Richard Linklater: An Overview

In 1989, a book by Rick Schmidt entitled How to Make a Feature Film at Used Car Prices was published. This book was a how-to on making an independent film at a maximum of $10,000, and had become a "bible" of filmmakers in the early/mid 90's such as Spike Lee, Quentin Tarantino, and eventually Richard Linklater.

Linklater originally had plans to become a doctor, studying gynecology at Sam Huston State University, but left college and worked on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. During his time working there, he picked up on a love for literature and film, partially due to visits to a repertory theater in Houston. After his work on the oil rig he bought a Super-8 camera, a projector, and some editing equipment and moved to Austin, Texas. Here he founded the Austin Film Society at the University of Texas.

Linklater created many short films that were the mostly just experiments in filming techniques and testing. In 1989 he finished his first full-length feature, It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books, which took about one year to film and another to edit. He filmed the entire film on a Super-8 camera, acted and produced the entire film on his own, and edited it in a public access TV station. The movie had little plot or narrative, as it follows a main character (played by Linklater) travelling about the country, meeting with various people and performing mundane, boring, everyday activities. The film lacked a wide audience and was rarely seen until its release with the Criterion Edition of Slacker.

His release of Slacker in 1991 followed a similar style of It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books, but with more dialogue and a hell of a lot more actors. It was Linklater's first major release, costing $23,000 to produce and film. It eventually developed a cult following, bringing in a gross of over $1,000,000. Slacker show us a glimpse of Linklater's developing style, which would change little over the course of 10 years worth of films. Like his first film, it carried little plot, and little narrative. It bounced between the lives of bohemians in Austin, like a flea jumping from one creature to another. But unlike Linklater's first, Slacker showed us much more meaning and thought; peering into the lives and minds of unusual individuals such as a character who steps off a bus and preaches his philosophy to an uninterested cab driver, a JFK conspiracy theorist, a television set collector who actually has a unit duct-taped to his back, or a woman trying to sell a Madonna pap-smear. Although the premise of the film seems boring, but the people we see in the film are surprisingly interesting, but Linklater doesn't want us getting too involved or attached to the characters like in other films. He merely wants us to observe and look into these individual's lives, and realize the similarities, differences, and philosophies in their lifestyles.

A later work, 10 years after Slacker, is another film that shares a similar theme, but adds a small narrative, and milks the philosophy right in the viewers face. This film is Waking Life. The film follows a boy who finds himself in a dream, and he cannot wake up. Throughout the dream, he confronts and hears the teachings of various characters concerning the mysteries of life, such as the concept of free will, and god's plan for us, or what happens after death. Waking Life was Linklater's first film to experiment with the use of a type of animation called rotoscoping. This was a technique where the entire film was shot live-action with a MiniDV camera, and then a team of artists would "trace" over each frame of the film. Every scene was carried a different feel to the animation, trying to capture how we perceive dreams; that we can recall mainly what happened and what we did during the dream, but certain details remain a blur, or they are constantly changing.

Soon following Waking life was Tape. This was a sudden change in Linklater's cinematography style, since it "turns the table" on setting and plot. While previous works like Slacker and Waking life, contain little plot, and wide setting, Tape gives us a big plot, with little setting. This may be because it was based off a theater performance. The entire film was shot on 2 handheld digital cameras, and is about a character named Vince (Ethan Hawke), who has an old high school friend, named Jon (Robert Sean Leonard), come to visit and catch-up on each other's lives since they graduated 13 years ago. As they chat and converse, Vince starts to pry into Jon, implying that maybe he raped a girl Amy (Uma Thurman), which ended their relationship back in senior year. Jon objects to this, and says it was merely rough sex and to leave it at that. The tension carries on, and a feud breakout that slowly reveals the character's true selves. The entire film is presented in real time, with no soundtrack, making the film present itself in the stage-esque that the story was originally presented in. But as I mentioned Tape takes place in one setting and one setting only; a hotel room. Since it happens in real-time, we see a very naturalistic feel to the film, making us even more connected to the characters than in traditional film, since we watch this film as if it were an actual documentation of a night at this hotel room. They actually have conversations that don't contribute to the story, but come back to the bigger picture eventually, just like people would in the real-world.

In 2006 came a more well-known work of Linklater, A Scanner Darkly. This was based on a Phillip K. Dick novel by the same name. It follows the lives of a few druggy guys in the not-so-distant future, who are constantly taking a drug known as Substance-D. One of these characters known as Bob (Keanu Reeves), is recruited into a secret police force that not even the co-workers of know each other's identity. But soon after Bob joins up with the force, he finds that he's assigned to watch a household of suspects, via secretly hidden cameras. But it turns out that this is Bob's home. Bob is faced with the confusion and moral decisions that may blow his cover, and may betray his friends. But as he continues with his drugged-out life, he starts to wonder whether the cameras or the 'scanner' see more of him, than he actually is willing to see; the him within himself. A