Houston-born, Huntsville-raised Richard Linklater, a self-taught filmmaker, worked on an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico before moving to Austin where he founded a film society and started making movies. In 1987 Linklater completed his first film, "It's Impossible to Learn to Plow By Reading Books", and shot his first feature, "Slacker", a comedic look at then-contemporary youth--post-college lazies, anarchists and neo-beatniks--as they wander around a Texas college campus over a 24-hour period in the summer of 1989. The low-budget film was lauded on the festival circuit in 1990, showcased at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival, and released commercially later that year.
Linklater's second feature, "Dazed and Confused" (1993), demonstrated that he could make a mainstream narrative for a thrifty six million dollars (this relatively paltry budget was still about 250 times greater than that of his previous feature). "Dazed" recounts the lives of a group of high schoolers on the last day of classes in 1976. With its dead-on portrayal of kids driving around aimlessly in search of something to do on this momentous night, the film largely succeeds as an "American Graffiti" for 70s teen drug culture. Linklater's acutely observed coming-of-age comedy serves as a thematic companion piece to "Slacker" and featured a bevy of then-unknown stars including Parker Posey, Jeremy London, Ben Affleck and Matthew McConaughey.
"Before Sunrise" (1995) represented a move in a new direction for the increasingly assured writer-director, with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy playing students who meet on a train and spend one romantic night in Vienna. Like his two preceding works, "Before Sunrise" is dialogue-driven, but whereas "Slacker" and "Dazed" were impressionistic compilations of incidents, the later film presented two fully developed characters. Furthermore, Linklater made the city of Vienna into a pivotal character in its own right rather than merely a source of pretty backdrops. Almost a decade later, Linklater would re-explore the characters in an equally entrancing sequel, "Before Sunrise" (2004), which would revisit the couple on a chance encounter many years after they met. A critical darling, the film would result in an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay for Linklater and his collaborators Kim Krizan, Hawke and Delby, as well as nominations from the Writers Guild of America and the Independent Spirit Awards.
Linklater departed slightly from his dialogue-rich, character-driven prior efforts with the fact-based Western adventure "The Newton Boys" (1998), chronicling the criminal exploits of a little-known band of brothers who were bank and train robbers. Starring McConaughey, Hawke, Vincent D'Onofrio, and Skeet Ulrich as the four Newtons, the film had a solid cast, a healthy budget and was true to the spirit of co-scripter Claude Stanush's source biography but disappointed many Linklater fans looking for a movie that better bore the director's unique mark.
After a bit of a hiatus, Linklater returned to the film world with gusto in 2001, premiering not one but two experimental works at that year's Sundance Film Festival. "Waking Life" reunited Linklater with "Dazed and Confused" star Wiley Wiggins and had the distinction of being the first known film to be shot with live actors and then animated. With the digital video feature "Tape", Linklater returned to his low-budget roots, this time joined by such big name stars as Hawke, Uma Thurman and Robert Sean Leonard. A real time feature based on Stephen Barber's edgy one-act play and shot mostly in order thanks to the inexpensive and versatile medium, "Tape" held the potential to challenge and broaden independent film in much the same way "Slacker" had a decade earlier.
In 2003 Linklater helmed his most mainstream and commercial project yet when he directed "School of Rock" from a script by Mike White tailor-made for the film's star, Jack Black. Although the premise--slacker and wannabe rocker Dewey Finn (Black) poses as a substitute teacher to earn some much-needed cast and turns his private school class into a kiddie rock band--was ripe with opportunities to veer into cinematic cuteness and mawkish sentimentality, Linklater and White scrupulously avoided such traps and delivered a winning, laugh-out-loud comedy that made the most of its subject matter and provided Black with his best star vehicle to date.
After the twin triumphs of "School of Rock" and "Before Sunset," Linklater lost a step--if only slightly--with his next effort, a studio-backed 2005 remake of the enduring 1970s kids' baseball film "The Bad News Bears." Though Linklater wisely cast Billy Bob Thornton in the Walter Mattau-created role of boozy, washed-up Little League coach Morris Buttermaker and the director continued to show his skill in handling child actors, the remake suffered in its too-slavish adherence to the well-worn original storyline and a refusal to sharpen the story's edges for a contemporary audience.