Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
Well, talking anyway. Right now, I think Linklater is at the peak of his creative powers. SCHOOL OF ROCK was a solid commercial flick, BEFORE SUNSET is just amazing and deeply heartfelt, and A SCANNER DARKLY is going to be a Valentine’s card for all true fans of Philip K. Dick who feel like his work has never really made it to the screen. Add to that the upcoming DVD re-release of DAZED & CONFUSED, one of my favorite films of the ‘90s, and it’s a good time to be a Linklater fan.
Here’s Beaks with his chat:
Richard Linklater entered our roundtable room at the Four Seasons looking a bit haggard following his morning go-round with the television media. Once situated, though, he looked genuinely relieved to see us, which he confirmed right off the bat.
I much prefer these to the T.V. six-minute things.
(Laughter.)
At what point did you decide you wanted to revisit these characters?
Oh, gosh. I mean, we were all talking about it maybe a year after the first one. First, you joke about it, then you take it more seriously, and we realized these characters are still alive in us. Eventually, we looked at each other and went, “We’ve gotta do this.” It took a while.
As a fan of the original, I was afraid when I heard this was being made.
Fear is a real… obvious emotion.
There seems to be this school of thought that if you’ve got something perfect—
(With interviewer:) Leave it alone! (Laughs.) Yeah. I know. That was the temptation. I think that’s why it took so long. I’m not going to say the first one was perfect, or anything, but, to us, it was really special. So, you realize you could not only screw up the first one… if you didn’t give it everything. So, yeah, there’s a certain fear, definitely. But it’s good. If you’re afraid of something, and still compelled to do it – in the arts, at least – you should probably do it. Maybe not in life.
How collaborative was the screenwriting process?
Well, as it says, the three of us wrote it. So, very.
Did you sit down together, and discuss characters?
Yeah.
Who put pen to paper?
We all did! First, we talked about it for years. Then, we sat down with three of us in a room for, like, three or four days, and worked out a very, very specific outline. I mean, the beginning, the end, what happens in every scene, all the emotional beats; it was very worked out. And, then, we kind of went our separate for almost a year. We each… well, Julie would send twenty pages, Ethan would send long monologues, I was rewriting and writing stuff. It was all on my laptop, I guess, ultimately, but if you did a word count they would probably exceed me. At some point, if one of us had an idea we were trying to squeeze into the movie, and the other two didn’t want to do it, or didn’t understand it… then it would disappear.
How crucial was it to spend a year thinking about the characters, and writing over a gradual period of time, rather than rushing it?
I think we probably could’ve rushed it because we knew those characters so well, but it’s helpful to have time. It’s just the way it worked out. But regardless of how long it took us to write it, once it got into official rehearsals, that’s when they would go to the level, and be in the final form. That’s what we did the first time; we spent three weeks in Vienna rewriting the script, and, then, adding a lot to it. New ideas. That’s what’s required of these two films: that the actors give everything of themselves. Ethan and Julie are great collaborators; they’re both writers, directors, musicians. They’re multi-faceted artists. It’s not a big deal that they co-wrote this.
How does the scene in WAKING LIFE figure into this?
Chronologically, it doesn’t fit.
Where do you see it?
Where it is in that movie: in the disembodied ether. (Laughs.) The good thing about that is that after we spent those few days – they came to Austin and we did that scene – we looked at each other and said, “Okay, we have to do this now.”
So, that was the turning point?
Yeah. Maybe that’s why I put it in there. We had been talking about it, but it was still abstract, and there was all that fear. But for us to get in a room and work together again, it was, “Okay, this is why we want to do this.” You know, we’ve got a neat shorthand, a neat collaboration going between us. It only gets better with time.
The scene in the cab and the ending: was that always planned?
Yeah. The driver, the scene in the car, and the exact ending as it is. The Nina Simone song… everything. That was in the outline. It seems like something we maybe just came up with like that, but that’s the real deal.
That’s a long take, the scene…
There are a lot of long takes.
And I marvel over capturing all of that. I don’t know how much time you had to nail it. How many takes did it take?
Which one, the car?
Yeah, but, I guess in general.
Usually, we were limited in that we only had a few hours a day. I think on any scene, with the exception of maybe the café and the bookstore, we had limited time because of light and other issues. So, we would get set up, we’d rehearse, get the camera moved down… wait, and, when the light was right… boom! We’d had, like, two hours to shoot. So, not only did we have a fifteen day shoot, we had two-and-a-half hours (per day). And it created this urgency among Julie and Ethan. They were so well rehearsed and they had worked so hard that… maybe, we’d get seven or eight takes.
Making a movie like this, that flows right out of the first one, I’d think you would be able to look back at the first, see what works, and stick with that. But, also, what did you look at in the first film and say, “This doesn’t work, I want to stay away from this”?
It wasn’t just the first movie, it was just movies in general. It was, “What was this movie, and what wasn’t it?” I think it’s a nice metaphor for the movie that the real time thing… in the first movie, they’re younger, they’ve just been hanging out, he’s been on a train for two weeks, she’s been on a vacation to visit his grandmother, and they just have all the time in the world. That experience is them filling fourteen hours. That’s a whole night! It’s an outgoing process; they’re having interactions with people, they’re going to clubs. In this movie, they didn’t have time for any of that. It’s just them. But that’s how life is sometimes. They’re on a schedule, it’s her home town, he’s working at that moment, he’s got a plane to catch.
And they’re older and more advanced, and have less time.
Yeah, isn’t that how it is? Can any of us return to that time when we were twenty-one, when we were like, “Yeah, I’m just gonna go hang out for a few weeks in… wherever!”?
