‘Before’ Director Richard Linklater

Director Richard Linklater has made a career out of telling personal stories with universal appeal. Dazed and Confused, Waking Life, the Before trilogy, Boyhood. No matter the genre or form, Linklater’s human touch remains. To mark the arrival of his latest films, Blue Moon https://www.fandango.com/blue-moon-2025-241629/movie-overview and Nouvelle Vague https://www.fandango.com/nouvelle-vague-2025-243174/movie-overview, we return to our talk last summer with Linklater. We begin with Hit Man https://www.netflix.com/watch/81728840?source=35 (6:36), his action-packed neo-noir (8:15) that also explores the malleability of identity (11:00). Then, Linklater reflects on his athletic career in college (17:20), the health scare that ushered in a period of creative exploration (18:48), and the renegade spirit that drove his first two feature films, It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books and Slacker (28:12). On the back-half, Linklater describes a formative Sundance memory with director Robert Altman (34:00), his first experience at the helm of a major motion picture (37:48), and the lived serendipity that inspired his Before films (52:22). To close: a Hollywood state of the union (1:00:54), why Richard continues to create art from the fabric of his life (1:08:00), and whether Sam should return to directing himself (1:17:36). Watch this conversation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHPpIN913tI on YouTube and subscribe to our new channel https://www.youtube.com/@talkeasypod. Original air date: June 9, 2024. Thoughts or future guest ideas? Email us at [email protected]. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:21Sam Fragoso?

  This is Talk Easy. I'm Sam Fragoso. Welcome to the show.

• 0:38Sam Fragoso?

  Today, my conversation with writer-director Richard Linklater. Linklater belongs to a class of independent filmmakers that you can identify by just saying their last names: Soderbergh, Lee, Tarantino, Fincher, Bigelow, The Coens, all of whom shaped the indie film boom of the 1990s. But for many young, wayward, aspiring filmmakers, it was Linklater who offered the clearest roadmap: a way of making movies on a budget, outside the system, far away from Hollywood. Instead, he told stories in and about Texas, where he came of age in the 70s and 80s. From there, he built one of the most distinctive filmographies in American cinema: Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Boyhood, Bernie,

• 1:23Sam Fragoso?

  Everybody Wants Some, the Before trilogy, School of Rock, films often grounded in the rhythms of everyday life. We sat last year around the release of Hitman, his neo-noir screwball comedy starring Glenn Powell as a fake hitman for the New Orleans Police Department. Now, only a year later, Linklater has returned with not one, but two new films in theaters this month. The first, Blue Moon, starring Ethan Hawke and Margaret Qualley, tells the story of a songwriter struggling with alcoholism and mental health during the opening of Oklahoma. The second film, Nouvelle Vague, is a playful homage to French cinema, part essay, part narrative experiment, that revisits Jean-Luc Godard's early years,

• 2:07Sam Fragoso?

  from writing film criticism to creating a long- Inside François Truffaut, the treatment that became his first feature. Taken together, the films reflect the duality of his work, the inward, personal stories, and the outward, more ambitious gestures toward cinema and culture itself. It's a rare moment, two films released at once from a writer-director who has always resisted easy categorization. In this talk, we trace the flashpoints of his career, from an ambitious and broke 20-something in Austin to running a big-budget set on Dazed and Confused, to today, where he continues to create stories from the fabric of his life. We also wanted to re-release this episode because it's now fully available on YouTube.

• 2:51Sam Fragoso?

  You can find it by searching Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso on YouTube. We've also included the link in the show notes of this episode. We'll be back on Sunday with a brand-new conversation with author Salman Rushdie. Until then, here is Richard Linklater.

• 3:29Sam Fragoso?

  Richard Linklater, nice to meet you.

• 3:30Speaker 01

  How you doing, Sam? Good to be here.

• 3:32Sam Fragoso?

  This has been a long time in the making. How are you doing?

• 3:36Speaker 01

  I'm doing pretty good. I can't complain. I tell people, I can't complain about anything, but I will if you want me to.

• 3:42Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, I was about to say, when people say they can't complain.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  Oh, I can complain forever. I just don't know you well enough to be that complainer, but I have people I can complain to. No, I try not to complain that much.

• 3:53Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  I don't like working with complainers.

• 3:55Sam Fragoso?

  Hmm. Is that a big, is that the big, like, criteria when you hire people? Are they complainers or not?

• 4:04Speaker 01

  No one would admit to being a complainer on their application, but...

• 4:07Sam Fragoso?

  You can sense it.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  No, it's like... A little bit. Making films is solving problems, not complaining about them.

• 4:13Sam Fragoso?

  Should we start with this new film of yours?

• 4:16Speaker 01

  Whatever you like. I'm here. That film's, it's already in theaters, which is nice.

• 4:21Sam Fragoso?

  I want to start with Hitman because there's a line in your film, Where'd You Go Bernadette? Where your character, who's an architect, says, "I've got to inhabit a space before I know what it wants to be."

• 4:32Speaker 01

  Truer words were never spoken, from my point of view, of creating something.

• 4:37Sam Fragoso?

  That's what I imagine. So if that's the same process of making a movie, can you walk me through how you began inhabiting this new film?

• 4:46Speaker 01

  It's so funny. Like, the filmmaking process, you go from inhabiting your own brain and your own storytelling, you know, impulses and ideas, but at some point, you are, you're building up to inhabiting a real space, you know? So by the end of it, I really need to be, like, on the set, rehearsing on the, on the actual location, to feel what the scene wants to be. You know, I'm taking that all the way to the end. But Hitman starts in 2001, when I read an article in Texas Monthly by Skip Hollinsworth, who I make another film with, from an article of his, Bernie, years later. But at that point, I'm friends with him, so I just call him up and start talking about this unusual occupation that this so intriguing character Gary Johnson has, you know?

• 5:31Sam Fragoso?

  He writes about Gary in Texas Monthly, is that right?

• 5:33Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm, yeah.

• 5:34Sam Fragoso?

  And what stood out to you about the piece?

• 5:37Speaker 01

  I think movies do occupations pretty well. It's fun to see a job you never think about, but if your lead character does that job, it's like, oh, that's a job, you know, I haven't thought about that. So, but this is the weirdest job in history, you know? You're a fake hitman, you know?

• 5:54Sam Fragoso?

  For those who haven't seen it, set it up a little bit.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  Well, in any police department in a major American city, you have to have...

• 6:02Speaker 01

  I guess someone who'll go in and do an undercover sting if someone out there is shooting their mouth off at a bar about, hey, you know, I'm trying to bump off my spouse or my business partner or something, you know, law enforcement has to kind of respond to someone who's talking about murdering someone. Most people who murder, they don't talk about it, they just do it. These are people who are kind of in the myth of the American consumerist dream that you can just buy someone's death, which is a total myth created by the movies, I'm proud to say. I mean, we're, we're good myth makers. But just the idea that there are people out there at a retail level. And the film becomes this, the film kind of deconstructs this idea that there are hitmen out there that

• 6:45Speaker 01

  you can have do this. But anyway, it is someone's job to put a wire on them and act the part. And, you know, Gary Johnson just happened to be particularly good at it in the Houston area, which Houston being Houston, I would imagine had a pretty high incidence, a high solicitation rate. We end up making the movie in New Orleans, which is also a city that it seems very plausible. But yeah, you hear about it all the time, people being arrested, trying to solicit. You never hear of a hitman being arrested. So I've known this for years, since the eighties. I remember this underground press, there was like a hitman manual. And I got it just because I was, you know, I'm underground punk. I just thought that was funny. But I heard that that manual was written by like a housewife

• 7:27Speaker 01

  somewhere. It's just all BS. It's just all bullshit. This thing, it's all myth, it's all movies and TV and books. And it's a great character in the American psyche. It's just not real. So I'm in a real debunking mood these days, but I have been for years. So I just thought it's, it's funny to take on this cultural notion, but also a film notion. You know, we're sort of in the hitman genre. We have a series in the movie. That he has to be all these different hitmen for the different clients. He's sort of tailoring his look for, and it's a comedy too, make no mistake. You know, it's, we go pretty, pretty deep into that. But it is very grounded in this real guy, Gary Johnson, who did that for a living. Most intriguingly, he taught at a college too.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  So that to me was the duality right there. That was.

