woke. Lolita became a chief exhibit in that argument. Me Too, these commenters declared, was going to come for Lolita, and the book would never have seen the light of day in contemporary publishing. 'What's different today is #MeToo and social media — you can organize outrage at the drop of a hat,' 'If Lolita was offered to me today, I'd never be able to get it past the acquisition team,' publisher Dan Franklin was quoted saying in The Spectator, 'a committee of 30-year-olds, who'd say, 'If you publish this book we will all resign.'' You can find Dolores's voice in its pages quite easily, once you start listening for her. When I look back on meditations on Lolita around this time, however, what I find are a few declarations that Lolita is a misogynistic novel; but a great deal more pieces by readers who went back to Lolita expecting to find it appalling, and instead found it holds up remarkably well. Many of the works of art that were allegedly 'canceled' by the excesses of the woke mob in the wake of Me Too are works whose essence changes entirely when you look at them as stories of sexual assault. If you go digging for the voices of the sexual assault victim in, say, Sixteen Candles, you find nothing. Lolita, however, rewards such a read. You can find Dolores's voice in its pages quite easily, once you start listening for her. 'Perhaps—and at Vegas odds—only Lolita can survive the new cultural revolution,' Caitlin Flanagan wrote in The Atlantic in 2018. 'No one will ever pick up that novel and issue a shocked report about its true contents; no feminist academic will make her reputation by revealing its oppressive nature. Its explicit subject is as abhorrent today as it was upon the book's publication 60-plus years ago.' What becomes much more difficult, in such a reading, is enjoying the music of Nabokov's prose without shame. Who's reading Lolita right? Since 2018, as the Me Too backlash has mounted, the culture war over Lolita has shifted once again. The question is not, now, over whether someone is trying to cancel Lolita. Instead, it's the same as the old one: How do you handle the pleasure of the novel, and how do you handle the horror? What is the correct way to like Lolita? In her 2021 essay collection The Devil's Treasure, Mary Gaitskill wrote defensively that she thought Lolita was about love, and that she was sure saying so would lead censorious readers to hurl her book across the room. 'I don't think it's ideal love, it's twisted love, but that doesn't mean it isn't love. Probably the majority of Americans who know of that book would say: 'Yes, in real life Humbert should go to jail, but he's obviously a fictional character and I'm interested to read about him,'' Gaitskill said to The Guardian. 'That seems simple, but for more intellectual people, or people who are loud on Twitter, I think it's become contentious.' In 2020, writer and comedian Jamie Loftus released her Lolita Podcast, an extensive deep dive into the cultural legacy of Lolita. A central part of Loftus's argument was that our culture had gotten Lolita fundamentally wrong by reading it as the story of the temptress Lolita instead of the victim Dolores. 'I'm now far more aggravated with how [Lolita] was presented to me than by the work itself,' Loftus said. 'For me, a close read of this work reveals that Nabokov is not glorifying the predator. I believe it's our culture that has.' Now, instead of fighting over who's Victorian and who's modern like they did in the 1950s, we seem to be fighting over who is alternately righteous and refreshingly perceptive. Versions of this argument over how to read Lolita continue to play out on social media, where Redditors vigorously debate whether people who read the book as a love story are illiterate edgelords stuck in the past, or if people who read the book as a horror story are virtue-signaling social justice obsessives. The culture wars have a way of making everything they touch look the same. Now, instead of fighting over who's Victorian and who's modern like they did in the 1950s, we seem to be fighting over who is alternately righteous and refreshingly perceptive, who is shrill and moralizing and who is unafraid of petty boundaries. The person who might be most helpful to us here is, of all people, Lionel Trilling. 'For me one of the attractions of Lolita is its ambiguity of tone … and its ambiguity of intention, its ability to arouse uneasiness, to throw the reader off balance, to require him to change his stance and shift his position and move on,' Trilling wrote, in the same 1958 essay in which he declared that Lolita is about love. 'Lolita gives us no chance to settle and sink roots. Perhaps it is the curious moral mobility it urges on us that accounts for its remarkable ability to represent certain aspects of American life.' Lolita was written by a Russian, but it is about America, the whole vast beautiful seedy map of it, which Humbert and Dolores criss-cross again and again over their horrible year together. It is Lolita's ability to change shape before our eyes, to shift, to mutate, to show us who we are in every era, that makes it such a purely American novel. The more we read Lolita, the more it has to show us about who we are.