We were talking earlier about how the original film came out when we were of that early twenties age, and, now, this really strikes a chord with people in their early thirties. So, for the next one, and, obviously, you’ve set yourself up for the next one, are you thinking about waiting another ten years and revisiting what it’s like to be these characters in their forties?
No. No specific thoughts, really, about that. I guess we’re talking more openly about it, because the tough one to do was this one, and if we were ever going to do it. So, now that we have, it’s easier to talk about it. But there’s no firm project in mind. We wouldn’t do it unless we had an idea worth developing, or if these characters were still alive and in a situation that’s interesting enough to make a film about.
So, you don’t think you’ve painted yourself into a corner at the end?
Not really. I think these two are nice little companion pieces. If it never went beyond this, it would be fine with me. The first one I could say the same about. It wasn’t begging for a sequel; it was begging to answer that question, the lady or the tiger kind of thing. Did they get back together in six months, or not? It didn’t necessarily make you think they had to be seen again.
Because of the way that this is a document of growing up, and especially how you use the flashbacks at the beginning, it really put me in the mind of Truffaut and what he did with the Antoine Doinel cycle. It seemed like you were opening yourself up to making this a bit of a cycle. Did you look at those films when you were preparing for this?
I know all those films. I didn’t have to watch them specifically. You know, another good little trilogy is the Malcolm McDowell/Lindsay Anderson films – IF..., O, LUCKY MAN, BRITANNIA HOSPITAL – “The Mick Travis Trilogy.” That’s a pretty interesting look at a guy getting older. But a very different character every time. It’s an interesting notion. Film can capture that in a way literature… you see it in literature with Larry McMurty, John Updike and Philip Roth – the same characters showing up and living. But in film you have that record of their face and how they age! You just juxtapose those images; I mean, I was going for that. You see young Julie and then a jump-cut to Julie in a bookstore. Pow. There’s nine years of someone’s life. It’s a big contrast.
It was an open ending, but a beautifully done ending. But, of course, there are going to be audiences out there asking what happens to them. What do you think of the audiences out there that are going to be baffled?
I don’t think anyone should be baffled because…
Some audiences need an explanation of what’s going to happen to these characters. They don’t have the imagination to fill it themselves. (Note: this is not my “Gee, ain’t I smart! I can stomach ambiguity!” question.)
Well, let’s face it, this isn’t for… *them*. (Laughs.) I think anyone who can sit through this whole movie, like it, and then be thrown by the ending… obviously, this wasn’t their movie.
I’m sure you’ve been asked over the last nine years about what happened after the original ended. You think this will be even worse now?
I think there’s less mystery of what happens in, say, the next eight to twenty-four hours. But the real issue is what happens two weeks later, a month later. To me, that’s another movie. Do you have the guts or the courage or the romance it takes to… change your life to accommodate a connection you feel with another person? It’s a messy business, and, like I said, a whole other movie.
You mentioned Lindsay Anderson. What other films and filmmakers have influenced your work?
Well… everything I’ve ever seen. All 20,000 movies, or whatever. I don’t know. Specifically? We didn’t screen a movie for this. I didn’t feel there was a precedent, really. You’re inspired in general, but usually not in a specific way. I don’t know. You know, I like movies. That’s what I do. I can talk about… name any director, any film – I can talk about that.
Can you name anybody specifically that’s been influential to your entire life, not only as an artist, but as a person?
Starting with parents? Genetics? Where do you begin or end with that thought? It’s huge. Every book you’ve ever read… it’s one of those overwhelming questions. It’s easier to get specific if someone says, “What do you think of so-and-so?” I don’t know where to start. I’m just a person taking in stuff.
How much extra preparation did it take to shoot in real time?
It was tough. It’s not, like, *difficult* difficult, but it required a lot of extra attention and thought. This whole movie, technically, was painted into a corner by the structure, and then having to make it work exactly around that. On every movie there’s something almost insurmountable that you have to work very hard to solve, but that was fun. That was the creativity; that’s what was unique about it.
You’re kind of a unique director in that, going back to the early nineties, your career has benefited so much from the home video and the DVD. Not just BEFORE SUNRISE, but DAZED AND CONFUSED, SLACKERS, etc. Are you thankful for that?
Yeah…
Or bothered, because it seems more people have seen these films at home than in theaters?
I think you can say that about a lot of films. It’s nice to be in an era where there’s a shelf life available. You know, back in the 60’s and 70’s, a film would come out, would not catch on, and just disappear for all time. Maybe a cult revival would come out and be in theaters, but it had to be a certain kind of movie. I see films all the time from the 60’s and 70’s that are just, “I don’t remember this film at the time. It’s a wonderful movie. Why didn’t this (catch on)? It’s as good as anything else!” We all can say that about literature or music. But it is good to be in this age of (home entertainment), because people don’t go to movies that much. We do, but average Americans… someone who attends “a lot” is once every six weeks. I had a studio head explain this to me when the film didn’t perform. (Laughs.)
When I was in college and worked in a video store, DAZED AND CONFUSED always rented. It was always gone.
It was huge on video. It’s funny how films have their immediate pop-culture-economic-life-moment when they’re in the theaters. A lot of that has to do with how they release it, where they release it. All films aren’t released equally. I think several of my films, in a parallel universe, would’ve done a lot better at the box office had people believed in them and distributed them in a certain way. But that’s beyond my control.
BEFORE SUNSET opens July 2nd. I’ll be back tomorrow with a review, and interviews with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy.
Faithfully submitted,
Mr. Beaks
Chat? Holy shit! That was jam-packed! Nice one, Beaks, and keep it up.
"Moriarty" out.