• 8:14Sam Fragoso?

  He was a philosophy lecturer?

• 8:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, psychology. And I think he taught some philosophy. Yeah, just a kind of a student of the mind, lived alone, very, had a little zen garden and cats. And this total introvert and then had this, you know, he's playing a murderer, an assassin. You know, so I don't know. I just thought that was so fun. And, and the movie becomes kind of this story of a transformation, you know, about identity. Can you change? Can you become? So he sort of becomes a more extroverted version of himself.

• 8:44Sam Fragoso?

  But the psyche and mind of a criminal, I've noticed this pattern around the release of The Newton Boys, Bernie, and now Hitman. You've said, "The minds of criminals are similar to the minds of artists. I think I could have been a good criminal. Art and crime are close. It's all getting away with something."

• 9:04Speaker 01

  I am a good criminal. I got away with a lot.

• 9:07Sam Fragoso?

  Like?

• 9:08Speaker 01

  Oh, just, you know, you do things. Getting your first films made, you, you know, it's real gray market stuff, you know? Like it's, I don't know if it bends into felony areas, but you know, you do what you have to do. You know, you borrow that piece of equipment, you give it back, but technically you're stealing. You, you cut every corner. You don't have any money. You have to, when you're so passionate about what you're doing, you think it's justified.

• 9:32Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  It's the same mind of a heroin addict who's robbing an old lady for her purse.

• 9:37Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  It's like if she, I'm not a bad person. If she knew me, she would understand my needs, that this is, might be bad. I'm not trying to hurt. I just need the money so I can get it and everything can be okay with the world. I'm not a bad person. I am, okay, I knocked her over, but I'm not a bad person. So I was that same guy, you know? Okay, I'm gonna do this, do that. But so it's criminal, you know?

• 9:59Sam Fragoso?

  So filmmaking is a crime of passion?

• 10:01Speaker 01

  Kinda, yeah. Especially at that, at that stage. But you think about it, you, the careers go similarly. If you think of the guys in. Organized crime, they have a good run, like in Goodfellas. They have a good run there, but then they all go to jail for a while.

• 10:14Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  It's the same in arts. You get a good run. You get a few movies made in a way. And then something bombs and you just gotta go away for a while, you know? You don't, suddenly people don't want to fund your next film. You feel like, oh. Um, you know, then you have to kind of scramble, regroup. You get out of, you get out of jail and then you start it again. You get the crew together.

• 10:32Sam Fragoso?

  You saying filmmakers have a good run when you've been on a run since 1989? That seems to be unending. I mean, there's some interruptions maybe, but.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  I could, you know, you look at an 18 month gap or a two year gap and it's like, oh, that means I was trying to get films made and I just couldn't.

• 10:50Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  Maybe they were too big budget for what I, where I was or something. You figure it out.

• 10:55Sam Fragoso?

  I want to talk about you in that period where you're starting to make films, you know, but like when we find Gary, you know, he's this kind of lifeless teacher. Living sort of middle class monotony and this job kind of gives him purpose and it, and it sparks something like a new in him.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  Well, you know, he's a lecturer, so it's not like he's a total, you know, he has, he's living a life of the mind. He says he, I liked my inner life, you know, but he's living in the suburbs with his cat, suburbs of New Orleans. You know, watering his plants, feeding birds, but I think he finds his calling. He says it in the movie. You know, oh, you know, this, this hitman thing he took, he took to it. He just liked it. It was a perfect kind of use of his skills, what he knows about people. A lot of performers are really pretty shy. They're just looking for that stage, that character they can dissolve into. And then they can be all these things that they're, they're not being in their day to day life. I can, I can relate to that, you know, so.

• 11:55Sam Fragoso?

  You can?

• 11:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm an introvert. I don't, I don't ever seek a stage or a mic or I'd never look forward to being in public ever. I really don't. I have to do it all the time. It's like, oh, you gotta do, you know, but I don't, I'd rather be, be watching a movie. I'd rather, I mean, I'm, I'm talking about everything.

• 12:13Sam Fragoso?

  I love that you're saying that to me, like looking right into my eyes as we're doing a podcast.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  What, that I'd rather be in my library, listening to music and reading? Ah, no, no offense, of course, no, you know. I accept where I am at all times and run with it and try to make the best of it. But you know what? I do this because like Gary, I kind of like being forced in that situation because it's not my default mode. Making a movie, you have to be around a lot of people. You have to work with people, you know, and the mode I'm in now, I have to come out and talk about my movie. I gotta talk to people and that's, that's good. I know that's good for me and I actually enjoy it, but I have to be kind of forced into it.

• 12:47Speaker 02

  Okay, I'll, I'll slowly nudge you in the direction.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  Please do, I need to be nudged.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  You know, Gary plays all these fake hitmen from all over the world and I couldn't help but juxtapose the nature of Gary, the, the, the middle-class monotony that we're talking about. With the opening scene of Before Sunset, where the Ethan Hawke character is in a bookstore and an interviewer is asking him, are all the books autobiographical? Do, do all the stories come from your life? And he says, "Well, I mean, isn't everything autobiographical? I mean, we all see the world through our own tiny keyhole, right? I mean, I always think of Thomas Wolfe, you know? Have you ever seen that, that little one-page note to reader in the front of Look Homeward Angel? Right, you know what I'm talking about?

• 13:37Speaker 02

  Anyway, he, he says that we are the sum of all the moments of our lives and that anybody who sits down to write is going to use the clay of their own life, that you can't avoid that. So when I, I look at my own life, you know, I have to admit, right? That I've, I've never been around a bunch of, of guns or violence, you know, not really. No political intrigue or a helicopter crash, right? But my life, from my own point of view, has been full of drama, right? And so I thought if I could write a book that, that could capture what it's like to, to really meet somebody. You know, I mean, the most exciting things that's ever happened to me, right? Is to, is to really meet somebody, make, make that connection.

• 14:20Speaker 02

  And if I could make that valuable, you know, to capture that, that, that would be the attempt or...

• 14:28Speaker 02

  Did I answer your question?

• 14:31Sam Fragoso?

  In this film, you, you literally inject guns and violence and intrigue into Gary's life. And I just love the, the juxtaposition of that. But that line about creating from your life, the clay of it, I want to understand where that kind of begins for you in the mid 1980s, which I think happens, if I'm getting this right, in the second semester of your sophomore year of college. You're batting third for Sam Houston State in Texas on a baseball scholarship.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  In the preseason, yeah, just right up to the beginning of the season.

• 15:08Sam Fragoso?

