When Richard Linklater's era-defining indie film Slacker snuck into arthouses in 1991, few of its fans could've imagined that 15 years later, Linklater's résumé would include a pair of mainstream studio comedies (School Of Rock and Bad News Bears), and an unusual double-dip appearance at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, with an animated adaptation of Philip K. Dick's mind-bending science-fiction novel A Scanner Darkly, and a sprawling, fictionalized dramatization of Eric Schlosser's non-fiction bestseller Fast Food Nation. Over the last 15 years, Linklater has built a reputation as an amiable, mercurial filmmaker, willing to experiment and willing to fail, and always championing cinema's potential to tell offbeat, personal stories. Criterion has just released a long-awaited special-edition DVD of what may be Linklater's most beloved film, the uncannily astute 1993 high-school comedy Dazed And Confused; on the day before he flew to Cannes to present A Scanner Darkly and Fast Food Nation to a mostly enthusiastic press, Linklater spoke with The A.V. Club about his new work, his old work, and why he wishes filmmaking weren't such a spectator sport.
The A.V. Club: Have you been to Cannes before?
Richard Linklater: Actually, I haven't. I think I've been to every other festival in the world.
AVC: Are you worried about the reception you're going to receive at Cannes? It has a reputation as the kind of festival where bad early word of mouth can cause long-term problems.
RL: It's kind of cool that Cannes audiences actually act like film is a big deal. I was in Berlin, and won an award for Before Sunrise, and people were hooting. It's kind of goofy, isn't it? You go to these festivals and get thrust into some kind of competition. It's sort of abstract. I don't take it seriously. As a former athlete… That's competition. A jury deciding what they think the best film is isn't really a competition.
Cannes rejected a few of my earlier films. I think they rejected Slacker and Dazed. Didn't want 'em. So I've got a little chip on my shoulder, I guess.
I'd be fine if there weren't film festivals, and you just made your films and didn't have to do anything from that point on. That would be really great, wouldn't it? I don't know. I'm in kind of an aloof time, where I'm not taking anything too seriously.
AVC: How did you and Eric Schlosser go about turning the reportage of his book Fast Food Nation into cinema?
RL: We just threw out all the statistics and history that's so well done in the book, and concentrated on the human drama of these people's lives. You know, Eric Schlosser, he's written plays and he's sort of a natural dramatist. I don't know if he wants anyone to know that. This is actually the biggest "drama" I've ever done, and so much of that was him.
AVC: Did you work in fast food at all growing up?
RL: I worked in a lot of restaurants.
AVC: Waiting tables?
RL: No, I was never that good. I was always like a busboy or dishwasher. You know, the true shit job of shit jobs. At hotels, I was always like the valet, or room-service guy. Service jobs, that kind of stuff. Probably the biggest job I ever had, for about two and a half years, I was an offshore oil worker. Hard-hat, boots, industrial settings. Now when I go into a meat-packing plant, I kind of get it. Guys with hard-hats and boots. Yeah, yeah. The real world.
AVC: This is a year of socially conscious films for you—Fast Food Nation and A Scanner Darkly both carry their share of political comment.
RL: I'm getting nothing but assists from the current administration, on all fronts. [Laughs.] I think they're working for me personally. With the NSA spying and tapping phone calls by the millions. That's Scanner. And now these bogus immigration issues, where nothing's really different from the past 20 years, and yet they've chosen to put a spotlight on it to focus on something other than their own failings in other areas. I guess it's an electoral ploy of some kind, that's probably going to backfire. But that's what Fast Food Nation is, that issue. It's probably one of the few films that's dealt with immigration here. So, hey… thanks Bush, Cheney, Rove.
AVC: Its unusual timing for A Scanner Darkly, since you started it so long ago.
RL: Yeah, but post-9/11. You could see the writing on the wall post-9/11. The first impulse was to crack down on American citizens. The government's always looking for any excuse to declare us the enemy. They're not suspicious anymore of whoever we're supposedly at war with. That went out the window pretty quick. Now it's "Let's clamp down everywhere."
AVC: Were you already familiar with the novel? Did the trends in American government remind you of that book specifically?
RL: I was actually attempting to get another Philip K. Dick book made, but the rights weren't available, and Wiley Wiggins, my buddy from Waking Life and Dazed And Confused, he mentioned Scanner, and that rang the bell. I was like, "Oh yeah." I checked into it. Rights were available, but it was tricky too, in that I had to convince the Dick daughters that I had the right take on it.
Yeah, so much of Philip K. Dick's stuff is prescient. But I think Scanner's a really clear-cut case. The adaptation was fairly easy. I just had to adapt to the modern era, which wasn't hard. He wrote it in the '70s and set it in the early '90s, so there was a slight time-period adjustment. But not much.
AVC: Did you find it hard to make the complicated plotting comprehensible?
RL: [Laughs.] I tried to embrace it. In an adaptation, you're naturally kind of combing it and simplifying it a little bit. But I really tried to maintain the weirdness of the story, and the weirdness of the tone, in that it's both kind of tragic and comedic. Which I think works in his books very well. Scanner especially. It's hilarious, and darker than you can imagine. I wanted the movie to be both. I think usually in adaptations, you lose the comedic. People think drama drives story, but I thought the comedy was really the heart and soul.
AVC: Is there a different process working with actors who know they're going to be turned into animated characters?
RL: Absolutely nothing different.
AVC: What about working with digital video vs. working with film?
RL: A little bit easier, in a certain way. You know you can use the convenience of not having to change mags every 10 minutes. Plus the mobility. And you're not as worried about the final image quality. Well, we were. We lit it and treated it like a regular film. But it was all going to be animated over, so that aspect was pretty forgiving.
As far as the actors go, we didn't really talk about it that much. We knew the general style, but no actor can approach it going, "Hey, I'm going to be animated, so I'll act different!" The good thing is, if their radio mic is showing in the back of their jeans, we just don't animate it. Don't worry about it. Perfection is not the focus so much. So much of film production is perfection and technique, while this was a little more forgiving.
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