Best Known As: Director of Slackers and School of Rock
Director and writer Richard Linklater's first nationally distributed feature, Slackers (1991), thrust him into the spotlight as a talented, self-taught filmmaker. A native of Texas, Linklater helped found the the Austin Film Society and started making his own movies in the early 1980s. Along with a handful of others, including contemporaries Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez and Wes Anderson, Linklater showed that independent films could compete in the marketplace with big-budget Hollywood productions. Throughout the 1990s he made critically acclaimed movies known for their unusual narratives and clever dialogue, including Dazed and Confused (1993, with future stars Milla Jovovich and Ben Affleck), SubUrbia (1996) and Before Sunrise (1995, with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy). His first mainstream production, The Newton Boys (1998, with Skeet Ulrich) didn't fare well at the box office, but 2003's School of Rock (starring Jack Black) was a big hit and proved that Linklater was not simply a maverick with a cult following. His other films include Waking Life (2001), Before Sunset (2004), a sequel to Before Sunrise, and Bad News Bears (2005, with Billy Bob Thornton).
For his 2006 film of Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly, Linklater used the same innovative animation technique as in Waking Life... some sources give 1961 as Linklater's birth year.
Career Highlights: Slacker, Before Sunrise, Dazed and Confused
First Major Screen Credit: Slacker (1991)
Biography
Self-taught writer/director Richard Linklater was among the first and most successful talents to emerge during the American independent film renaissance of the 1990s. Typically setting each of his movies during one 24-hour period, Linklater's work explored what he dubbed "the youth rebellion continuum," focusing in fine detail on generational rites and mores with rare compassion and understanding while definitively capturing the twenty-something culture of his era through a series of nuanced, illuminating ensemble pieces which introduced any number of talented young actors into the Hollywood firmament.
Born in Houston, TX, in 1960, Linklater suspended his educational career at Sam Houston State University to work on an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. He subsequently relocated to the state's capital of Austin, where he founded a film society and began work on his debut short film, 1987's It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books. Three years later he released the sprawling Slacker, an insightful, virtually plotless look at '90s youth culture that became a favorite on the festival circuit prior to earning vast acclaim at Sundance in 1991. Upon its commercial release, the movie, made for less than 23,000 dollars, became the subject of considerable mainstream media attention, with the term "slacker" becoming a much-overused catch-all tag employed to affix a name and identity to America's disaffected youth culture.
Landing with Universal, Linklater next filmed 1993's Dazed and Confused, a generational update of George Lucas' American Graffiti set during the last day of high school in 1976. Despite massive studio interference, the movie maintained Linklater's unique sensibilities while also proving his ability to work within the confines of more mainstream narrative structures, and went on to become a critical success as well as a cult favorite. Switching gears, the director traveled to Vienna, Austria, to film 1995's Before Sunrise, a sweet romantic comedy which bypassed the impressionistic textures of his previous work to place a new focus on character development. After making a brief voice-over appearance in the animated hit Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, Linklater next directed 1997's SubUrbia, an adaptation of Eric Bogosian's play of the same name. Though it bore a strong similarity to Linklater's previous work -- Slacker and Dazed and Confused in particular -- SubUrbia largely abandoned those films' improvisational style in favor of a more faithful script interpretation, which garnered mixed notices with critics.
Linklater's first foray into major-studio filmmaking, The Newton Boys, followed a year later. The true-life, Bonnie and Clyde-esque tale of a group of bank-robbing brothers, it shared little in common with the director's other films -- aside from the casting of Linklater pals Ethan Hawke and Matthew McConaughey as angsty young Texans. Dumped into the late-summer marketplace, the plodding, straightforward genre film did little to ignite either critical or box-office attention.
Recoiling from the Hollywood filmmaking community, Linklater struck out on his own with two micro-budgeted projects, shot on-the-quick in digital video. The first of these was the most ambitious: Waking Life followed a philosophical, non-narrative structure similar to Slacker, but with all of its characters and conversations enhanced in post-production using an innovative, "rotoscoped" computer animation technique. The other film, Tape, was a spur-of-the-moment project based on a play brought to Linklater's attention by Hawke, who enlisted friend Robert Sean Leonard and then-wife Uma Thurman to co-star. Confining its action to one seedy hotel room, the film allowed Linklater the freedom to experiment with a variety of takes, angles, and points of view he might not have otherwise tried on a more expensive format. Given warm receptions at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival, both films received lauded art-house runs later that year, even as Life was denied a Best Animated Feature nomination by the Academy.
Linklater found himself willing to give Hollywood another try in 2003 when presented with Mike White's script for School of Rock, a fish-out-of-water comedy starring Jack Black as an unreliable, would-be substitute teacher who commandeers a class of sixth-graders. Reworking the script and putting his cast through extensive rehearsals, Linklater added an element of off-the-cuff realism to the formula tale, and in the process garnered some of the best reviews - and easily the best box-office returns - of his career. He followed up that success with Before Sunset, a sequel to Before Sunrise that reunited Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. The film, full of motifs that have carried through all of Linklater's best work, earned him a flurry of critical praise and an Oscar nomination for screenwriting.
