Richard Linklater isn't too worried about Trump's movie tariffs

"The tariff thing, that’s not going to happen right?"

By Emma Keates | May 18, 2025 | 1:45pm

Photo: Stephane Cardinale - Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images

Film News Richard Linklater

Richard Linklater isn't too worried about Trump's movie tariffs

Donald Trump’s threatened 100% tariff on all “foreign” films may have some corners of Hollywood in a tizzy, but Richard Linklater is feeling fine. “The tariff thing, that’s not going to happen right? That guy changes his mind like 50 times in one day,” the director said during the Cannes press conference for his new film, Nouvelle Vague, per Variety. “It’s the one export industry in the U.S., it would be kind of dumb to… Whatever, we don’t have to talk about that,” he reportedly continued.

While not nearly as extreme as Trump’s plan, other figures with a vested interest in the industry like “Ambassador to Hollywood” Jon Voight and California Governor Gavin Newsom have weighed in with their own plans to “Make America Film Again,” in Newsom’s words. Nouvelle Vague star Zoey Deutch echoed some of that rhetoric during the press conference. “It would be nice to make more movies in Los Angeles,” she said. “The history and the studios and the culture and the crews, it would be so beautiful… I just finished doing a movie there and it was magical in the same way that Paris is magical and has this history.”

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Linklater also lauded his French hosts for “taking care” of their own film industry. “They make sure it’s healthy and they nurture it and they help it. The government, everyone is all in,” he opined. “From production to distribution, they care. And our country, the U.S., could use a little bit of that.” Nouvelle Vague, Linklater’s first project shot entirely in French, also pays tribute to France’s industry. The film, which also stars Guillaume Marbeck and Aubry Dullin, recounts the production of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, which originally premiered in 1960.

This is far from the first mention of Trump to color this year’s festival. Robert De Niro also used his opening ceremony speech as a powerful call to action against “America’s philistine president,” in which he told “everyone who cares about liberty to organize… to protest, and when there are elections, vote.”

Despite all the threats, however, Linklater is feeling good about the future. “Cinema is optimistic—it has to be,” he said. “It always feels under attack, you know? I’ve had movies out for over 30 years now and it’s always, ‘Things are terrible, it’s tough.’ And it is tough, it’s a struggle—but it always has been.”

“There’s new threats, but there’s something perpetual,” he continued. “We like stories told to us, we like the format of feature films. There’s more films than ever being made, indie films, it’s just harder to get them seen. But we adapt.”