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'Daydreaming is a productive activity,' Richard Linklater says. 'Where do you get your ideas from? If you're working all day, that kind of kills a lot.'
Linklater may be famous for popularising slacking, but in fact he is prolific, hard-working and thoughtful. Born in 1960, he knew early that he wanted to make films but decided that going to film school would only slow him down. Instead, he worked on oil rigs to buy the time to read, study and experiment with shooting on Super-8. His first film to get a distribution deal was Slacker, made with his former flatmate Lee Daniel, who has been director of photography on many of his films since. Slacker follows a series of young people as they drift round Austin, listening in to their conversations and jumping from one story-line to another. It is, as one of the characters says, about how we all have 'separate realities ... you know, entirely different movies, but we'll never see it because we're kind of trapped in this one reality'. In fact, the character says 'in this one-reality restriction type of thing', which is probably even more isolating.
The film gave its name to a whole way of life. Young people started going to Austin to opt out of consumer society, just as hippies had gone to California in the 1960s. Ironically, so many went that Austin is now a boom-town for film and information technology.
Cheney's dream
Linklater doesn't actually see himself as part of the slacker scene, though he shares many of the slackers' concerns about modern society. One such concern is that the 'one reality restriction type of thing' that we're stuck in at the moment is the creation of the Vice President. 'We're trapped in someone else's dream,' Linklater says dryly. 'We're in Dick Cheney's dream, in his ideal world. Total domination and aggression and paranoia. A clampdown.'
Since Slacker, Linklater has deliberately made films in a wide range of styles. Dazed and Confused, about a night of misrule at a high school, has an enormous ensemble cast, rocking 70s soundtrack and witty editing. The Newton Boys tells the true story of a family of Texas bank robbers, while Before Sunrise and its recent sequel Before Sunset are two-hander romances, starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. His 2001 film Waking Life, whose content has similarities with Slacker, is transformed by being shot on digital video, then animated.
Linklater rejects attempts to find a consistent thread in his work. 'I don't strive for consistency,' he says. 'I don't have one thought pattern, necessarily.' Linklater's fans – and many of the people who work with him – point out, however, that his films consistently seem to pose certain philosophical questions. 'Can we be truly free?', for example. And 'What is consciousness?' And 'How can we know what is real, when each of us is stuck in a one-reality restriction type of thing?'
Perhaps the point, as Ben Lewis found in the course of making his documentary, is that Linklater is asking the questions, not answering them – or at least not giving the answers hoped for. His answers are nevertheless revealing. Pressed by Lewis, he responds that the attempt to see an intellectual pattern in his work is not only 'not very valid' and 'not interesting ... to me' but also that any such pattern would be 'a construct'.
'That's the human construct that renders the world comprehensible,' he adds. 'It's very important for all of us ... that it makes sense; it's important that that part of our brain is working. But to me, if you really break it down, that's a fiction. That's where fiction lies.'
The reverend Richard | Slacker with a work ethic | Planning and instinct | Find out more
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