  When you're playing the outfield, like you're deep in left, how often was your mind on baseball?

• 15:15Speaker 01

  Well, in a game, I'm, I'm dialed in. I'll, I'll admit that. I was, I was focused enough to that. But in practice, you know, you have these lengthy practice, you know, four hour practice. And you do a lot in practice. But out there, I was just kind of going, wow. I was starting to get jealous of some of my, I was in a playwriting class and some literature classes. It was, it was great. I was always a writer, but I was really meeting people and professors and, you know, I was realizing, realizing I was behind in my reading. You know, I thought I was kind of well read, but I wasn't, of course. I was discovering so much. So I suddenly had this greed to be reading more. And so, out there for four hours, just on a baseball field, which I loved. I dedicated so much of my life to,

• 15:58Speaker 01

  and loved. But I was kind of thinking, well, you know, there's another world out there. You know, maybe I could be, be, you know, I'm, I'm missing out on something a little bit. Or, you know, I realized there was such limited time and I kind of wanted more time for this other area. And boy, and I was given it immediately.

• 16:16Sam Fragoso?

  The way in which you were given it is pretty unexpected.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  I know. I don't believe in like fate or some kind of divine intervention or something. It just so happened that I found myself kind of dizzy and aware of my heartbeat. And I had this thing that's easily curable now, but 40 years ago, it was kind of like this atrial fibrillation. They didn't really have a thing for it. So my heart was just off track. If I ran, my heart rate would go up to like 200 and be highly inefficient. I would see white and kind of fall over. So I couldn't run anymore.

• 16:46Sam Fragoso?

  It caused like arrhythmia?

• 16:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was an arrhythmia thing. So I just couldn't run and especially me, I was a base stealer. I was fast. That was my whole thing. So everything went on hold and I was like, oh, I can just walk to the library every day and finish that play and I'm out at noon. I'm out at noon. You guys like you have all your classes in the morning and then I had, I felt like suddenly I had all the time in the world. I had from noon to like 11:30 at night when the library closed.

• 17:13Sam Fragoso?

  You don't believe in faith. Like you're you're standing there in the outfield.

• 17:17Speaker 01

  I know.

• 17:17Sam Fragoso?

  Wondering, how do I get more time to do the things I want to do, which is to write plays, to read, to watch movies. And then suddenly your body fails you.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  I know.

• 17:29Sam Fragoso?

  If not fate, what is this?

• 17:32Speaker 01

  I mean, yes, we're all faded. Life makes sense backwards.

• 17:36Sam Fragoso?

  I don't want to corner you into faith.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  Kind of like, I mean, what looks like a curse. Everybody's like, oh, you must be really depressed. You're not playing ball. I was like, not really.

• 17:43Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was kind of like, eh, you know, I loved it. I might have, I could have kept playing and I was doing fine, but you gotta be open for what the world's throwing at you, I guess. And I just took advantage. But you know what? Looking back, I did bring that kind of athletic dedication, the way you're all in to what I was doing next. I was very systematic about it. I read books on the French New Wave or whatever I was studying. I watched films. I, you know, I kind of always, I was still locked into that kind of all in approach to what I was doing. I mean, artists have to do that anyway. I just brought, I think I've been accused of that even as a director, bringing in kind of a athletic,

• 18:26Speaker 01

  you know, I guess I'm the coach now, approach. So, but it works for me.

• 18:30Sam Fragoso?

  I want to talk about that dedication. When you're, when you're 20, 21, a college dropout, living back at home in Houston, watching some 600 movies a year at River Oaks Greenway Plaza and the Rice University Media Center.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  And the Museum of Fine Arts.

• 18:47Sam Fragoso?

  And the Museum of Fine Arts. Even for 1982, pre-internet, pre-iPhone, that is a lot of movies. Like, on paper, this reads like your Beatles and Hamburg chapter. But on the screen, in those dark theaters, which worlds created by filmmakers did you find yourself most attracted to?

• 19:12Speaker 01

  All of them. All of them.

• 19:14Sam Fragoso?

  You didn't discriminate?

• 19:15Speaker 01

  Uh-uh. Yeah, I just, you, you loved the medium so much, you know? I, that's, I loved, you know, world cinema. I'd love to film from India, a film from Africa, you know, whatever. I was documentaries, shorts, experimental films, you know, epics, you know? It was just all, I was just taking it all in. But I think that's not uncommon, you know, musicians who kind of love all kinds of music. And at that moment, I probably couldn't have totally guessed what kind of filmmaker I would be. I just loved film and I realized I had films in my own head. You know, that was me discovering my art form. I'd written a short story in college and then I thought, oh, what if I adapted that? You know, I could see all the shots and I started thinking in terms of visual storytelling and...

• 19:58Sam Fragoso?

  What was that story?

• 19:59Speaker 01

  It was a Reagan era, and come to think of it, kind of a Zoo Story inspired. Like, there's this guy who just gets slowly more and more unhinged and dies at the end, who seems kind of out there, but it, it is...

• 20:13Sam Fragoso?

  Autobiographical?

• 20:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was pretty unhinged, you know? At that age, you're kind of on fire. You, you don't know where it's gonna go. You think, oh, I'll be lucky to be alive when I'm 25, you know? Not that I was doing anything with my body to endanger myself. I'm a, you know, I wasn't doing anything dangerous. It was all in my own head.

• 20:30Sam Fragoso?

  Did you wear like the stack of books were gonna fall on your head?

• 20:32Speaker 01

  No, no, it's just, just an inner feeling of kind of craziness and intensity and where to put all this, where to put all this stuff inside your head, you know? So that's, that's an artist looking for a medium. That's the healthy version. Other people can act out in other ways.

• 20:49Sam Fragoso?

  You know, when you do interviews, this, this is true when filmmakers are interviewed. They're always asked about the directors that have inspired them. But you have this quote that you gave McConaughey in some interview, where you said that my early life, I didn't know what I wanted to be, but I knew what I didn't want to be. That's ultimately why I wanted to be a filmmaker. You're more motivated by the films you don't think work, by the films you don't like. What's to be avoided? I don't think that works. I don't think in that genre. I don't want to do that. You're defining your own sensibility and what you want to communicate vis a vis what you don't find satisfying.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  And I would say that quote is getting a little closer to making films. I think the first rush for me of cinema, I kind of loved everything. In addition to, you know, house theaters, double features of the classics. I was watching every film that came out between 81 and 86, you know, most of the commercial films of that time. But once you start making your own films, the world closes in a little bit. You know, it's like, oh, I guess I do think this way. And then you get a little more critical. It's like, oh, that's not my feelings at all, actually. The more I really think about cinema and have learned more, it's like, yeah, I don't, I don't agree with that kind of cinema. I'm, there's a purity here I'm looking for. I just started to have theories about film itself and acting and everything.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  You know, you become a little theoretician of your own cinema.

• 22:15Sam Fragoso?

  So what did that theory start to sound like when you're making your first two movies?

• 22:20Speaker 01

  Well, before I made my first two feature-length films, I had made probably 20 shorts.

• 22:25Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  You know? Those were mostly just technical exercises. I wasn't trying to say too much. It's amazing how patient I was with myself. I knew I didn't have the technical skill yet, formal abilities to pull off deeper things I was trying to explore. So they were really just technical. I was just teaching myself. We skipped over, I didn't get in film school and I just started doing it on my own, which was my nature anyway, so.