He attempted to recapture the box-office success of School of Rock with a remake of Michael Ritchie's The Bad News Bears, although the results were not quite as fruitful either artistically or financially. In 2006 Linklater had two films at the Cannes Film Festival. His fictional adaptation of Eric Schlosser's non-fiction book Fast Food Nation competed in the main competition, while his rotoscoped adaptation of Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly (a film that utilized the same technological tools as {#Waking Life) screened in the directors fortnight. Both films were released later that year in the United Sates.
Linklater was born in Houston, Texas. He studied at Sam Houston State University and left midway through his stint in college to work on an off-shore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. While working on the rig he read a lot of literature, but on land he developed a love of film through repeated visits to a repertory theater in Houston. It was at this point that Linklater realized he wanted to be a filmmaker. After his job on the oil rig, Linklater used the money he had saved to buy a Super-8 camera, a projector, and some editing equipment, and moved to Austin. It was there that the aspiring cineaste founded the Austin Film Society and grew to appreciate such stylized auteurs like Robert Bresson, Yasujiro Ozu, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Nagisa Oshima, and Josef Von Sternberg.
Since his early 20s, Linklater has been a vegetarian.[2]
Career
Linklater founded the Austin Film Society in 1985 together with his frequent collaborator Lee Daniel, and is lauded for launching and solidifying the city of Austin as a hub for independent filmmaking.
For several years, Linklater made many short films that were, more than anything, exercises and experiments in film techniques. He finally completed his first feature, the rarely seen It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books (which is now available in the Criterion Collection edition of Slacker), a Super-8 feature that took a year to shoot and another year to edit. The film is significant in the sense that it establishes most of Linklater's preoccupations. The film has his trademark style of minimal camera movements and lack of narrative, while it examines the theme of traveling with no real particular direction in mind. These idiosyncrasies would be explored in greater detail in future projects.
To this end Linklater created Detour Filmproduction (an homage to the 1945 low budget film noir by Edgar G. Ulmer), and subsequently made Slacker for only $23,000. The film is an aimless day in the life of the city of Austin, Texas showcasing its more eccentric characters.
While gaining a cult following for his independent films, such as Dazed and Confused, Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, his mainstream comedies, School of Rock and the remake of Bad News Bears, have gained him wider recognition. In 2003, he wrote and directed a pilot for HBO with Rodney Rothman called $5.15/hr, about several minimum wage restaurant workers. The pilot deals with themes later examined in Fast Food Nation. In 2004, the British television network Channel 4 produced a major documentary about Linklater, in which the filmmaker frankly discussed the personal and philosophical ideas behind his films. "St Richard of Austin" was presented by Ben Lewis and directed by Irshad Ashraf and broadcast on Channel 4 in December 2004 in the UK. In 2005, Linklater was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for his film Before Sunset.
Many of Linklater's films take place in one day, a narrative approach that has gained popularity in recent years. Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Tape, Before Sunrise, and Before Sunset are examples of this method. Two of his recent films, (A Scanner Darkly and Waking Life), employ an innovative animation technique. To create this effect, Linklater shot and edited both movies completely as live action features, then employed a team of artists to 'trace over' individual frames (a technique known as rotoscoping). The result is a distinctive 'semi-real' quality, praised by such critics as Roger Ebert (in the case of Waking Life) as being original and well-suited to the aims of the film.
Fast Food Nation (2006), is an adaptation of the best selling book that examines the local and global influence of the United States fast food industry. The film was released in North America on 17 November 2006 and in Europe on 23 March 2007. In this at times confrontational film, Linklater demonstrates a political commitment to stances against inhumane treatment of animals and human workers.
Despite the popularity of some of his films and his ability to direct high-paying Hollywood productions, Linklater remains in Texas and refuses to live or work in Hollywood for any extended period of time.
Significance
Film scholars and commentators consider Richard Linklater's films to be significant in a number of ways.
In the early 1990s, Slacker was hailed as something of a manifesto for Generation X because the film's young adult characters are more interested in quasi-intellectual pastimes and socialising than career advancement.[3] However, Linklater has long since eschewed the role of generational spokesperson. Moreover, viewing Slacker years after its production and at a distance from these debates throws into relief the film's inclusion of various generations, as well as themes that are universal rather than generation-specific.[4] The film's purported relationship to Generation X is also undermined by the fact that the slacker existences depicted are as appealing for today's teenagers and young adults as they were for youth in the early 1990s. In this way, the film remains significant for documenting alternative pursuits of fulfilment in the face of a competitive, career-orientated and materialistic society.
Those of Linklater's films that have non-formulaic narratives about seemingly random occurrences, often spanning about twenty-four hours, have been hailed as alternatives to contemporary Hollywood market-driven blockbusters. In conjunction with these unorthodox narratives, the emphasis on philosophical talk over physical action in Slacker and Waking Life aligns Linklater's work with art cinema traditions, particularly those of Europe, from which much recent American cinema is estranged.[5] Linklater's films thus embody the potential for contemporary American filmmaking to explore and develop new alternatives to formulaic entertainment.
The use of the rotoscoping animation technique in Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly has captured the imaginations of film viewers, scholars and filmmakers. In Waking Life, the combination of this technique with dream subject matter seems to have stimulated new visual approaches to representing subjective experience. An example is Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir (2008), an animated documentary that is based, like Linklater's work, on video, although without using the same animation technique.