Los Angeles Times
3 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
She was always meant to play Jean Seberg. Now Zoey Deutch has her own ‘Breathless'
When making a movie about the behind-the-scenes saga of one of the most transformative and influential films of all time, one might not expect it all to hinge on a haircut. And yet for the team behind 'Nouvelle Vague,' about the production of Jean-Luc Godard's radically freewheeling 1960 feature debut, 'Breathless,' it kind of did. As the film's director, Richard Linklater, puts it, 'All the roads led up to the haircut moment.' Linklater, himself a generationally influential filmmaker for movies such as 'Slacker,' 'Before Sunrise' and 'Boyhood,' first worked with actor Zoey Deutch on the 2016 baseball comedy 'Everybody Wants Some!!' It was then that he first mentioned to her the idea of playing Jean Seberg, the American star who took on the female lead in Godard's Paris-set film about a doomed low-level gangster on the run from the police. (Having premiered earlier this year at Cannes, 'Nouvelle Vague' will touch down at festivals in both Toronto and New York before coming to theaters Oct. 31, then on Netflix on Nov. 14.) Seberg's haircut in the original film, a super-short, blond pixie cut, rewrote fashion trends around the world and encapsulated a spirit of youthful, diffident insouciance. Working with colorist Tracey Cunningham and stylist Bridget Brager in Los Angeles, Deutch recreated the look. During a recent interview at Netflix's offices on Sunset Boulevard with a straight-on view of the Hollywood sign, Deutch says she had no fear about the transformation. 'It was so much harder for everybody else around me,' says Deutch, 30, her hair currently at a sleek shoulder length and dyed a rich dark brown. 'I found that people, women and men, were like, 'How do you feel? Are you OK? This is so crazy. What's it like?' It was the focal point of every discussion. It was like a cool social experiment.' For Linklater, it was worth the wait. 'You can imagine for months and months I'm in Paris, saying, 'This is Jean Seberg,' and people are seeing this dark-haired American,' recalls Linklater in a Zoom call from his home in Texas. 'I was like, 'She's the perfect Seberg, trust me.' And then in through the door comes the pixie-cutted Zoey as Seberg. And everybody was like, 'Oh, OK. That's her.'' Deutch often brings a mischievous playfulness to her performances, a knowing sense that she gets it, regardless of the genre or situation. Which fits in well with the movie-mad world of Godard and the community of French New Wave filmmakers in 'Nouvelle Vague.' 'Zoey's a good old-fashioned chameleon,' says Linklater, calling her a 'body-of-work actress' for the broad range of roles she is capable of, from the teen drama 'Before I Fall' to rom-coms like 'Set It Up' and even a legal thriller in 'Juror #2.' 'You look at her films, she can be very different and not afraid to play an a— or someone who has very strong feelings, and so there's a certain constant bravery to Zoey that I really admire.' In the intervening years since shooting 'Everybody Wants Some!!,' Linklater and Deutch have remained in-touch and he casually mentioned the Seberg project once or twice. A few years ago, on the off chance it might actually come to be, Deutch began studying the films of the French New Wave and learning to speak French. 'I thought just in case, let me be ready to be lucky,' she says, in Los Angeles for a day while on a break from shooting the upcoming 'Voicemails for Isabelle' in Vancouver. There was a television interview from August 1960 in which Seberg gives a tour of her apartment in Paris, speaking both French and English, that became a touchstone for Deutch. You can hear Seberg attempting to mask her natural Midwestern accent with a more mid-Atlantic flavor popular among performers at that time — and then also speak French on top of that. 'I was grateful that I got to play her at a moment in time when her French wasn't perfect, because that was less intimidating,' says Deutch. She adds, 'I find her to be an incredibly mysterious person. And me not speaking French and having to learn the language helped me kind of step into her a little bit a lot more, between that and the hair. There's a certain set of challenges with doing an entire movie in a language you don't speak, but a huge gift because it helped me understand her essence.' Originally from Marshalltown, Iowa, Seberg leaped to fame following an international talent search by director Otto Preminger for the leading role of his 1957 medieval epic, 'Saint Joan.' The actor was physically harmed while shooting the film's climactic burned-at-the-stake scene, then suffered terribly from the film's bad reviews. Preminger cast her again in his 1958 'Bonjour Tristesse' and again psychologically tormented her during the film's production. After 'Breathless' made her an international star, Seberg's career continued to have its ups and downs, with her radical politics leading to her being put under surveillance by the FBI. In 1979, her body would be discovered in the backseat of her car in Paris, her death ruled a suicide. 'Is the rest of her life incredibly fascinating and intense and tragic? Yes,' says Deutch. 