• 22:49Sam Fragoso?

  The Stanley Kubrick film school?

• 22:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, just buy a camera and start doing it. You know, I'd saved up money that whole years I was in Houston. Again, pretty methodical. I knew people in their early twenties. I was 20, 21, 22, turning 23. I just saved up a bunch of money. Back then, it was like $18,000, but that could go a long way. As a young person then, so I lived on that for years. So I had created a lot of time for myself. That was part of it. And then I could watch films all the time. So I was being pretty methodical about how I approached it. Yeah, looking back, I'm amazed. But you know, at the time, you're just doing what you feel compelled to do. I mean, even my goal, I was studying careers and they all said, here I am, you know, 21, 22.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  And they say, ah, you don't really get to make your first feature till you're about 30. Goddard complained about that. And I said, well, you know, I want to move as fast as I can, but that seems realistic. So I had a long-term goal. I mean, I tell aspiring filmmakers, it's going to take twice as long and cost twice as much. You know, just everything, you're going to have to work twice as hard and it's going to take twice as long as you can even imagine. But you have to enjoy it. You have to love every step of the way. So which I certainly did.

• 23:59Sam Fragoso?

  Well, it's funny, when you sat down here, you were like, it's weird. I've been hearing the show and I'm thinking like, in my twenties, I didn't have a real job. Like what, what, I thought you're a filmmaker. What are you doing? This is what.

• 24:12Speaker 01

  What I said to you.

• 24:13Sam Fragoso?

  You said to me.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, your, your job, your success here, Sam, could actually be your impediment.

• 24:17Sam Fragoso?

  It's my impediment.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  I'm not saying it isn't. Only, only you can answer that, Sam. I was just lucky and I maybe I, maybe I rigged the deck because I probably could have been good at a lot of things. Had I gotten a degree, I was one of those people that they kind of expected to do stuff. And I suffered through those years with my family and everybody going, hmm. Maybe in listening to advice from everyone, they start, they start worrying about you by about 24, 25, when you don't have anything showing for yourself. And, you know, and I was like, ah, you know, I'm kind of watching a lot of films. I'm doing that. So, you know, I suffered through all that, but I, I already had a plan, you know?

• 24:53Sam Fragoso?

  You had a plan.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  This hit me in my late teens.

• 24:55Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  Actually, I was looking around the world and I said, you know, I don't want a normal life. I, I just want time to do what I want to do.

• 25:04Sam Fragoso?

  And I would say interviewing you is not a normal life for me.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  Oh, okay. Well, you've said it all up. We all make it work for ourselves, don't we?

• 25:12Sam Fragoso?

  We're going to see. I think by the end, you'll tell me if it's a hindrance or not.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  Okay. I'll, I'll let you know. I'm, I'm judging you every second of the way. Believe me.

• 25:19Sam Fragoso?

  Oh, I, trust me, I feel it from here.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  But I didn't listen to advice. You know, I, I looked at the world as like, these are really well-meaning people, some who love me, but I don't really want their life. So I'm not gonna do their advice. I'm gonna do the opposite. The whole world's doing this, I'm gonna do that. I, I quit watching TV. I said, if I wanna accomplish anything in the world, I've gotta just do this whole thing differently. I just dropped out of Consumer Society. I didn't watch TV. I didn't read newspaper. I just wasn't in the flow.

• 25:47Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  From my late teens on, I was just gonna do my own thing.

• 25:50Sam Fragoso?

  It's fascinating you're saying that because when I'm thinking about those first two movies, It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books and Slacker, the visual language of those films exist in stark contrast to the MTV-ation that was happening in that moment.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  Yes, those are underground fuck-uses to the mainstream, both of those.

• 26:11Sam Fragoso?

  Right, and the way you use the camera, the way you're thinking about the camera, how did you begin to understand your relationship to, to your own visual language at that time?

• 26:20Speaker 01

  And in my mind, those films are polar opposites within that language. The first one, the camera never moves. Every shot is a lock-off. Every shot is a composition.

• 26:29Sam Fragoso?

  And you're also making it basically by yourself.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that, that too, I couldn't kind of create a nice dolly shot. There's a lot of movement within the frame. It's a, it's a road movie. There's a lot of movement in the frame, outside the windows and all that. But it's all, it's about being kind of stuck in a, in a, in a world. And there's hardly any dialogue too, uh, which people would find rare, you know, from me. So the, the next film, I said, well, what if this guy burst forth? You know, what if he started speaking? And what if we let, what was, it was all about the interiority. You know, that is a very suppressed movie, the first one. And this like, oh, well, what if he opened his mouth and started talking? And what if the camera started moving? So I'm really, that whole movie, trying to get this flowing feel.

• 27:12Speaker 01

  Also, one take, I'm not cutting a lot, but I, I did want this flow and I was able to. For a no-budget film, incorporate, you know, a crane shot, a long Steadicam move. We stole a dolly, a lot of dolly track. And, you know, so it had this continuous flow, continuous flow.

• 27:30Sam Fragoso?

  This is the criminality that you're talking about?

• 27:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, which if you give back, you didn't steal, you borrowed.

• 27:35Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  I borrow.

• 27:36Sam Fragoso?

  Temporary.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 27:38Sam Fragoso?

  Permission is a...

• 27:39Speaker 01

  You grant permission to your, to yourself. Come on, let's face it, it's just property, who cares?

• 27:44Sam Fragoso?

  Oh, I want to thank Best Buy formally for helping me make short films and allowing that two-week return policy.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, we like that. I want to thank Kiko's for, I did get caught with my own little, the thing you plug in that counts your thing, I ended up with one, so I would come, but that's more, I'm doing that on behalf of the Austin Film Society, making flyers. So I have this parallel life to my own films you're talking about. I was also programming films and showing films and starting a nonprofit. So I had a really busy, fun life. It just didn't make one penny, but I was, I was happy doing what I was doing to get back to the underground nature of those first two films. I think I had turned the corner, like I think a lot of writers do, when you start to view your own life, what's right in front of you as your own subject matter, like that that was worthy.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  And that's a big leap psychologically to take for any artist in any level. You study careers and you see the early work of painters or anyone, and it starts off derivative usually, you know, even Mark Rothko, you see the recent, oh, he's doing, he seems of his time, the first 10 years, you know, it's like, oh, and then you see him kind of find their voice. And, you know, you see it in painting, you see it in music, you see it everywhere. And so it's like, oh, yeah, I was just burning through all this, and primarily in those short films, those 20 short films, I got out of my system so much of the MTV impulse, quick editing, you know, all these things, excessiveness that wasn't really me. I got to do a lot of things that I could just, you know, discard as, oh, I don't really

• 29:21Speaker 01

  like that, it's not how I think, that's not what I want to do, but I tried it. So it's not really there for anyone to see. So by the way. At the time, I'm doing the other things. I really do stand behind those first films as, you know, they're full-fledged attempts for me to express something that was going on inside of me.

• 29:37Sam Fragoso?

