This tripped-out conversation with Richard Linklater, about this year’s best animated film, Waking Life, took place over the phone under the scrutiny of a publicist. But that didn’t stop Linklater from engaging in a conversation that went off on tangents and non-sequiters about… everything. This interview became so surreal that it actually began to resemble dialog from Waking Life itself.
Here’s how it began. There was a click on the line, and the publicist/operator came back on:
“It’s just going to be a few more minutes. I’ll call you back.”
Richard Linklater, director of “Slacker,” “Dazed and Confused,” “Suburbia,” “Before Sunrise” and “The Newton Boys,” a man who named a generation, who once sent Led Zeppelin a video of himself begging on his knees for the use of a song, is going to be connected to me from Austin, Texas. This feels like a highly regulated, corporate mode in which to encounter a man whose main filmic theme seems to be anarchy and free will, but Linklater has chosen to dive head-first into the Hollywood mode and seems to be pounding his way through.
We spoke about Waking Life, the film in which Linklater has gone straight back to the anarchist, philosophical, dream-logic, Bunuelism of “Slacker,” and it’s about time.
Get the interview in part two of LINKLATER ON LIVING THE “WAKING LIFE”>>>