'But Rick was really adamant on telling a story at a very specific moment in time. We're not telling anything that happens after. Godard is not a legend yet. You don't know who this guy is, what he's doing. He's not who he was later. Don't read the last page of the book when we're still on Page 1.' The teasing dynamic between Seberg and Godard (played by Guillaume Marbeck) is the core of 'Nouvelle Vague,' with Seberg often exasperated by the emerging director's unconventional ideas — and vocal about it. Deutch's impressions of Marbeck's deadpan Godardian grumble, sometimes affectionate, sometimes sarcastically biting, are a comedic highlight of the movie. Eventually the two come to appreciate each other. In preparing for the film, Deutch realized she would in essence be playing three parts: the actual Seberg, the character of Patricia in 'Breathless' and the moments when Seberg is popping through while playing Patricia. The re-creation in 'Nouvelle Vague' of one of the most famous scenes from 'Breathless,' — Jean-Paul Belmondo and Seberg sharing a flirtatious stroll down the Champs-Élysées — required Deutch to exhaustively match the onscreen movements of Seberg as Patricia while also speaking as Seberg, since the film had its dialogue recorded later, essentially playing two characters at the same time. While Seberg may have been plucked from obscurity and tossed into a literal trial-by-fire with her first two movies, Deutch was born in Los Angeles, the child of 'Back to the Future' star Lea Thompson and veteran director Howard Deutch ('Pretty in Pink'). Still, she recognized something in Seberg's struggles. 'There is a sort of collective unconscious understanding amongst anyone who's been a young actress — you get it,' says Deutch. 'No one's exempt from the experience of what it means to be a woman in Hollywood at a young age, regardless of what year it is. 'But I have immense empathy and feel deep pain for her circumstances of not having a community around her that could help her, when she was 19, navigate in these in insane waters,' adds Deutch. 'She's an incredibly strong, brave, brilliant woman. It's absolutely correct we have very different backgrounds and I feel for anybody that comes into this world and doesn't have a foundation or a support system around them.' The production of 'Nouvelle Vague' had access to voluminous information on the production of 'Breathless,' from many books and documentaries to the paperwork of the original shoot itself. The actual camera used by cinematographer Raoul Coutard to shoot 'Breathless' is the one seen onscreen capturing the action in 'Nouvelle Vague.' While the film's costume designer, Pascaline Chavanne, did deep-dive research into the origins of the clothes in the original film, some garments were provided by Chanel, including a reproduction of a cappuccino-colored striped dress that Deutch liked so much she wore it to the photo call for the film at Cannes. The production had to recreate the iconic T-shirt worn by Seberg for the Champs-Élysées scene featuring the logo for the New York Herald Tribune. It has become one of the film's most cherished images. 'There were places where we could be more fluid and interpretive, but that shirt was not one of them,' recalls Deutch, with genuine seriousness. 'We wanted the ribbing to be perfect. We did so many different variations of it with the text and the size and getting it perfect.' Deutch also reverse-engineered moments from 'Breathless' that she would drop in elsewhere in 'Nouvelle Vague,' such as skipping onto set or repeating a line with different inflections, to imply that Godard may have plucked them from the world of the film's production and inserted them into the story. She observed this was a technique Linklater had used when they were shooting 'Everybody Wants Some!!' to bring the unpredictable liveliness of the making of the movie into the movie itself. 'I basically just obsessively watched 'Breathless' and said, 'What are some weird moments that I'm confused why they're there?'' says Deutch, who sees Godard and Linklater as similar in spirit. 'They are both directors of deep and true authenticity. And I liked the idea that both of them would do something like that because they're present and they're looking.' Linklater describes making the new film as 'a kind of séance' with the dead, noting that only two people portrayed in the movie are known to still be alive. Recreating a famous moment — such as when Seberg runs her finger over her lips as Belmondo had done — was deeply meaningful to him: an invocation. 'My favorite moments are when you finish a scene — an actor does something just great — and you're the first one to know it,' says Linklater. 'You've worked on it and you recognize it and you know what they just did was fantastic. And you can't wait to edit it and put it in the movie. 'But then they say 'cut' and the real world quickly fills up that space,' he adds. 'Magic just happened but then, OK, we're moving on. Just the way life seeps back into the magic — what did it look like to everyone else there?' 'There's always that layer when you're filming a movie, it's just people don't know it's there,' says Deutch. 'No one ever watches the movie and knows that day you got into a fight with your husband or your dog died or it was raining and your mascara was smearing. No one has any context and no one really cares. Generally they see it for what it is. But you feel it and see it and remember.' She's articulating a mission statement as good as any. In combining the emotions of 'Breathless' with the story of its creation, 'Nouvelle Vague' finds a heart and meaning of its own: when people with ambition, talent and creative drive step into their own power.