  Well, let's take a look at a piece of work we can see. This is a clip from the opening of the film Slacker by Richard Linklater.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Man, there was this book I just read on the book. Well, you know, it was my dream, so I guess I wrote it or something. But, uh, man, it was bizarre. It was like, um, the premise for this whole book was that every thought you have creates its own reality. You know, it's like every choice or decision you make, the thing you choose not to do fractions off and becomes its own reality, you know, and just goes on from there forever. I mean, it's like, uh, you know, in The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy meets the scarecrow and they do that little dance at that crossroads and they think about going all those directions, then they end up going in that one direction. I mean, all those other directions, just because they thought about it, became separate realities. I mean, they just went on from there and lived the rest of their life, you know, just,

• 30:29Speaker 01

  I mean, entirely different movies, but we'll never see it because, you know, we're kind of trapped in this one reality restriction type of thing, you know? And another example would be like back there at the bus station, you know? As I got off the bus, the thought crossed my mind, you know, just for a second, about not taking a cab at all, but, you know, like maybe walking or bumming a ride or something like that. You know, I'm kind of broke right now. I should have done that probably. But, uh, just because that thought crossed my mind, there now exists at this very second, a whole nother reality where I'm at the bus station, you know, and you're probably giving someone else a ride, you know? I mean, and that reality thinks of itself as this, it thinks of itself as the only reality, you know? I mean, at this very second, I'm in that, I'm back at the bus station, just hanging out,

• 31:12Speaker 01

  you know, probably thumbing through a paper, you know, probably going up to a payphone.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  And I'll say this beautiful woman just comes up to me, just starts talking to me. You know, she ends up offering me a ride, you know, we're hitting it off, go play a little pinball. And we go back to her apartment, and she has this great apartment, you know, I move in with her. You know, and see, if I say I have a dream some night that I'm with some strange woman I've never met, or I'm, you know, living at someplace I've never seen before, see, that's just a momentary glimpse into this other reality that was all created back there at the bus station.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  And then, you know, I could have a dream from that reality into this one, that like this is my dream from that reality, you know, of course, that's kind of like that dream I just, you know, had on the bus, you know, the whole cycle type of thing. Man, shit, I should have stayed at the bus station.

• 32:08Sam Fragoso?

  That was from Slacker, your second film. I really, I think the movie still really holds up, but it had this odd, winding rollout. You made it in the summer of 89. It plays at a theater in Austin, I think in like 1990.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  Summer 90.

• 32:26Sam Fragoso?

  Summer of 90, and then it finds itself as part of this Gen X wave of what was happening. The Douglas Copeland novel, the, you know, Nirvana's Nevermind. Eventually, the movie lands at the Sundance Film Festival, January of 91, which is basically the dream every young filmmaker has. And there's a lot I can ask you about in that period, but there's one moment that I want to hold, which is you're at the festival and you see Robert Altman across the room. What do you remember about that interaction? And what did you say to him?

• 33:01Speaker 01

  He was there with, I think he had rebooted Tanner, he was there with Gary Trudeau, and showing some episodes from his latest TV thing, which were brilliant television, by the way. And he was just kind of hanging out, I don't, I'm truly trying not to be the obnoxious fan. I'm really shy, I wouldn't normally do this, but I kind of got in proximity to see what he was doing. And I realized he was just in between things, so I kind of sidled up to him.

• 33:27Sam Fragoso?

  Did you have a beer in you?

• 33:29Speaker 01

  No, I wish I could have offered a joint or a beer, but it was at a reception and some, but I just kind of wandered up and I said, oh, you know, Mr. Altman, that scene in The Long Goodbye where... Elliot Gould drops his cigarette, you know, whatever, it's just some little moment. I said, that, you know, that, that changed my life. And he got a weird look on his face, looked at me and says, I can't be responsible for that now. You know, it was funny. It was funny. I said, no, I'm here with the film. It's, it's a good thing. It's a good thing. You really inspired me. And, uh, and he just, he was really nice. And then, you know, cut to six years later, when I've joined the director's guild, he signed my card. And cut to another decade goes by or so, and I'm agreeing to be his backup director. He was going to shoot a film in Austin.

• 34:13Speaker 01

  He passed away right around this time, but he was planning a film in Austin. And because of his age and health, you need a kind of a backup director for insurance purposes.

• 34:21Sam Fragoso?

  I think he hired PTA.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, Stephen Frears in London, PTA, you know, in LA. And then I was going to be his Austin guy. And even though I was kind of busy, a producer came by, he didn't ask me like a producer, hey, you know, will you do this? So anyway, I was like, I, I have to anything someone like that asked me. And I've done that for a few other directors too. And I hope someone does that for me someday.

• 34:42Sam Fragoso?

  I'll stand in.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm going to ask you, Sam.

• 34:44Sam Fragoso?

  I mean, you can ask maybe Jeff Nichols. He seems like a good candidate. I know it's a joke and I know it's a bit, and I know I'm teasing you by bringing it up.

• 34:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 34:52Sam Fragoso?

  But the moment where Elliot Gould drops his cigarettes, what about that changed your life?

• 34:59Speaker 01

  Here's the thing, it's something I would cut out of a movie, frankly. It's an imperfection, but it's kind of an improv. He, all movies works much looser than I do.

• 35:07Sam Fragoso?

  Right. You're more rehearsal based.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, very much. I'm not even sure, Long Goodbye, one of my favorite Almonds. It's either Sterling Hayden or Elliot Gould. Someone drops a cigarette and he goes, oh, you dropped your cigarette. You know, how they just kind of keep going. It was like a real, just a real random moment. But in my cinematic thinking, I was like, oh, that's so hardcore. It's real and it happened, but you see people strive for that in such phony ways. I don't really believe in real and cinema so much. I believe in the reality of the atmosphere you can create. And actors can get to somewhere very real, but never mistake that it's all a big construct.

• 35:43Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  I'm not looking for total randomness.

• 35:46Sam Fragoso?

  But you're trying to approximate. Something real.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  Absolutely. That's the effort that goes into it. I want the viewer to think something real is happening in front of them, but real filmed is not, it's a documentary. It's not, it's not that compelling story wise. So I'm too much of a writer storyteller to, to let it just float in the breeze. But I do appreciate the feel of, of those films that, you know, you're in the character's reality. So that's, it's simple. That's, that's what I'm always going for.

• 36:16Sam Fragoso?

  In the spirit of you embarrassing yourself with Robert Altman, I'll embarrass myself a bit here and pinpoint a moment from Dazed and Confused that I have long thought about and that feels like one of those cigarette dropping moments. It's at the baseball game. Wiley Wiggins, who by the way, I have gone to a whole lot of cities in this country and it doesn't matter which city I go to, someone, somewhere always comes up to me and says, I look like the character from Dazed and Confused.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  You kind of do, Sam. You have the hair, put on a ball cap and you'll be Wiley Wiggins on that field.

• 36:55Sam Fragoso?

  And I say to them, that character is 12 years old.

• 36:58Speaker 01

  No, he's older than that.

• 36:59Sam Fragoso?

  14 years old.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  14. He's gonna be 15 soon.

• 37:02Sam Fragoso?

  Tough to be compared to a 14 year old.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  Well, that's what you get for looking so young.

• 37:07Sam Fragoso?

  Oh, thank you. That's, it's common about my youth, not my long hair.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 37:11Sam Fragoso?

  Constant touching on the nose.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  You do have Wiley Wiggins hair.

• 37:14Sam Fragoso?

  I do. But he's, he's on the mound. He's pitching poorly so that he doesn't get paddled by the upperclassmen. But the moment comes after the game when the teams shake hands and say, good game, good game, good game, good game.

• 37:52Sam Fragoso?

  I remember doing that as a kid. No one likes doing that.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  Every little leaguer in the world has to do that. You don't want to.

• 38:00Sam Fragoso?

