Richard Linklater is a young American director responsible for some excellent semi-improvised dramas and fine ensemble comedies, as well as for attempting to create animated feature films for adults. He is more interested in real characters than in mechanics of cinema.
His first film to gain wide attention was Slacker (91), which was followed closely by Dazed and Confused (93), an ensemble piece which follows a group of students on the last day of school in 1976. The film, complete with authentic 70s soundtrack, was a cult success. Linklater repeated the trick of setting a film in a single day with Before Sunrise (95), a charming romantic drama in which an American tourist (Ethan Hawke) meets a Parisian woman (Julie Delpy) on a train and spends 24 hours with her. Such was the demand to find out what happens to the characters, Linklater wrote and directed a sequel, Before Sunset (04), which completed the story believably.
Linklater directed the low-key and edgy project Tape (01), based on...
Richard Linklater is a young American director responsible for some excellent semi-improvised dramas and fine ensemble comedies, as well as for attempting to create animated feature films for adults. He is more interested in real characters than in mechanics of cinema.
His first film to gain wide attention was Slacker (91), which was followed closely by Dazed and Confused (93), an ensemble piece which follows a group of students on the last day of school in 1976. The film, complete with authentic 70s soundtrack, was a cult success. Linklater repeated the trick of setting a film in a single day with Before Sunrise (95), a charming romantic drama in which an American tourist (Ethan Hawke) meets a Parisian woman (Julie Delpy) on a train and spends 24 hours with her. Such was the demand to find out what happens to the characters, Linklater wrote and directed a sequel, Before Sunset (04), which completed the story believably.
Linklater directed the low-key and edgy project Tape (01), based on the play by Stephen Belber. The film is set in real time in a single room, and stars Hawke, Uma Thurman and Robert Sean Leonard as three characters arguing about their respective versions of the past. After such experimental fare, Linklater was a surprise choice to direct School of Rock (03), a Jack Black comedy about a musician forced to teach music to high-school kids. The film is funny and sweet and a deserving mainstream hit. Linklater repeated the trick with his remake of the Bad News Bears (05), which starred Billy Bob Thornton.
Linklater has also been fascinated by the possibilities of an animation technique called rotoscoping, where artists painstakingly draw over frames of real film. There have been two films using this technique. The first, Waking Life (01), is a series of philosophical discussions; the second, A Scanner Darkly (06), an hallucinatory adaptation of a Philip K Dick novel.
