Richard Linklater on Everybody Wants Some!!
Indie movie hero Richard Linklater discusses creativity, the 80s, being a jock and Everybody Wants Some!!, his ‘spiritual sequel’ to Dazed and Confused
It's a testament to Richard Linklater's success that his brand of unassuming indie films have started to seem positively mainstream. The naturalistic warmth first achieved in 1990's Slacker is now part of a greater cinematic language, yet his flair for honest characterisation and spontaneous-sounding dialogue remains a rare commodity.
His last feature, Boyhood, a casual epic, chronicled 12 years in its characters', actors' and viewers' lives. Everybody Wants Some!!, however, marks a return to the taut, lean narratives best exemplified by his hugely popular Before... trilogy.
An intellectual movie disguised as a frathouse comedy, it follows a 1980 college baseball team over a matter of days as Blake Jenner's freshman acclimatises to his new surroundings. The weight of expectation placed upon young adults is deftly conveyed, alongside the sense of pure possibility felt at that age. Linklater has made a wise, autobiographical gem which touches on subjects of greater significance than its genre conventionally allows.
While he was in Glasgow to present his film at the Glasgow Film Theatre, we sat down with the director to discuss his subversive latest offering.
The Skinny: Is Everybody Wants Some!! a typical Richard Linklater movie?
Richard Linklater: Very much so! This is a movie I might have made a long time ago. It's a youthful ensemble comedy, so it's a bit of a throwback for me. It's very much my kind of film. You know, a limited time span, people talking a lot, humour... all those things.
It's being touted as a 'spiritual sequel' to Dazed and Confused.
Yeah... I'm to blame for that phrase because I sort of threw that out there as an orienting device to the people I was trying to talk into making the movie. I said Dazed was my high school, this is my college. I think it does have the same kind of spirit. It's a hanging out movie, with very distinct characters that I think people might have an affection for.
Dazed and Confused trailer
The characters come across very well in the hands of the cast, but I imagine they'd seem less sympathetic on the page.
I think that's why it took me ten years to get the film financed! A lot of those characters, especially the bottom six or seven all kind of sound the same. My working method is to cast the most interesting actors I can find, and if they fit in well together I can bring out more personality in the rehearsal process. Most of my movies don't work so well on the page, they're very execution dependent. The good thing about having a track record is that people eventually take a leap of faith with me.
You mean actors?
The backers. Actors are brave, they're always the first ones in.
The film draws heavily from your own experience of college, but its themes seem to have wider political significance.
I think so. You get the benefit of hindsight. This was an era I lived through and when you're in a moment, you don't think much about it. But as time went by, I started to look back and realised it was a pretty interesting time. In America, it was pre-Reagan, pre-Bush era, pre-AIDS... There was a lot going on. Even musically, disco hadn't died yet, punk and new wave were new, rap was new.
Looking back, it represents the end of a certain era. For me, the 80s saw culture get much more commercial and ugly. Politically it was really regressive, anti-intellectual and anti-fun. Things really started going backwards. We live under this notion of progress, that things get better. But they kind of don't. The tide turns and things can march way back. It's hard to pinpoint it when it's happening, but you just feel it. To me, that's what the 80s were.
There's a stoner character who gets expelled here. Would it be pretentious to read anything into that?
That's a good one, I haven't heard that before! I think that's fair. He's been discovered. There's no room for him or that kind of thinking any more. That kind of searching. It is kind of true, it became less cool to be that guy.
The 80s are often thought of as a decade of selfish individualism.
That was the mainstream. It's that conflict of being part of a collective and being an individual. College has a way of throwing you in together and saying, 'You're this, that's your world.' You're put into groups and the individual wants to rebel and say, 'No, I'm everything.' As Whitman says, “I contain multitudes, I contradict myself...” You know, you want that freedom to expand and express yourself. It's a contradictory position to be in, but it's very interesting developmentally. Baseball's like that too. It's a very individual sport, but you're in a team environment.
The 80s were very commercial. Even the Hollywood films. No-one will be saying the 80s was the best era for cinema. The studios pulled back the reigns from the artists. There was a push for more money and artists weren't trusted. But by 82 or 83, I was completely underground, where there was a really rich scene in opposition to all that. Indie cinema was growing out of that. There was an interesting opposition to all the mainstream and it was a fun era to be part of. It was actually fun to have such an awful mainstream to rebel against. I got lucky on both sides: I got to grow up in the 70s, and the 80s happened just as I became more politically aware and demonstrative.
(Continues below)
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You paint a very positive picture of college in the movie, but didn't you drop out?
That was just a reaction to being really poor! I didn't see the point in finishing college. I'd been there two years, I'd gotten a lot out of it and had a reading list a mile long. I just wanted to read and write at that moment. I discovered theatre and thought I was going to be a playwright. Within three months I'd taken a job offshore and was making good money, but when I was on land I just found myself going to movies. They were showing a lot of repertory cinema and that really led to me shifting toward film. From that point, I was just saving up money to buy equipment. It was a sacrificial period.
The film concludes with the characters coming into their own at an arty party. Did you find redemption through art?
I was drawn to the performing arts. When I met dancers and actors, I was amazed because they didn't care at all about sports. I thought that was cool! I saw the sports environment for what it was, but I didn't have much respect for people who were just fans! I'd see them and think, “Get a life! Like, shouldn't you be doing something?”
Athletes don't have to do anything, they just show up, whereas artists express themselves in different ways. Creativity for creativity's sake opens your horizons. The whole world isn't just money and sports.
Everybody Wants Some!! trailer
Did you ever identify as a jock?
People who didn't know me would have thought so. If you got to know me well, you'd realise, “Oh, he's a writer,” or whatever. You work through jock bravado and realise they're not bad guys. They're not dark hearted. They surprise you.
Like the characters in this film. The alpha male's seen smoking a pipe and reading Kerouac...
That was true! It was cool to be turned on to that! An older guy lent me On the Road. There were a few guys who were really pretty smart.
Does the media tend to portray jocks one-dimensionally?
Overwhelmingly, yeah. Fans don't care about them outside the field, so they aren't given a forum. An interview with an athlete is always about the game and how they feel. That's what fans are interested in. They never ask them what books they're reading, or what their favourite band is. The athlete has to bring that up and if he does, 'He's eccentric! He actually likes something!' Also, these days they're shyer to speak up than they were back then. Athletes didn't get paid very much in the era I'm depicting. They could be more political; the dissident athlete, the guy in rebellion. As far as I can tell, that's completely gone from the culture.
Are you a nostalgic person?
Not really. There's no point in my life that I'd want to go back to or relive. They all have their associated anxieties. To me it's all been a developmental step. You can't go back psychologically, that would be painful.
Half-baked, sentimental nostalgia is really harmful. Politically, people often pretend there was a better time that we should return to. But if you were a woman or a minority, you wouldn't want to go back in time! But power structures want to go back. Nostalgia can be really harmful if you misinterpret it. It was your time, but it was never a perfect time.
Everybody Wants Some!! is released released 13 May by Entertainment One