  Whether you won or lost, you're like, this is.

• 38:01Speaker 01

  That's why they're going, game, game, game.

• 38:03Sam Fragoso?

  It's ridiculous.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  It's by rote.

• 38:05Sam Fragoso?

  But it's a tiny moment.

• 38:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:07Sam Fragoso?

  And it's a moment that I believe was this close to being cut.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. Well, there's so many moments, probably a lot of your favorite moments from that movie were probably close to being cut because I didn't have enough, you know, I was so squeezed. Oh, that film, I still have PTSD from the production of that. And that was just my trial by fire. I was suddenly making a low budget studio film and I was just thrown into that world and, oh, lunch penalties and overtime and you gotta do this and tight budgets and schedules. And they, they cut my schedule right before. So every day at lunch, I have this producer around who's like, well, you know, we can cut that scene because, you know, it doesn't really advance the story. I'm like, what story? I'm not, I'm not trying to advance the story. I'm trying to find a great moment that I just have in my head. I couldn't explain myself.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  I'm like, I just want to do it because it's, it's the film in my head, you know? It sounds so weird or arrogant to describe it that way. So anyway, I almost came to blows with that guy a few times and, you know, I haven't had that much trouble since.

• 39:07Sam Fragoso?

  You kept a running diary on set of that film.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  I wrote it all after.

• 39:11Sam Fragoso?

  You wrote it all after?

• 39:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:12Sam Fragoso?

  Well, in August of 92, which is when you're making the movie, there's that day where that scene that I'm talking about is potentially going to get cut.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  I remember everything. So I, I wrote, that was a, I, I poured out this.

• 39:25Sam Fragoso?

  I was wondering if you wanted to read this for us.

• 39:28Speaker 01

  What? You don't want to read it?

• 39:30Sam Fragoso?

  I don't want to read it. You read it.

• 39:31Speaker 01

  Why, why are you forcing me to go back to like the worst moment in my life?

• 39:35Sam Fragoso?

  Not the worst moment. This is, this, this is a telling, this will tell the story.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  This is after one of those lunch meetings. I walk back to the set after lunch in a daze, as depressed as I've ever been in relation to this project. This is when I would, we'd have a lunch break and I'd have these long-faced producer types, even my own, you know, people in my camp going, "Okay, so we're, we're behind and we have to cut this. I think we can cut that and maybe we can make it through the day." I'm just seeing my dreams just go down the drain every single day and every, and everybody's against you. It was hell. Don't ever make a, it wasn't even my second film. It wasn't even my sophomore slump. It was my third film and they're treating me like I'd never made a film before. Anyway, that's not what I'm saying here. Okay. Depressed I've ever been in relation to the project.

• 40:22Speaker 01

  What could have been an interesting film is going to be a compromised piece of shit. And then at the end of the day, I'll get blamed for the underachievement. Fuck them all. I have a frighteningly real urge to just keep walking, get in my car and leave. If they have it in their minds how I should make a film, then maybe they should just do it themselves. Every director thinks this way. Since we're at a baseball field, the proper analogy hits me. Always sports metaphors with me, isn't it? They are sending me up to the plate with a 28-inch bat and with two strikes on me, but expecting a home run. As I walk by, I notice Wiley is on the pitcher's mound, working on his wind-up and pitch. Unlike his character Mitch, Wiley's never really played baseball and can't throw or catch at all convincingly. Yet Wiley was really not an athlete.

• 41:06Sam Fragoso?

  For the record, I can pitch.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  Okay, good.

• 41:08Sam Fragoso?

  I played baseball.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  Put me in coach.

• 41:10Sam Fragoso?

  That's where the comparison's at.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  Good, good. I've told him that through the use of a stunt double and close-ups and various details, I had to get very clever here. I'll have him looking like Roger Clemens before it's over. He just has to have a tough, competitive expression, but he still looks fairly awkward and I know most actors would be embarrassed to have a, and have a horrible attitude about being the focus of the set and not be good at what they're supposed to be doing, take after take. He had all these little leaguers just, just mocking him, everything he did, but, but he's nothing but professional and positive. I hear Wiley tell one of his friends, "If I have to stay out here all night, we're gonna get this right." Exclamation point. This sends a chill through me and brings me back to life. I'm moping around, ready to quit, and then I realize the people who matter are busting

• 41:54Speaker 01

  ass for the film, for their commitment, and I owe my absolute best to all of them. Things have a way of turning on a dime. Very true. That's indicative of the the mental roller coaster ride of being an insecure filmmaker, making your first big film with a lot of pressure and really hanging on to it, but just your own lack of experience and insecurity matched with the pressure of that. And so that was the one I had to survive and get out alive. So I always say to another sports metaphor, I've used this before in relation to that. You know, before you fight the title fight in boxing, there's always a match before

• 42:35Speaker 01

  that. It's like, oh, I won the title four matches ago when I beat that guy. You know, it's like, people look at the final result and go, oh, but it's like, no, this game was won way back then. And that, for the rest of my life, that film is the one that made or broke me. I could tell, even when it was going on, I was like, okay, I can't, I just got to double down. And so you have to find some inner strength to get through it. It's so funny, because it's like a light, it's a comedy, it's a hanging out, party, fun movie on the surface. But I just happened to go through hell on it. And the cast had a good time. I think I sheltered them from a lot of the turmoil I was going with. But it was just, you know, classic film industry, art meets commerce, you know, that's why people are intrigued with the film industry and how it works, because it's such a collision

• 43:18Speaker 01

  of those things. So, but I got good at it, and I never had those problems again, ever. I've never had a bad experience. And that was it. Not a, you notice, they didn't take the film away from me. It is my film. I did get everything I wanted. That's just, I was tweaked out about how I had to go about it, you know. So it's been nothing but easier ever since.

• 43:38Sam Fragoso?

  You're right. Like, it's such a easygoing joint smoking film.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 43:44Sam Fragoso?

  But what it took to make it, the make or break, the the alternate path where you do just go home, or you don't get out of the trailer, or you just go, you know what? We'll have the standby director finish it. I'm out.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  Or, or just, how about, the worst would have been, okay, I'll cut that scene.

• 44:01Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 44:02Speaker 01

  Or in post-production, okay, you can bring in modern music.

• 44:05Sam Fragoso?

  The compromise.

• 44:06Speaker 01

  We can play modern music over the credits. That'll get us an MTV rotation.

• 44:12Sam Fragoso?

  We can have a 90s band recreate a 70s song.

• 44:14Speaker 01

  We can do all that. Yes. I'm so desperate to work in the industry. I will do all those things. Please, give me another opportunity. No. I was like, fuck them. You gotta, you gotta go down. Every film since, it's like, if this is my last film, so be it. I'm going down with the ship.

• 44:30Sam Fragoso?

  But in your early 30s, having only made two films.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:34Sam Fragoso?

  Why didn't you budge?

• 44:35Speaker 01

  Why? I'm sculpting this thing to be this way. Why, you know, you can't.

• 44:41Sam Fragoso?

  I ask that because you, more than anyone.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:45Sam Fragoso?

  Know the history of cinema.

• 44:47Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 44:47Sam Fragoso?

  Is filled with people going, I'll take the scene out, I'll sleep a little bit easier, and I'll get this job done, and I'll move on. You said, I would rather move on without the movie, instead of making the movie the way they want to make it.

