Director Richard Linklater may be a recent Oscar nominee for 2014’s Boyhood but his body of work has been receiving acclaim for decades. Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Waking Life, School of Rock and Bernie are just some of the highlights on his resume and the man has a well-established reputation for being open and fun with his fans.
His newest film is Everybody Wants Some!!, a movie with two exclamation points in its title and spiritual roots to Dazed and Confused. To hear Linklater tell it, this movie is what would happen if the characters from the high-school set Dazed in the 1970’s went to college in the ’80s. Many parallels run throughout the new film but not enough of them to get distracted and detached from the cinematic experience.
Richard Linklater recently traveled to San Francisco to talk about Everybody Wants Some!! where he highlighted the benefits of working with an unknown cast and how Boyhood helped get this movie made. This is a transcription of that conversation.
Q: Did the success of Boyhood help get this film made and if so how?
Richard Linklater: This has a lot of similarities to Boyhood, I conceived them at the same time and I started shooting Boyhood when I really started thinking and conceiving this one. In my mind I had this one movie about growing up and this other college movie. But the success of Boyhood did help get this one made. This movie has no stars and sometimes having stars in your movie can work against you.
Q: I see what you mean by that.
Linklater: Yeah, their success down the line doesn’t help you right now.
Q: There are some obvious parallels to Dazed and Confused in this movie. Were those choices deliberate from the script stage or did they manifest on set?
Linklater: I was always up front that this movie was a sequel. If you imagine Mitch (played by Wiley Wiggins) going to college, this is where he would end up. That was my high school, this is my college and it’s a similar kind of ensemble. I didn’t expect the marketing to focus so heavily on Dazed and Confused but that’s alright with me because in this case it happens to be true.
Q: The chemistry between the main guys is great. Did you have any kind of bonding sessions prior to filming?
Linklater: Oh yeah. I have some land outside of Austin, it’s a bunk house and they all lived there for three weeks. It was the most fun, work, play environment. A couple of the guys are married but I said no, you’re going back to college. They jumped in full force.
Q: Did the script change at all when you were at the bunk house?
Linklater: Yeah, it was really about me adapting the script to this new cast I had. To me that’s the crucial creative moment. I don’t understand improv, I call it workshopping. People always accuse my work of being heavily improvised, I don’t understand it.
Q: What about the little details that make up the background of this movie and root it in the time period? How extensively did you research those choices?
Linklater: A director’s job is to say yes or no to about 900 things a day. If Finn comes up to me and says his character should have a pipe, it’s up to me to say no or yes, that’s a good idea. You have a quick decision to make and if you get it wrong enough times something in the movie feels off. In one of my favorite movies Day For Night my favorite line is “I get asked questions all the time, sometimes I even know the answers.”
Q: What was one of your favorite things about working on this movie?
Linklater: The cast. Their energy and their spirit, it was just fun. There’s something rewarding about working with young talent, they haven’t been jaded yet, they haven’t been burned.
Q: The Criterion Collection has been working on Boyhood and a lot of us are very excited for it. What are some of the special features we can expect on that release?
Linklater: It’s coming a little later in the year. We have a ton of behind the scenes type stuff that they have to work with. It’s a uniquely documented process so between photos, videos and behind the scenes stuff I think there’s some cool things coming. There are interviews with the cast members over the years and watching them growing up. It’s always great as a filmmaker to work with them, it’s the final resting place for your movie.
Q: And the Before films are also coming this year, right?
Linklater: I’m not sure on the release date but I feel good that they’re doing the Before trilogy and Boyhood.
Q: Maybe Everybody Wants Some!! someday?
Linklater: I hope so. When you work with a studio it can be tough to work out rights issues but the Before films were from three different entities so sometimes you have to wrangle those rights and figure it out.
Q: This is a silly question but why are there two exclamation points in the title?
Linklater: It’s in the Van Halen song and I like it, personally. Van Halen was the rock band of my generation and they had a sense of humor that I appreciated and carried over to this movie.
Everybody Wants Some!! is now playing in limited release.
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