As one of the pioneers of the independent film movement of the 1990s, director Richard Linklater, in large part, stayed true to his indie roots while remaining a relevant force in Hollywood. After bursting onto the scene with “Slacker” (1991), which became a cult classic while introducing the titular term into the lexicon, Linklater directed “Dazed and Confused” (1993), a teenage coming-of-age comedy for the 1970s stoner set that confirmed his status as a filmmaker capable of spinning a compelling yarn with the thinnest of plots by focusing on sharp dialogue and memorable characters. The film was also of note for introducing audiences to future stars Matthew McConaughey, Parker Posey and Ben Affleck. Not willing to confine himself to tales of adolescent angst, Linklater matured greatly as a filmmaker with the romantic drama, “Before Sunrise” (1995), only to take a slight step backward with “SubUrbia” (1997). Perhaps his most significant contribution to the cultural zeitgeist was in popularizing rotoscope animation in “A Waking Life” (2001), which he later employed to great effect in “A Scanner Darkly” (2006). Though he occasionally made forays into mainstream Hollywood with “School of Rock” (2003) and a remake of “The Bad News Bears” (2005), Linklater’s legacy was inextricably linked to the brief moment in the 1990s when the independent movement redefined how films were made.
Born on July 30, 1960 in Houston, TX, Linklater was raised in a broken home after his parents divorced. Following graduation from Huntsville High School, he attended Sam Houston State University on a baseball scholarship, and studied literature and drama. But Linklater discovered during his sophomore year that he had a heart condition, which forced him to quit the sport he loved and leave school. Already enamored by playwriting, Linklater spent the next two-and-a-half years working on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, where he began developing a love for film while spending shore leave watching movies in Houston theaters. In 1985, he moved to Austin and used the money he saved from working the rig to buy a camera and other film equipment in order to shoot his first film, “It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books,” an autobiographical road movie about a young man trying to find himself. That same year, he also formed the Austin Film Society with cinematographer Lee Daniel and South by Southwest founder Louis Black. Originally intended to showcase independent and experimental films, the society grew over the years to actively developing projects by turning an old local airport into a studio, complete with hangars transformed into production stages.
A self-taught filmmaker, Linklater charged right into making his first feature, “Slacker” (1991), a rambling, almost plotless comedic look at then-contemporary youth – post-college layabouts, anarchists and neo-beatniks – as they wander around a Texas college campus over a 24-hour period. Made for a scant $23,000 in 1989, “Slacker” emerged from the 1991 Sundance Film Festival something of a cultural phenomenon and became a bellwether of the independent film movement of the 1990s that included “sex, lies and videotape” (1989), “Reservoir Dogs” (1992) and “Clerks” (1994). Linklater's second feature, "Dazed and Confused" (1993), demonstrated that he could make a mainstream narrative on a thrifty $6 million budget. Recounting the lives of a group of high schoolers on the last day of class in 1976, “Dazed and Confused” was a dead-on portrayal of that era’s carefree adolescence, largely succeeding as an "American Graffiti" for 1970s teen drug culture. Linklater's acutely observed coming-of-age comedy served as a thematic companion piece to "Slacker” and became a favorite among critics, fans and fellow filmmakers, while featuring a bevy of then-unknown stars including Parker Posey, Jeremy London, Ben Affleck and Matthew McConaughey.
Linklater grew substantially as a filmmaker with the mature romantic drama, "Before Sunrise" (1995), which represented a new direction for the increasingly assured writer-director. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy starred as two students traveling Europe who meet on a train and spend an increasingly romantic day and night with each other in Vienna. Like his two preceding works, "Before Sunrise" was chiefly dialogue-driven, but whereas "Slacker" and "Dazed" were impressionistic compilations of incidents, “Before Sunrise” presented two fully developed characters whom audiences eagerly watch falling in love, only to go their separate ways. A critical darling, “Before Sunrise” resulted in an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay for Linklater and his collaborators Kim Krizan, Hawke and Delpy, as well as nominations from the Writers Guild of America and the Independent Spirit Awards. Returning to the slacker world of 20-somethings coming of age, he directed “SubUrbia” (1997), which was based on the Eric Bogosian play about a group of friends hanging around a local 7-11 waiting for their friend-turned-rock star to arrive. More a critique on the wasted lives of aimless adolescence than a celebration of rebellious youth, “SubUrbia” failed to resonate like his previous two excursions into similar territory.