• 45:02Speaker 01

  Well, I think that was me counterbalancing that with their, and they weren't even demands. They were just persistent, kind of, this thing. I knew I could outlast them. I was more dedicated. This was my life. This was my life on film, and, you know, this is my future life. This is my past life. Everything's, it means a lot to me. And I realized, they're on vacation, they're walking their dogs, they got five other films. I, I just sussed it out. I go, you know what? I care more. I can out, passion wins out. I, I can just outlast them, and I will win here. And that's exactly what I did.

• 45:36Sam Fragoso?

  This is the athletic part of it.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. I'll go, I'll win this in the 15th round.

• 45:41Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 45:41Speaker 01

  Not the second.

• 45:42Sam Fragoso?

  I'll go 19 innings.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  Like, uh, Demiro and Raging Bull. You never got me down, Ray. He never hit the canvas. He lost. He got the shit beat out of him, but he didn't hit the canvas. That was my metaphor. I was like, hey, no, no, keep, keep punching.

• 45:54Sam Fragoso?

  Which also, by the way, is a perfect comp, because Raging Bull was one of the earliest films that told you that film could be art.

• 46:01Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I remember seeing Raging Bull. I was in college by then. And I was like, holy shit, film can do that? You know, it can be that. And I kind of related to Jake LaMotta, his environment, that kind of. You know, obsessiveness, jealousy, you know, I was a fucked up 20 year old, you know, whatever mindset you're in at 19 or 20, you know, you're just like, oh, gosh. But I thought it so beautiful, too. So it really affected me in that way, in a great way.

• 46:33Sam Fragoso?

  After the break, more from writer-director Richard Linklater.

• 46:52Sam Fragoso?

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• 47:35Sam Fragoso?

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• 48:16Sam Fragoso?

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• 48:36Sam Fragoso?

  I think a lot of us are gonna spend the next few weeks looking for gifts online. And while I like finding something thoughtful for the people in my life, the process can get a little ridiculous. You've got a dozen tabs open, you're comparing prices, and you're trying to remember which store had that one thing you saw that has a deal, and you flagged it, and you saved it, and now you can't find it. Anyway, that's what I like about Shop. Shop brings all kinds of stores together in one place, so you can search for what you're looking for across different brands while discovering new ones along the way, plus tracking all your orders without jumping in between websites. And just in time for the holidays, they're celebrating the all-new shop.com with a pretty extraordinary giveaway.

• 49:17Sam Fragoso?

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• 50:05Sam Fragoso?

  You know, Dazed and Confused is lightly, loosely, sort of based on your freshman year of college. And I've heard you say that "American Graffiti is the upbringing people wish they had, dazed of the upbringing we're stuck with." And it's inspired by your freshman year, and yet you do resist-

• 50:22Speaker 01

  High school, you said college.

• 50:23Sam Fragoso?

  So the film's inspired by your freshman year of high school, and yet you do kind of resist nostalgia in the movie to some degree.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there's a character comes out, well, they're talking about decades. Well, the 50s, because there was a 50s revival, you know, like 50s are boring. There had been that and then 60s rock. And she comes out and says it, Riss Rabisi's character, and she's like, 70s obviously suck. I was trying to show how just kind of boring, it was really not the era. But it was just that when you're stuck, you're just riding around doing nothing. So, but I realized, oh, well, that's cinema. I clearly believe that was cinema. I wouldn't be making a movie, you know, of riding around like, oh, that's life. That's what I'm really trying to capture here, that moment to moment reality of just the teenage mindset, of just trying to fit in, trying to be cool, looking for a party. That's what being a teenager was for me.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  So I get into a genre, I think, well, here's all the tropes of the genre. But what was it like to me? It was this, it was just hanging out.

• 51:21Sam Fragoso?

  I want to talk about that because I was a high schooler who saw that film and thought, oh, my God, that seems like a lot of fun. I had a lot of reverence for it, did feel nostalgic. But I'm thinking about Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, where you seem to be working in this personal, historical present. I think Nathan Heller wrote that in The New Yorker. He said, "A kind of Polaroid of the moment, developed by a man farther along in time." A Polaroid of the moment. Do you feel like that's an accurate description of how you're thinking about time and memory in these films and your experiences?

• 51:55Speaker 01

  Hmm, I'm definitely trying to recreate a space and time and mostly a feeling between people or what the atmosphere was like. You know, in teenage, people look back and say, oh, that looks like a lot of fun. And it is fun, maybe sometimes more in retrospect. In the moment, you're kind of like, you might be in a fight any second. You might, you know, you're worried about, you know, your girlfriend, you know, whatever's going on there, there's a lot of angst, there's so much angst in the air. And Mixed signals and it's all crazy. So I don't know if it's technically that fun. You look back and say that was fun. My fun started, it was more like college. My college comedy, my spiritual sequel to Days, Everybody Wants Something. Now that's fun.

• 52:36Speaker 01

  I realized when I was doing Days, like, oh, this is really, I'm revisiting a kind of a dark. There's some dark places here that I'm going to. I'd be on set and I'd look up and I'd, I'd have these weird flashbacks like, oh, gosh, I'm, I'm visiting these sorrows of another era. Believe it or not, I know the film's a comedy, but it was dark edged to me. Whereas, once I was in college, I was thinking the same thing. I got into it and I was like, no, no, this was all fun.

• 53:03Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  It was all freedom. We were on our own. It was a blast. It was in the moment and in my mind, it still was. To me, one's about oppression and being stuck and riding in a circle. And one's about freedom.

• 53:15Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 53:16Speaker 01

  Getting to do whatever the fuck you wanted. And that is what I aspired to as a young person. I couldn't wait to get older and just have old people out of my face. Let me do my thing.

• 53:26Sam Fragoso?

  You wanted to be the old person.

• 53:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Or just not be encumbered by old people or anyone.

• 53:31Sam Fragoso?

  It's so funny because like, and all these films are, you know, we talked about in the beginning, taken from and, and built with the clay of your life.

• 53:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, before Sunrise, I've said it before. And I'm, I'm the one who'll own up to the autobiographical aspects of my movies because I don't think the film becomes autobi-, you know, it's a construct. You're, you're casting, you're, you know, it's this other thing. But I will admit the autobiographical inspirations to, to every movie. So in that, yeah, I did meet this young woman. We spent a night walking around Philadelphia. And even while I'm doing that, The Curse of the Filmmaker, I'm thinking like, oh, this is a movie. I even mentioned it to her. I was like, hey, this, she's like, what? I don't know, just this feeling we're having. So cut to, you know, five years later, I'm telling Ethan, I want to make a movie about a feeling. It's just this thing. And I think it relates to that quote you said earlier about, I've never been around a sign.

• 54:23Speaker 01

  Like, that's really dramatic as a human, when you're in that, that means everything in the world to you, those moments. So it was just about attraction and that energy that runs between people. And, you know, in a way, they could have been saying anything. It was really just about that feeling.

• 54:39Sam Fragoso?

  You call that the filmmaker curse. I guess that's what I want to sit with for a second. This compulsion to make a movie out of your life.

• 54:48Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 54:49Sam Fragoso?

  Does it interfere with the lived experiences happening in front of you? Like, does thinking about how you may transmute a moment in film take you out of the moment you're living in real life?

