Now that Richard Linklater has filed the latest of his once-every-decade progress reports on the characters played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in Before Sunrise, he may finally be ready to turn his attention to revisiting the spirit of his other most-beloved ‘90s movie, the teen-nostalgia trip Dazed And Confused. The prolific and unpredictable filmmaker has been talking about doing a “spiritual sequel” to that movie for a long time; as recently as 2010, Linklater was lamenting that, while he had the financing in place, he still needed to “get a distributor that would do it or would give me enough to make it.” Yesterday, during a Reddit rap session, Linklater announced that he finally hopes to start shooting the movie this fall. “Assuming his plans go according to schedule,” Angie Han points out at SlashFilm, “that means the film could hit in 2014 at the earliest.”
Linklater has described the project, which once almost went into production under the title That’s What I’m Talking About, as a “college comedy” that will once again give him the chance to “mix it up with a big ensemble,” a la Dazed And Confused, which detailed the adventures of a couple dozen characters on the last day of high school in the summer of 1976. The new movie, set at a college during a weekend in 1980, is conceived as an attempt to duplicate the style and feeling of the earlier movie, though Linklater has indicated that none of the characters from Dazed will actually reappear. That may not rule out the possibility that some of the actors will turn up in different roles, so Linklater fans can continue to dream that the “sequel” will provide a new chapter in the ongoing renaissance of Matthew McConaughey. But what exactly was the foosball situation in 1980?