Chicago Tribune
33 minutes ago
- Chicago Tribune
Today in Chicago History: The Beatles play two shows at Comiskey Park, and scarcely a note was heard
Here's a look back at what happened in the Chicago area on Aug. 20, according to the Tribune's archives. Is an important event missing from this date? Email us. Weather records (from the National Weather Service, Chicago) How George Halas' columns for the Chicago Tribune, a field goal and a charity game helped the Chicago Bears prove their legitimacy in 19351948: The National League champion Chicago Cardinals beat the College All-Stars 28-0 in front of 101,220 fans at Soldier Field. Chicago White Sox pitchers have thrown 20 no-hitters since 1902 — including 3 perfect games. Relive them all here.1957: Bob Keegan — at 37 — became the oldest player to throw a no-hitter for the Chicago White Sox. The Sox beat the Washington Senators 6-0 in the second game of a doubleheader at Comiskey Park. 1961: The international press called it 'a stunning upset.' Three American teenagers scored a Wightman Cup victory at Saddle & Cycle Club over veteran British tennis stars Ann Haydon, Cristine Truman, Angela Mortimer and Deidre Catt. Billie Jean King on today's tennis, the media and a new play at Chicago Shakespeare about her lifeThe American teens were Karen Hantze and Justina Bricka, both 18, and bouncy 17-year-old Billie Jean Moffitt, who spurred on her own game by muttering 'Come on, baby' to herself. Moffitt later played under her married name, King. The American teens had lost to the same Britons at Wimbledon earlier in the year. They said that playing the established British stars before huge crowds helped them gain experience and confidence for the Wightman matches in Chicago. 1965: After arriving quietly at Chicago's Midway Airport, the Beatles played a day-night doubleheader at Comiskey Park. More than 50,000 incessantly screaming fans drowned out the Beatles during the 3 p.m. and 8 p.m. shows. John Lennon, then 24, was not annoyed. 'They pay good prices to get in (top tickets, $5.50). Who are we to say whether or not they should scream?' A solid line of officers sat shoulder to shoulder, with their backs to the infield, to prevent teens from taking second base, where the Beatles performed on a plywood bandstand. Paul McCartney singing 'I'm Down' pumped up the volume of the screamfest. Based on that alone, Tribune reviewer Will Leonard surmised that this was 'easily the artistic success of the evening.' The take at the Comiskey gate was an estimated $150,000 to $160,000, compared with the year before at the Chicago Amphitheatre, when the Beatles had a reported $30,000 in ticket sales. After the concert the Beatles stopped at Margie's Candies in Bucktown for ice cream, recalled owner Peter Poulos Jr. 'They sat at the back booth and ordered Atomic Busters (banana splits standing up). They began singing, John was standing on the table. The place was packed. They stayed about an hour.' 1976: Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla led a group of bishops on a tour of the United States that included Chicago. He returned in October 1979 — then known as Pope John Paul II. 2014: The Chicago Cubs won 2-0 over the San Francisco Giants after 4½ innings and a 4-hour, 34-minute rain delay when the grounds crew mishandled the tarp. The Giants appealed the ruling, won, but lost 2-1 a day later. Subscribe to the free Vintage Chicago Tribune newsletter, join our Chicagoland history Facebook group, stay current with Today in Chicago History and follow us on Instagram for more from Chicago's past.
