If Godard didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent him. The gnomic Franco-Swiss filmmaker, who shot to worldwide acclaim in the early 1960s, was a seminal figure in the development of the medium, singlehandedly changing what movies and the people who made them were supposed to be like. He is one of the standout characters in film history—a small man with a lisp and prescription sunglasses who has produced a body of work that defies convention and is dense with political, intellectual, and personal allusions.
Cinephiles have been obsessively dissecting Jean-Luc Godard’s personal and creative life for decades. Now Screen Daily is reporting that French director Michel Hazanavicius, best known for The Artist, will be trying his hand at the notorious JLG in his next film, Redoubtable, a ’60s-set adaptation of a memoir by the French New Wave icon’s second wife, actress-turned-writer Anne Wiazemsky. Wiazesmky—who made her debut as the star of Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar, one of her eventual husband’s favorite films—married Godard in 1967, becoming his muse as the focus of his work shifted toward radical politics and rhetoric. Though their relationship didn’t last long, the two remained legally married until 1979.
Oddly enough, Godard will be played by Louis Garrel, whose father, Philippe Garrel, directed Wiazemsky in several films. Stacy Martin—best known for playing the younger version of the protagonist of Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac—will play Wiazemsky.