By Ann Hornaday
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 16, 2006; N01

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."

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."

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."