Richard Linklater

Richard Linklater (born July 30, 1960, Houston, Texas, U.S.) is an American filmmaker known for idiosyncratic, personal films that reflect his self-taught directorial origins. His notable movies include Slacker (1991), Before Sunrise (1995), School of Rock (2003), and Boyhood (2014).

(Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film preservation.)

Early life

Linklater spent much of his childhood living with his mother in Huntsville, Texas, before he moved at age 17 to live with his father in Houston and play for a more-prestigious high-school baseball team. He earned a baseball scholarship to Sam Houston State University, but he dropped out of college and returned to Houston to work on an offshore oil rig. He developed an interest in film while frequently going to the cinema during his time off ashore. In 1983 Linklater relocated to Austin, Texas, where he purchased a Super-8 camera and took film-studies classes at Austin Community College. He immersed himself in the Austin film scene and cofounded the Austin Film Society in 1985.

First films: Dazed and Confused and Before Sunrise

Linklater produced, directed, shot, and acted in the leading role of his first feature film, It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books (1988). His second film, Slacker (1991), is a narrative-free piece that meanders across mostly unconnected vignettes featuring Austin bohemians over the course of a single day. It was a film-festival hit and helped launch the American independent cinema renaissance of the 1990s. The film’s success gave Linklater entrée into Hollywood, but the first movie he made for a major studio, Dazed and Confused (1993), is far from a lavish affair. Instead, it explores the director’s typically small-bore cinematic interests, most notably the development of distinct, introspective, offbeat characters. Drawn heavily from Linklater’s own teenaged experiences, the slice-of-life comedy, which follows students at a suburban Texas high school on the last day of the 1976 academic year, earned raves for its verisimilitude. Featuring a cast of future stars (including Ben Affleck and Matthew McConaughey), Dazed and Confused was warmly received by critics and went on to become a cult classic after it failed to make a large box-office impact upon its release.

Linklater’s next film was Before Sunrise (1995), a romance in which two strangers (played by Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke) meet on a train in Europe and spend one night together in Vienna discussing love and the vagaries of human nature. Linklater then directed a pair of forgettable studio productions (SubUrbia [1996] and The Newton Boys [1998]) before returning to the rambling dialogue-heavy style of his first films with Waking Life (2001). That film is something of a sequel in spirit to Slacker, in that it flows from vignette to vignette of people waxing philosophical, although, unlike the earlier movie, it does so while following a main character. Critics praised Waking Life’s rotoscoped (a process wherein live-action footage is traced over by animation) visuals, which adds a dreamy surreal quality to the film. Linklater next made the experimental Tape (2001), which he followed with a crowd-pleasing comedy about an out-of-work musician (Jack Black) who cons his way into teaching music at a prep academy, School of Rock (2003); in 2016 the latter film was adapted as a television show for children.

Before Sunset, Before Midnight, and Boyhood

In 2004 Linklater, Delpy, and Hawke reunited to create Before Sunset, a follow-up to their film from nine years earlier that sees the characters from the first film reunited for a short interlude in Paris. The sequel touches on many of the subjects discussed in Before Sunrise but in a more mature and disillusioned manner. Before Sunset earned Linklater his first Academy Award nomination (which he shared with Delpy, Hawke, and Kim Krizan) for best adapted screenplay. He then directed a series of films that met with an underwhelming response both at the box office and from critics: Bad News Bears (2005), a remake of the hit 1976 comedy about a motley Little League baseball team; A Scanner Darkly (2006), a rotoscoped science-fiction thriller based on a Philip K. Dick short story; the critique of modern America Fast Food Nation (2006); and the period drama Me and Orson Welles (2008).

Linklater returned to his Texas roots with Bernie (2011), a black comedy based on the real-life murder of a wealthy widow (played by Shirley MacLaine) by her business manager, a former mortician (Black), in a small East Texas town. (In 2014, after a defense attorney who was inspired by the film secured a hearing upon discovering new evidence, the real eponymous Bernie Tiede was released from prison on bond and moved into an apartment owned by Linklater.)

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Linklater next directed the third film in the Before series, Before Midnight (2013), in which the Delpy and Hawke characters, now married with children, struggle with their commitment to each other. The film was well received, and the two actors and Linklater were again nominated for an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay.

Linklater’s following film, Boyhood (2014), was an ambitious undertaking that was filmed in short bursts over a 12-year period to tell a story of a six-year-old coming of age in real time. Linklater earned a Golden Globe Award for best director for his work on the project, and the film received a Golden Globe for best drama. It was also nominated for an Academy Award for best picture. Linklater received Oscar nods for his directing and writing work on the film as well. His next effort, Everybody Wants Some!! (2016), was a lighthearted examination of young adulthood in the mold of Dazed and Confused. The film, which is set in 1980, trails the high jinks of a college baseball player in the days leading up to the start of his freshman year.

Later films: Hit Man

In 2019 Linklater helmed and cowrote Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, an adaptation of the best-selling novel by Maria Semple. The comedy starred Cate Blanchett as an architect and mother struggling with “the banality of life.” He then wrote and directed Apollo 101/2: A Space Age Childhood (2022), an animated drama set in 1969 during the Moon landing. For his next movie, Hit Man (2023), Linklater earned widespread acclaim. The screwball comedy starred Glen Powell as a professional killer.