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Director's Reel: Richard Linklater Looks Back at 'Dazed and Confused,' the 'Before' Trilogy, and More

Talky
but never boring. Cool but never pretentious. Personal but never exclusionary.
Defiant but never disaffected. Funny but never too daffy. Always backed by a
kick-ass soundtrack.

These
are a few of the attributes of the characters and movies of Richard Linklater,
the Houston-born, Austin-based writer-director who burst onto the filmmaking
scene with micro-budgeted 1991 comedy Slacker.
Two years later Linklater dropped the ‘70s-set, future-cult classic Dazed and Confused, and this week he returns
with its “spiritual sequel, Everybody Wants Some.

In
between, the 55-year-old filmmaker brought us the beloved Before trilogy (Before Sunset,
Before Sunset, and Before Midnight), dabbled in
groundbreaking rotoscope animation (Waking
Life
, A Scanner Darkly), cranked
kiddie tunes up to 11 in a family-friendly hit (School of Rock), and spent 12 years filming an undisputed
masterpiece (Boyhood).

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Director’s
Reel: Spike Lee on the Prescience of 'Do the Right Thing’ and the Mockery of
Denzel’s 'Malcolm X’ Oscar Loss

In
our latest episode of Director’s Reel,
Linklater strolls with us down memory lane and shares input from the making of
some of his best films (watch above). A few highlights:

Slacker
(1991)

Linklater
disputes the notion that his breakout film (his second after 1988’s little-seen
It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by
Reading Books
) was a "portrait of disaffected youth and all that. To
me it’s [about the] beatnik, hippie counterculture.”

Before
Sunrise
(1995)

“After
doing these two large ensemble films, Slacker
and Dazed and Confused, I think I was
wanting to do a much more intimate film about two people [Ethan Hawke and Julie
Delpy] connecting,” Linklater said. “And that was really all my
impulse was.

Boyhood
(2014)

Linklater
said he wanted make a film about his childhood, but was having trouble settling
on one moment in time. "And I had kind of given up on the idea… when the
idea hit me. Oh, it’s all, 'What if I just filmed a little bit of every year?’
That’s the journey of maturing.”

Everybody Wants Some is now in theaters. Watch Linklater talk
about its relationship with Dazed and
Confused
: