Movies in the mind: independent filmmaker Richard Linklater is having a big fall season, with two unique movies opening within weeks of one another

Insight on the News, Nov 26, 2001 by Gary Arnold

Director Richard Linklater first attracted a following 10 years ago with his debut feature, the discursive social comedy Slacker. Currently, he's promoting a couple of projects that have gestated in his imagination for years. The just-released Waking Life required about one year's worth of computer-animation enhancement, while the compact Tape was shot on digital video in a single week. "You're making movies in your mind all the time" says the 40-year-old Linklater. "Some work, and some don't."

Waking Life is one of the most refreshing and offbeat pictures of the year. The movie blends video and animation to stylize talking-head footage in a wistful and distinctive way. A poetic, free-floating sense of conversation emerges as people share their reflections, usually hopeful but sometimes sinister, with an inquisitive dreamer named Wiley Wiggins -- an alter ego of Linklater -- who levitates around Austin, Texas, the filmmaker's birthplace and residence.

Based on an unproduced one-act play by Stephen Belber, Tape is a three-character, one-setting vehicle about a group of high-school friends reunited at age 28. Ethan Hawke, who had played a principal role in the filmmaker's unsuccessful 1998 feature The Newton Boys, brought the drama to Linklater's attention; he's joined in the film by spouse Uma Thurman and Robert Sean Leonard.

"I've been building up to the idea of Tape for a long time" Linklater says. "Ethan found a script that crystallized things.... It takes place in real time. The characters go at each other in this confined setting for an hour-and-a-haft. The performances are great. It was a godsend because we could shoot it so quickly ... after a lot of rehearsal, of course."

Although never exactly idle while animation supervisor Bob Sabiston and two dozen associates gave Waking Life its illustrative camouflage, Linklater was grateful to have an additional movie in the works. "The animation artists had a lot of free rein," he says. "While they were busy with their stuff, my hands-on involvement was limited to the music and dialogue tracks. Then the schedules fell into place in such a fortunate way that I got to do the final sound mixes on both films a week apart.

Linklater resists much speculation about the likelihood the national mood has shifted in a contemplative, stock-taking way that might enhance receptivity to Waking Life. Perched cross-legged on a sofa at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, one of his stops on a recent media tour, he formulates a diplomatic response. "I feel weird thinking about it" he says. "I don't want to find myself thinking, `Oh, God, the country has been forced by this great calamity into being in a friendly frame of mind for my new film.'" He does admit the film "very consciously brings up fundamental questions about reality, unreality, existence, free will -- all the stuff that you realize will elude simple answers but you still need to ask, since the questions are always worth thinking about."

As for developing movies in one's mind over a period of years, or decades, the director acknowledges an element of serendipity. "It's only when I saw the computer-animated shorts that Bob Sabiston and a friend of mine, Tommy Pallotta, who was in Slacker, had been doing that I thought maybe there is a way of replicating what's in my head" he says. "What I needed was a way of depicting unreality in a realistic fashion. Bob developed this wonderful software, a computer refinement of the tracing technique that animators used for the human figures in cartoon environments. Even five years ago, it could only render white backgrounds with black line drawings. Now it's fluid and colorful."

The idea of a live-action Waking Life never seemed right to Linklater. "It needs to be something contradictory between image and soundtrack" he says. "One source of fascination was to see how the artists interpreted the people in the taped episodes. We looked at the live-action footage a lot and cast animators from it, almost like you'd cast the actors themselves. But I never thought of the live-action material as a presentable finished film. Some of it was pretty bad-looking video"

Linklater estimates that about one-third of the finished material was scripted. He credits participants with another third of the material. The final third fell into the "more or less spontaneous" unrehearsed zone. "My original credit," Linklater says, "was going to read: `screenplay by me, with additional dialogue by numerous cast members.' That would have been the accurate thing. The Writers Guild wouldn't permit it. They don't like credits that acknowledge more than three or four writers.... There's no doubt in this case that the actors helped develop their characters. In many cases, they simply were the characters."

GARY ARNOLD WRITES FOR Insight's SISTER PUBLICATION, THE WASHINGTON TIMES.