Richard Linklater’s acclaimed twelve year magnum opus, Boyhood, had just lost out to Alejando G. There seemed to be a small wave of shock across the film world after the 2015 Academy Awards came to a long-delayed close. “I’m not building a wall but making a brick.” - Richard Linklater, Slacker It was important for me, especially at that time in my life when I was a little bit of a fuckup.ĭazed and Confused is out now on Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection.Drawings by Sam Reynolds Original Photo by Dan Winters At the same time, it has opened so many doors for me that I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. People would come up to me with preconceived notions – that I was big-headed, or wanted to smoke weed with random strangers in broad daylight. But it was a slow burn: it played for five years at the same theatre Slacker had played at.
RICHARD LINKLATER SLACKER FULL
I dropped out of school shortly after the film was shot, so I didn’t experience the full blast of recognition. There was this terrible mockery coming from these kids, which made things much worse. But an entire team of Little League extras were watching me make these terrible pitches. So I just tried to look like I knew what I was doing. But they just told me they’d get a Little League kid, put him in a wig, shoot him from behind, and he’d look like Roger Clemens. I had maybe exaggerated my ability to play baseball to get the part. So I only heard about their off-hours shenanigans – going to gun ranges, taking mushrooms and rafting down the river.įilming the Little League scene was a big pressure night for everybody. Most people were staying in the Radisson hotel, but I was a local kid who still lived at home. It was a very close-knit cast and a lot of great relationships were formed. I tried to play it cool with Nicky Katt and the guys who were going to beat me with paddles as part of the film’s freshmen initiation scenes, but the first thing I did was shoot the cue ball off the table. The night before we started shooting, everyone went to the Hole in the Wall bar to play pool.
‘Maybe I exaggerated my ability to play baseball’ … Wiley Wiggins as Mitch in Dazed and Confused. Rick was a nice, personable guy who didn’t seem like a real adult. I was excited because it said it was the same production team as Slacker, which I had seen five times. I was sitting outside Captain Quackenbush’s Intergalactic Espresso House on the Drag in Austin when Anne Walker, the co-producer, gave me a casting-call leaflet. It tells you there’s something about teenagedom that never changes. I also enjoy people who weren’t even born then liking the film. I don’t think it’s my best movie, but it represents a rite of passage for the “busters”, the end of the baby-boom generation. I never made a penny off anything to do with it – I waived most of my rights to pay for the soundtrack. But I didn’t take any of their dumb ideas. They wanted me to put in modern music – or reshoot. People seemed to really enjoy the screenings, but then their ratings on certain aspects were always lower than executives thought they should be, which confirmed their fears that I had made an art film. I didn’t think I was going to be there for long, but I realised they were doing this psy-ops thing on me, trying to wear me down. The studio put me up in soulless corporate accommodation.
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Photograph: Universal/Gramercy/Kobal/Rex/ShutterstockĪfter shooting was over, I went to Los Angeles for the finishing touches. Improvised humour … Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused. So I switched things around to expand Matthew McConaughey’s role instead. There was one actor, Shawn Andrews, who wasn’t exactly rocking and rolling with the rest of the cast. Not everyone picks up on the vibe of what you’re trying to do, though. Improvisation was one of the things that made the studio nervous, but it added a lot of additional humour to Dazed and Confused. About a month before we started filming, Tom Pollock, the head of Universal, watched Slacker, at which point he realised who he was doing business with and he thought, ‘Oh no, it’s going to be one of those arty, jerk-offski movies.’ Everyone was on high alert for me after that. I still have PTSD when I think of how difficult the shoot was. Stylistically, it was trying its best to look like one of those drive-in movies. I wanted it to look like it was shot in the 70s, so I didn’t use Steadicam. The girls got a lot of Joni Mitchell Mitch, Wiley’s character, was at the cooler end of the 70s, glam and prog rock – he would be the first guy to buy the Ramones. I made the actors mixtapes of music their characters would listen to. He was a 15-year-old with all the bad habits of a grad student: smoking cigarettes, hanging out at coffee shops, my kind of guy.
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We cast in New York – where I met Parker Posey – Los Angeles and Austin. There were very few teenage movies at the time, so every young actor was clamouring to be in it.
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