REVERSE SHOT: You’ve been described as a “self-taught” filmmaker, which is an interesting way to think about how you came to filmmaking: dropping out of school, going to work on the oil rig, starting the Austin Film Society. It feels like something that’s carried over to the work to a certain extent. Would you agree with that?

Richard Linklater: Yeah. I mean, I don’t want to make too much of the “self-taught.” I think maybe making films is something innate you can’t really teach to begin with. But yeah, I think it was natural for me to sort of do it on my own. I never liked school that much, I never fit into any kind of academic program. I never liked official systems of any kind. Without even thinking about it, I just realized that wasn’t the place for me. I saw it as a long-term process, my filmmaking. I knew it would be a long time coming and I didn’t want to be humiliated right off the bat.

I was sort of at a loss about what I was going to do at college. Actually, I had been on a baseball scholarship, and I had a heart condition so I couldn’t play anymore. It was an arrhythmic thing where I couldn’t really run—it hasn’t really affected my life that much. But I had become interested in theater and literature; I was an English major and I remember hoping I just would have more time to read and write. The whole world opened up to me once I wasn’t in school anymore; I didn’t have that term paper due, or that thing I needed to be studying for. During my free time I could study my own path, which back then was theater, writing plays. This was a small East Texas college, I hadn’t really discovered cinema at this time. I had seen a few films I liked, but it seemed so far from me. It was only after I had kept my job offshore, the void of my physical time, in all the moments I wasn’t working, I found myself quite a bit in the movie theater. I think it’s how a junkie starts; it’s like “hey, I realized I was shooting up every day.” Watching three or four movies a day. This was in the early Eighties when there were still a lot of repertory cinemas in Houston, a couple cool theaters and university programs. Then I would go home and read up on whatever film I saw, or the director, and for a couple years I just inundated myself.

RS: Any particularly influential filmmakers for you at that time?

Linklater: Kind of all of the above. When you’re taking it all in, I think you’re taking it all in. Everything was a discovery: seeing Breathless for a second time; seeing Blow-Up for the second time. For a lot of these films, it wasn’t until the second viewing that they really kicked in. It was a whole world opening up. And also along the way I had seen some low-budget American independent films of the Seventies and early Eighties, which I found to be more inspiring. That was when I segued from thinking I could just write movies to thinking I could be making them. I had always been technically inclined. So I was saving up my money and bought a Super 8 camera, projector, some editing equipment, a bunch of film stock, and moved to Austin. I got laid off of the oil rig job after about two and a half years, but I had saved up a lot of money.

RS: What was the experience of working on the oil rig?

Linklater: I’d always had crummy jobs that didn’t pay very well, restaurants, crappy jobs. The oil rig was the first job I ever had that paid well, so instead of going back to college that summer, I kept that job. That experience had been kind of wonderful; it was like being in the service, I think, but better than the army. You fly around on helicopters, you work really hard, it’s vaguely dangerous. It was something good to do at that age, so unexpected, what no one wanted me to do. But that set a tone for the rest of my twenties. Maybe the rest of my life. Stay in school was the advice from everyone. I learned early on: listen to all the advice, get a consensus, and then kind of do the opposite.

RS: Isn’t that what Jesse says in Before Sunrise? Is he speaking for you?

Linklater: Yeah, I would imagine. [Laughs] I’m one of the few filmmakers who will claim autobiographical elements, not like Woody Allen who says, no no, not at all. I would say yeah, sure, pointedly autobiographical.

RS: Aside from Dazed and Confused, where else? Are there autobiographical elements in, say, School of Rock?

Linklater: The room Jack Black lives in, that round room, I lived in that room, I lived in that house. That’s how I found my way into that movie. Jack [Black] is me in my twenties, in a way.

RS: How did you come to make your first film, It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books [1987]?

Linklater: That came after several years of doing short films and technical experiments. But that was the first film for which I ever put much thought into content or form, everything before that was kind of “film school.” I talk to aspiring filmmakers who have a script and are ready to jump in and make a feature, I just say, “Have you made a six-minute short yet?” They say, “No, no I’m ready for the big time.” You will learn so much, you gotta flounder around, get a lot of things out of your system. Even Orson Welles, the ultimate boy genius of cinema, made several shorts, and some weren’t that good.

