RS: Is it a conscious thing for you that you’re moving so quickly between genres?

Linklater: It’s not a conscious thing. You just follow your instinct. It’s like, “There’s this Philip K. Dick novel I like a lot, I can feel it as a movie, and I want to do it.” It’s only when I’m doing it I realize that I’m technically making a science fiction movie, that I’m in the genre of science fiction. But I don’t feel it’s science fiction. Or like when I’m making Before Sunrise or -Set, I guess they’re technically romantic comedies maybe, but I don’t acknowledge the genre stuff too much. But that’s all just classification, people trying to make sense of what you’re doing. I’m not setting out to defy genre expectations; I’m just the opposite.

RS: One thing we all agreed on when we selected you for this symposium, is that you’ve tried out all this different stuff, but each film is unmistakably yours. In School of Rock, there’s a certain shot where Jack Black is performing his “Band Is Mine” song for the class for the first time, and the camera moves, floats gently backwards. I feel like this “drift” is carried through all of your films.

Linklater: Again, not really conscious on my part, but maybe that’s how I see things, just this sort of floaty observation. That’s the thing about this kind of work. You’re stuck with your own personality, for better or for worse. And the sad thing about loving cinema before making films is that you think you can do anything or anyone, like Scorsese or so and so. Once you’re doing it all you really can do if you’re being honest and not knocking off something, is be yourself, the way you see it, the way you feel it. It’s always amusing when Robert Altman gets money now and then to make a film, like that Grisham film, The Gingerbread Man, an Altmanesque version of Grisham [laughs], and then to hear him bickering with the studio. I mean, how could they have expected anything else? And I’m probably stuck there. You’ll sort of always get a Linklater version of something. But I’m not afraid of that.

That’s partially why I did School of Rock. It came to me, and I always had a little prohibition against that, thinking, oh that wouldn’t be my film. But I think I was confident enough I felt that I could do something with it, I found my way into it pretty easily story-wise. It was definitely a challenge to make a comedy at that level. I like comedies, I always felt I was pretty comedic, to go back to your genre thinking. It was a big challenge to pull that off, to deliver the goods as a studio comedy and yet still be a personal film. I’ve always emulated and admired that; Scorsese and Oliver Stone, people doing personal films no matter how big the budget. That’s where the whole independent thing breaks down. Independent good, studio bad: that kind of thinking is such bullshit. You go see a totally lame genre wannabe piece made for $30,000 and think, “okay that’s their calling card to the industry.” But then you see a $60 million obsessive personal film; my hat’s off to that. That’s not easy to do. For me, Newton Boys was a very personal film, a story I felt very attached to, a story I felt only I would be interested in telling and I told it my own way. It just didn’t connect with the expectations of what it should be. I was dealing with the studio, and yet I was very happy. I had to fight all the battles, but very similarly to Dazed and Confused, I got out with the film I wanted to make. I’ve never had a bad creative experience. I’ve never had to re-shoot an ending, I’ve never had to cast anyone I didn’t want. I’ve never had to trim 20 minutes I didn’t want to. I’ve always been reasonable, never laid out a three hour movie and said take it or leave it. I stand behind everything for better or for worse.

RS: You talk about having control over something, and it ultimately being a Linklater film. How does this fit into the overall question of auteurism? To me, your films stand alone because they’re much more about collaboration.

Linklater: I never beat my chest and say this is a “Linklater film.” I’m just sort of the ringleader of a lot of creative energies. Inevitably that’s what a director does. I think that’s why I’m doing this in the first place, why I’m not sitting in a room writing alone. What I live for is mixing it up with other people and artists, having a good time and expressing ourselves. It’s sort of like I create the sandbox, but I’m inviting people to come and play in it. It’s the spirit of film, I just want to have a good time. But the director in me is striving to make the best thing possible for what I have in mind, which requires someone to come at me with more ideas than I could ever imagine. That’s what good collaboration is, whether it’s with an actor, a writer, a composer. People together on the same wavelength, building on an idea. When I work with someone, we both end up somewhere neither anticipated. You plan everything on paper, and you do all the homework and prepare, but the alchemy happens when you mix it up with others. To me, that’s cinema. A cameraman like Sven Nykvist; his best work is with Bergman. With someone else, it’s good, but it’s not the same. Those two guys go to some level together in which one needs the other. Same with directors and actors.

RS: You really just seem able to let the outlandish star persona take over, as with Speed Levitch in Live from Shiva’s Dance Floor or Jack Black in School of Rock, and even to a certain extent with Before Sunset, in which Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy are devising their own characters and developing their own dialogue. Is there one particular way you deal with actors?

Linklater: This might sound rigid, but I work exactly the same on each film. People say, there must a huge difference between how you work with Ethan [Hawke] and Jack Black, but I can honestly say I don’t work any differently. I tell Jack Black, we’re going to rehearse three weeks and he says, “What are you talking about? I’ve never rehearsed at all.” I worked with Jack and these kids as I did with Julie and Ethan. We sit in a room, we read the scenes, think about it, always re-writing, I don’t care who wrote it. I always say, the director in me fires the writer…even if the writer’s me.

RS: What are your thoughts on the new tool of DV which you used on Tape, Waking Life and now in A Scanner Darkly?

Linklater: First one I shot on DV was Waking Life, and that was animated so it was just a capture medium, a convenient one at that. The only one I shot that I really cared that it was DV and it was sort of a restriction, was Tape. It was part of a series that was all made digitally. I didn’t mind cause I liked the look, and thought it fit that movie’s palette. But I wouldn’t seek it out, let’s put it like that. It never crossed my mind to shoot Before Sunset digitally. I don’t like the way exteriors look, even in the hi-def, the 100,000 dollar camera where there’s really no savings to speak of. It’s an interesting tool, just one more tool out there, but I think you have to be careful. So two of those three DV films are animated and I’d be a fool to shoot on film, process, and then animate over it. I’m not priding myself, going, “oh I’m shooting on 24p, I’m being so radical.” It’s just that I’m shooting on something to put it in the computer. School of Rockis 35mm, Before Sunset is 35mm.

…An interesting tool but not the revolution everyone thinks it is. Certainly not on the financial level, when people think oh you can just shoot a movie. You can if you can edit it on the computer and you’re satisfied with that. If you want it to be in theater on film, it’s going to cost a lot more. It’s good for learning, but I’m kind of old school. I like film, I like the way it looks. I like getting it back to the lab. I like timing it. I like film stock. Until that other stuff looks better, I’m still a film guy.

go to interview part 3