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Laid-Back Linklater Is a Force For Change
The image of the boyish, no-big-deal filmmaker has been with Linklater since "Slacker," a discursive, picaresque portrait of Austin's quirky off-campus community whose lackadaisical rhythms and conspiratorial digressions at once captured and defined the Gen X zeitgeist.
Although Linklater always resisted the Voice of His Generation role (he turned down an invitation to hold forth on ABC when Kurt Cobain died), Austin author Alison Macor suggests that he has cultivated the laid-back image with surprising shrewdness. "Maybe if 'Slacker' had been a different kind of film, he wouldn't have been labeled that way," says Macor, whose history of the Austin film scene, "Chainsaws, Slackers and Spy Kids: 30 Years of Filmmaking in Austin, Texas," will be published in 2008. "But I think he worked that label very smartly. And I don't mean that in a manipulative way, I just think he's very savvy about navigating his career. And I think he's surrounded himself with people who've been able to help him do that."
  Richard Linklater in rotoscope. He used the technique for "A Scanner Darkly." (Warner Bros. Entertainment) |
Macor points to a decision Linklater made in 1988 to attend one of the industry's most important networking opportunities, the Independent Feature Film Market in New York. "Even before he was making 'Slacker' he went to IFFM to kind of assess the industry and what was happening with independent film," Macor says. "To me, that is something very businesslike -- to make those contacts even before you make your film."
Linklater himself allows as how his own mellow, slackeresque persona has probably been overstated. He works out with the University of Texas baseball team, and he possesses the determination of a lifelong competitor. "I was really focused," he says of the years when he was deciding to become a director. "I knew what I wanted to do [and] I didn't take it lightly."
Growing up in Huntsville, Tex., and later Houston, Linklater played football and baseball, ultimately earning a baseball scholarship to attend Sam Houston State University. But around his sophomore year, he left the team due to a heart condition, began watching films in English classes and thought about writing plays. He quit college before graduating in 1982 and got work on an oil rig on the Gulf of Mexico, where he worked for 2 1/2 years. During breaks from the rig, he would visit Houston movie theaters and art houses. "It was that first summer that film was taking me over," he recalls. "I quit reading playwrights and started watching three movies a day."
In 1985, Linklater moved to Austin, bought a camera and shot "It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books," an autobiographical road picture about a young man searching for himself. He shot "Slacker" shortly thereafter for $23,000; it became a hit in Austin and then at Sundance, and along with Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith -- all now good friends -- Linklater became an avatar for a new generation of independent filmmakers. He also proved to have a canny eye for talent: Matthew McConaughey, Renee Zellweger, Ben Affleck, Milla Jovovich, Parker Posey and Adam Goldberg all appeared in his next film, "Dazed and Confused."
Linklater has hit only one major glitch in an otherwise smooth trajectory since his debut: "The Newton Boys," a $27 million western (more than 1,000 times as expensive as "Slacker"), starring McConaughey and Ethan Hawke, that was a critical and box office flop. The film's failure launched a two-year period that Linklater says was the toughest of his career. "It's so much harder not to be making a movie than making a movie," he says. "You spend all day not making a movie. It's horrible. Next time that happens I'm going to take a year off and just read and watch movies."
As it happened, Linklater kept busy, building a cabin on property he owns in Bastrop, 30 miles southeast of Austin, and finally making two low-budget films on his own, "Tape" and "Waking Life," in which he resuscitated the technique of rotoscoping, or "painting over" live-action film, by way of computers. Then, screenwriter Mike White and producer Scott Rudin -- both fans of Linklater's since "Slacker" -- called him to direct "The School of Rock." Linklater was back. And the guy who at first looked like he would be his era's answer to John Cassavetes instead turned out to be its Vincente Minnelli, an accomplished generalist who is willing to tackle just about any genre.
Even during the post-"Newton Boys" dry spell, Linklater's longtime lawyer and executive producer, John Sloss, wasn't concerned. "He's never been about some kind of commercial career arc," Sloss says. "He's continued to make movies of all scales, and if the commercial establishment limits his scale relative to the success of his previous films, that would be a momentary speed bump. It wouldn't stop his inexorable drive to make movies."
"I never aspired to make big films or little films," Linklater explains, "just what was on my mind." What's on his mind lately is a project with Ethan Hawke about a day in the life of jazz trumpeter Chet Baker; a possible adaptation of the sequel to "The Last Detail"; and an ongoing project he's been working on in which he's filming the same actor from first through 12th grade. And, although he lost out on the chance to direct "Friday Night Lights," he'd still love to do his Texas football movie some day.
But in the end, it doesn't really matter what the movie is, as long as it's a movie and he's making it. "Every day I'm on a set -- and I've learned this from two years of sitting around -- I look up and say, 'I can't believe I get to do this,' " Linklater says. "It's like joining the priesthood. You give your life to it, and if you work really hard at it, it will feed you."