RS: Another crucial point of your biography from around this time is the foundation of the Austin Film Society. How did you start that?

Linklater: Like everything, it started really small time. Myself and my roommate at the time, Lee Daniel, who was my cameraman and is my cameraman to this day, had been in Austin a couple of years and had grown a little tired of all their programming. After I had burned through everything, I realized they were showing the same things the next year. I was passionate about doing something filmwise. I was shooting all these films, editing all night, but it was time to get a little more physical, a “Let’s Put on a Show” kind of thing. So, I found out: oh you can rent films, you get a venue, show ‘em, collect money and that pays for everything, and you put up fliers—it was fun, a good training ground. Ultimately, we premiered Slacker at the same theater five years later.

RS: And you distributed Slacker yourself?

Linklater: Initially. We opened it in Austin ourselves. At the Film Society we picked up people along the way who shared the mission of “Cinema: all for one.” I did most of the heavy lifting, doing all the business, booking, all the crap work. I took on all that responsibility. I guess I’m blessed or cursed with this one part of my personality, because my dad was a straight-up insurance executive kind of guy, that I could stomach going to meet with a lawyer, go file paperwork at the state, return phone calls, deal with a lot of bureaucratic nonsense that seems so “not art.” I somehow have the personality to stomach all the crap. And it’s served me well, actually, in dealing with the studios. I think people think I struggle with that, that I’m some kind of “renegade-artist-type-dude.” But I have always gotten along and been able to deal with bigger systems. I was always able to have that meeting, do what I have to do, as a means to an end. Incorporate as a nonprofit, get grants, do all the paperwork.

RS: Has this “business sense” helped you be able to get to this point in your career in which you after making your two least accessible movies, your next is your most successful movie—do you now have a freedom to pick and choose where maybe you didn’t before?

Linklater: Well…I don’t know. It’s luck that one thing works out and one doesn’t, it’s sort of happenstance. Dazed and Confused was a studio film, Newton Boys was studio, so was School of Rock. And some of the others are studio-financed to some degree, or industry-financed. Even weird ones like Waking Lifeand Tape; the money comes from cable and things like that. I’m happy to not be raising money from relatives and credit cards. But you’re always dealing with somebody. I do find myself at the moment, due to the success of School of Rock, to be on people’s radar a little. It’s enabled me to get the recent two films going: Before Sunset and Scanner Darkly. And it’s never tit for tat. When you’re dealing with studios, if you have a big failure hovering over you, it just looks bad to the stockholders. It’s kind of tough, I’ve been at this long enough to kind of sense the ebb and flow of my own popularity. I’ve never been a guy who had more than a toe in Hollywood anyway, so my toe is more easily lopped off than most.

RS: Given all that, how do you see yourself in relation to what’s left of the American independent film scene you were very much a part of in the late Eighties, early Nineties?

Linklater: I don’t think it’s changed much. I think there are more films being made, but there are probably less outlets for them and distributors. I think people get jaded really fast, thinking, “Oh look at this guy who made one film that was a hit at Sundance and now he’s making a big studio film.” But the truth is, that’s probably where that person was heading all along. The truth will only be told over a career. You have to start small; that would be like bemoaning a minor league baseball player because he’s now in the big leagues. He was always working towards the big leagues. You can’t take Robert Rodriguez and criticize him for moving on from El Mariachi to big films. That’s who he was, where he was heading, he’s in his groove now. I never saw myself only doing big films or small films; I don’t have a plan for myself, just what the film requires. I’m excitable about weird, small projects; that’s how my mind works, so you’ll get a Tape, a Before Sunset, or a Waking Life. But I don’t have a singular plan. Whatever story you want to tell, tell it at the right size. I think you get in trouble if you make experimental big studio films. I’ve tried, I’ve pushed those buttons. That’s one thing that’s changed within the industry, like our society in general, it’s big and small, there’s very little in between. Now that I know that I can save myself a lot of time. I lost a year or two in there, trying to get films financed that I didn’t know would never get financing.

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