For his next film, Linklater departed slightly from his previously dialogue-rich, character-driven efforts with the fact-based Western adventure "The Newton Boys" (1998), which chronicled the criminal exploits of a little-known band of bank and train robbers. The film boasted a solid leading cast with McConaughey, Hawke, Vincent D'Onofrio, and Skeet Ulrich starring as the four Newtons brother, while Linklater was given a healthy budget from which to work. Linklater stayed true to the spirit of co-scripter Claude Stanush's source biography, though fans looking for the director’s unique mark were duly disappointed. After a brief hiatus, he returned to the film world by premiering two experimental works at that the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. First – "Waking Life" reunited Linklater with "Dazed and Confused" star Wiley Wiggins and had the distinction of being the first known film to be digitally shot with live actors and then animated in the editing room. Using a relatively cheap form of animation called rotoscoping, where animators traced over the live action frame by frame, Linklater unwittingly helped popularized a technique that was later used in other mediums, including television commercials for Charles Schwab.
Linklater’s second film at Sundance in 2001 was the digitally-shot "Tape," a talky drama that allowed him to return to his low-budget roots. Joined by such big name stars as Hawke, Uma Thurman and Robert Sean Leonard, “Tape” was a real-time feature based on Stephen Barber's edgy one-act play and shot mostly in sequence, thanks to the inexpensive and versatile medium. Though the film had the potential to challenge and broaden independent film in much the same way "Slacker" had a decade earlier, “Tape” nonetheless failed to excite despite its promise. In 2003, Linklater helmed one of his most mainstream and commercial projects, "School of Rock," from a script by Mike White that was tailor-made for the film's star, Jack Black. Although the premise – a slacker and wannabe rocker named Dewey Finn (Black) poses as a substitute teacher to earn some much-needed cash and turns his private school class into a kiddie rock band – was ripe with opportunities to veer into cinematic cuteness and mawkish sentimentality. But 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 one of his best star vehicles.
Almost a decade after making “Before Sunrise,” Linklater re-explored the characters in an equally entrancing sequel, "Before Sunset" (2004), which would revisit the couple (Hawke and Delpy) on a chance encounter many years after they initially met. After the twin triumphs of "School of Rock" and "Before Sunset," Linklater lost a step with his next effort, a studio-backed remake of the 1970s kids' baseball film, "The Bad News Bears" (2005). Though Linklater wisely cast Billy Bob Thornton in the Walter Matthau-created role of boozy, washed-up Little League coach Morris Buttermaker, 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. The result was a mixed critical reaction and a weak showing at the box office. He used the rotoscoping technique from “A Waking Life” to great effect in “A Scanner Darkly” (2006), his hallucinatory adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel about a drug-addicted narcotics agent (Keanu Reeves) spying on his drug-addled friends. The animation only enhanced the agent’s decent into madness, as he struggles to figure out what is real and what is not.
Linklater next adapted an unlikely book for the screen, “Fast Food Nation” (2006), a non-fiction bestseller by Eric Schlosser about the perils of the fast food industry. Instead of taking the source material and crafting a documentary, Linklater instead centered the narrative around the marketing director of the fictional Mickey’s – a spoof on McDonald’s and Burger King – who discovers that fecal matter has made its way into the restaurant’s meat. Traveling to the equally fictional Cody, CO, he sees the horror of how their burgers are processed, leading to a conflict of conscience. Turning to his old love of the theater, he helmed “Me and Orson Welles” (2009), a fictional account of the famed director (Christian McKay) who stages a production of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” using a 17-year-old actor (Zac Efron) in a critical role.