A lot of credit cards that never got paid off. And the rest - well, you had a lot of bankruptcies. And I thought, “Man, that’s so many films!” And only 14 or so got in. When I submitted “Slacker,” there were, like, 200 other submissions. You look at the submissions at, say Sundance. You needed to come up with that 20, 30 grand, or however many thousands, which is a lot. There used to be a definite paywall to get through to make indie films.
#RICHARD LINKLATER SLACKER MOVIE#
Today, you can do a movie like that that for 7,000, 6,000, or whatever you wanted to spend shooting digitally. You mean if I were starting out now? Well, technically, I think it would be easier. Looking back to “Slacker,” which kicked off your career: Do you think it would be easier or more difficult to get that film made today? And experience can kind of lighten you up a little bit, so that you’re thinking, “OK, maybe the sky isn’t falling. You’re having to double your energy because you really don’t have, you know, experience. I think a lot of youthful passion is actually lack of confidence. As a coach said once, “You can’t fake confidence.” You only get it through experience. Isn’t that kind of confidence something you have only after you’ve lived long enough, and have done the job enough times?
I’ve shot this, I’m gonna use this, let’s move on.” It’s not like I have tickets to the ballgame, I’m not going anywhere, but we’re done.” I wasn’t being lazy - we were all pushing ourselves. You know, every day, I’d be like, “I think we’re done. I’m gonna say this is kind of my Sidney Lumet phase. Everybody was so ready, it was just frictionless. We had a 33-day shoot, but we wrapped on day 30. Because by the time we were shooting, we were so confident and really ready to go. But you know, we got some serious time and it paid huge dividends. But in patches, you know? They kind of came and went, because everybody was so busy. Did you have much rehearsal time before you started shooting? In “Last Flag Flying,” you have three very different actors playing three very different characters - and yet they mesh beautifully as an ensemble. It stars Cate Blanchett, this thing I adapted from a book, “Where’d You Go, Bernadette?” But it’s more from a female perspective. You know, I’m in post-production on a movie that’s a middle-aged woman’s movie. But I’m gonna disappoint them, because I have other films that are going right back to my youth. It’s funny: If they look at “Last Flag Flying” in the context of your career, coming right after “Everybody Wants Some!!” and “Boyhood,” some folks will be tempted to say, “Well, gosh, looks like he’s saying goodbye to his youth. Young people are always kind of looking forward. Which is rare for me, you know, because usually the characters in my films are looking forward. So it definitely has that kind of looking back vibe. But now, having a grown child and then running into buddies from college - well, that’s a big difference from running into someone you went to first grade with at age 21, you know? In this case, that gap in time is important, because you have these guys getting back together all these years later, and you see how that informs their lives, and their relationship. So, it was perfect, yeah.ĭo you think it would have been possible for you to have made this film immediately after, say, “Dazed and Confused”? But by the time I was making it, I was their age. You know, when I first conceived of this, the characters were a little older than me, because I was in my mid-40s. But we were all within about seven, eight years of each other. Actually, I think Cranston had just turned 60.
And it was so much fun to be, like, with contemporaries. Would it be fair to say “Last Flag Flying” is your first film that’s informed by a middle-aged man’s sensibilities?Ībsolutely. Here, in some of the highlights from the conversation, Linklater talks about “Last Flag Flying” and the film’s ensemble, and looks back at the film that launched his career. (The movie has been described as a “spiritual sequel” to 1973’s “The Last Detail” - which, like “Last Flag Flying,” was based on a novel by Darryl Ponicsan - but the characters here have different names and markedly different backstories.) And now, at age 57, the director of “Boyhood,” “Dazed and Confused,” “Tape,” and the “Before Sunrise” trilogy is home again to talk about “ Last Flag Flying,” his well-received dramedy starring Steve Carell, Bryan Cranston, and Laurence Fishburne as Vietnam War vets who are reunited in 2003 after the son of Carell’s character is killed in the Iraq War.
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