Laid-Back Linklater Is a Force For Change

Richard Linklater in rotoscope. He used the technique for "A Scanner Darkly." (Warner Bros. Entertainment)

AUSTIN

It's hard to believe that the film production company that brought the world "The School of Rock" and the remade "Bad News Bears" resides here, in a low-slung, nondescript building on the wrong side of Interstate 35, hard by a very un-Hollywood Days Inn. Other than the odd vintage poster for movies such as "Straw Dogs," a visitor could easily mistake Detour Filmproduction's modest lobby for the entryway to a mom-and-pop insurance business.

Then in walks the director Richard Linklater, dressed casually in khaki shorts and sandals, all smiles and eye twinkles. Now it's obvious we're in the red-hot -- well, better make that quiet and cool -- epicenter of Austin's vaunted indie film culture. And we're exchanging pleasantries with the man who despite a reflexive aversion to self-congratulation and a sweetly shy demeanor, in large part created it.

Twenty years ago, Linklater founded the Austin Film Society, which shows repertory programs of classic and rarely seen works and gives grants to emerging Texas filmmakers. It's since grown into a beloved local institution that sponsors its own Texas Film Hall of Fame awards (this year's honorees: Lyle Lovett, Matthew McConaughey, Kris Kristofferson). The show is a part glitzy, part down-home shindig in an empty airplane hangar at the former Austin airport, now a movie soundstage that plays host to Linklater's local colleagues Robert Rodriguez and Mike Judge.

"The whole Hall of Fame notion, I was never for that," Linklater says, settling into a chair in his office. "I was sort of like, 'Aw, come on.' But it's a fun night."

"Fun" might best sum up Linklater's approach to his career, which began right around the time he was starting the Film Society. (He made his first movie, "It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books," in 1987.) A playful streak runs through many of his films, from "Slacker," with which he made his theatrical debut in 1991, and "Dazed and Confused," his hilarious follow-up (both became hugely successful cult films) to the big studio family pictures.

No doubt Linklater thought it was fun to be nominated for his first Oscar, for his screenplay to 2004's "Before Sunset" (the sequel to the 1995 romantic duet "Before Sunrise," starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy). And it was surely fun to be at Cannes this year with not one but two films -- "Fast Food Nation," a fictionalized adaptation of Eric Schlosser's investigation of the fast-food industry that will come out in the fall, and "A Scanner Darkly," Linklater's animated take on the 1977 futuristic thriller by Philip K. Dick.

It was fun that "Scanner," which received befuddled reactions in France, earned a bevy of positive reviews when it opened in Los Angeles and New York on July 7 (it opened in Washington on Friday). And, okay, kind of fun that it earned a earned a respectable $23,000 per screen during its opening weekend, against the summer's behemoth-to-beat, something about a pirate, starring a guy named Johnny (per-screen average: $32,800).

Such invidious comparisons don't much interest Linklater, who will turn 46 at the end of this month, and who as a high school and college baseball star aspired to be the first major league baseball player who was also a serious novelist. "I remember once ['Titanic' director] Jim Cameron going, 'Every film I've done opened at number one. We creamed 'em,' " Linklater recalls. "Who cares? You just always hope your film finds its audience."

Let it be said that "Scanner," a trippy, funny and ultimately dark journey into the paranoid underside of drug addiction, government surveillance and corporate greed, has found its audience. The film, starring animated versions of Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson and Winona Ryder, is being hailed as "a gift from the studio and the filmmakers to the PKD community" on the Philip K. Dick fans' Web site.

According to Isa Dick Hackett, who with her siblings controls their father's literary estate, "A Scanner Darkly" can rightfully claim the term "phildickian" (the insiders' term of art for the truly authentic), "not Philip K. Dick-like, which I always call some of the adaptations," she said recently.

When Linklater flew to the Bay Area to meet her, Hackett recalls, she was immediately impressed by how well he understood both the humor and the tragedy of the story, which was largely based on her father's own experience. Linklater's script, which he showed her, included the book's postscript listing the friends and family members -- among them Hackett's parents -- whose lives were ultimately destroyed by drugs. "When we read the screenplay and saw that he had the In Memoriam in there, we said, 'This guy's serious,' " Hackett says. But once she saw Linklater on the set of "A Scanner Darkly," she was amazed at his equanimity. "I've never seen him be stressed. He's just always relaxed. Nothing is that big a deal."