• 55:04Speaker 01

  Inevitably, but yeah, I've always kind of been hyper aware of that. I remember reading Ingmar Bergman, he wrote several autobiographies, but one of them, he speaks of this. Even his parents dying and he was there thinking, oh, this is a scene in a Bergman film. You know, it's like, oh, wow. I recognize, I was like, yeah, what is that? What is that thing? It's so funny, most of these flashpoint emotional, what I'm finding now, those are still, they're youthful, they're under 30, there are these big moments that happen. And now I find much fewer, but that's a good thing.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  Like, if I were to make a movie, now it's like, oh, a guy hanging out in his library is pretty, there's not a lot of conflict there. There's not a lot of, there's not a lot of, I'm like, it's kind of a happy person proceeding through life, like, middle age and beyond is much more difficult. Cause it's just the stakes get seemingly lower. I have done these, I have done these movies and I don't, as far as I can tell, no one likes them. Last Flight Flying, Where'd You Go Bernadette? You know, it's like, no, I'm taking on a certain age and what it's like to get older, be a parent, to suffer loss and to, you know, and even before Midnight, you mentioned, it's like, yeah, this is what it's like to have kids and to deal with this shit. It's just not as sexy and romantic, but it's real.

• 56:30Speaker 01

  So there's a, there's a real challenge there to make that compelling somehow.

• 56:35Sam Fragoso?

  And thinking about Four Midnight and especially Boyhood, you've made them pretty compelling.

• 56:40Speaker 01

  Well, but that's the challenge, you know, that's, that's, that's the hard part.

• 56:43Sam Fragoso?

  You made, you made a documentary in 2019, I think it's called like A Day in the Office. And, and it was like a film you were forced to make by the Pompadour because they were doing this big retrospective.

• 56:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 56:55Sam Fragoso?

  And they said, we need you to make a film about where you're at in your life.

• 57:00Speaker 01

  I know, what an assignment.

• 57:02Sam Fragoso?

  And I, I've seen, I've seen it a couple of times.

• 57:04Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. You're one of a hundred people.

• 57:06Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, there's a quote in there. I used to think the arts were some kind of calling, but now I think it's just the right therapies for the right conditions. I'm thinking about how you see filmmaking at this point. Like, is it a calling or is it a coping mechanism?

• 57:24Speaker 01

  That's the revelation I really had in that. And over the years, you interpret your youthful passion and all this stuff as some kind of calling. You know, like, oh, I'm really compelled to do this. And you feel chosen, you feel, it's a great feeling. But you get older and you see, and you know, everybody else who's does it, you know, all your friends, and you kind of analyze, why do some people do it? Why do some, why do some people do it? You know, and I'm like, oh, we're all a little, little crazy. We're all a little wired, you know? Spectrummy, not uncommon in film directors especially to be, you know? I was kind of realizing, oh, yeah, you've got ADHD, dude. I was the undiagnosed generation. It's like, oh, yeah, that's what allows me to focus. And I know so many others that are, you know, OCD, Asperger's, all that.

• 58:08Speaker 01

  So I think that's the undertold story of a lot of artists. And so I was just kind of having fun with that, realizing that in myself. It's like, oh, that's, yeah, what I thought was a calling is just me. But what's the difference? You know, it's, you know, you know, it's all, it's all coping, but it's a, it's a very, I think it's a very healthy coping. That's why I really love anyone who's pursuing the arts. I just find it beautiful because they could be doing much more harmful coping, you know? I just realized at some point, it's just the way I process the world. Whether it's coping, whether it's, you know, whatever it is, it's a great way to go through life, you know?

• 58:46Sam Fragoso?

  So you've always been unwavering.

• 58:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't, I don't really relate to people. I mean, I can understand getting depressed because I've, you know, I, you see, you saw it in that film. I'm kind of at a loss to what film I'm doing. I had to make that film for the Pompadour, and I make fun of it, but I'm in meetings and getting stupid notes from young executives. I was trying to do this thing. It's just kind of, I tried to make it entertaining, but it was just kind of a moment of down like, oh, man, the Marvel universe has taken over. Where do I fit in this world? And, you know, and then I go from that and get a bunch of films made. So I seem to be landing on my feet fairly consistently, knock on wood. But, you know, there are all these low moments, but I never, I never said I'm done with filmmaking.

• 59:28Sam Fragoso?

  In that doc, you have that notes meeting. And.

• 59:33Speaker 01

  Oh, it's a fictional film, by the way. I mean, it looks like a doc.

• 59:35Sam Fragoso?

  Of course, of course, of course. But it is recreated. It's scripted. It's recreating the notes process. Anyone who's received notes from a company, we're not saying Netflix, of course.

• 59:45Speaker 01

  No, that wasn't Netflix.

• 59:46Sam Fragoso?

  They would never do that. But anyone who has received creative notes from, from folks that are not so creative, where they're asking about the stakes of a movie, or the, the tracking of characters, and why should someone care about?

• 1:00:00Speaker 01

  That's always the big one.

• 1:00:01Sam Fragoso?

  It's fascinating because we're in this moment in the industry, post pandemic, post this historic double labor strike.

• 1:00:12Sam Fragoso?

  The box office is in tremendous trouble. It's, it's had a hard time rebounding. It does seem like people under 25 don't want to go to the movie theaters. There's so many things that we could talk about, but you have this quote in The Hollywood Reporter, where they're asking you, do you think someone could have the kind of career you've had in the modern age? And you said, it feels like it's gone with the wind, or gone with the algorithm. Sometimes I feel like, sometimes I feel like, I guess I was born at the right time. I was able to participate in what always feels like the last good era of filmmaking.

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  That's one of those questions. You do an interview about something else and it's the last question.

• 1:00:53Sam Fragoso?

  I know.

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  And you just kind of throw something out off the top of your head. I'm of two minds, you know?

• 1:00:57Sam Fragoso?

  But I want to hold that genuinely with you, not, not as a last question.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. And I'm not saying it's our last question, but you know, you throw something out there and I'm like hesitant to be the prognosticator of our industry because I just don't have my ear to the ground. I don't read the trades. I really blissfully out of it. I only know how it affects me. Like, oh, I can't get funding for this. Oh, they're out of business.

• 1:01:16Sam Fragoso?

  But you're also, can I give you some credit also? Like, you're also still making a ton of movies. You have the Austin Film Society, which you're majorly part of. You, you.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  And I'm around a ton of young filmmakers.

• 1:01:28Sam Fragoso?

  Grants to young filmmakers.

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're all making their first films. So I do worry.

• 1:01:33Sam Fragoso?

  Yes.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  I, I'm with you. I do.

• 1:01:36Sam Fragoso?

  This is something you give a shit about.

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  Very much, very much. The film culture is the thing I care about the most in the whole world. Because it's a thing everybody talks about. But you know, everybody always has, you know? Just because I participated in 90s cinema and people are looking at that like, oh, that was great. It's almost like looking back at the 70s and that was great. It's like, I lived there. They kind of sucked. 90s, you know, there was conflict. There was all these problems. Here's how, you know, you go back and read Pauline Kael from 1969 saying, it's over. You know, the studios are now run by bean counters, executive, you know, the corporate guys have come in and taken, Hollywood's always been over. It's the good days were behind us. So that's just a given.

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  It's all, no one ever says, hey, we're in a great era right now. Cause, but I've seen it change significantly. Three or four times, it feels like. I just think what they're experiencing now is what everyone's experiencing. Like the ebb and flow of studios and funding and distribution, that's always going. What, what we're experiencing now has jumped the track to what everyone's experiencing in every field. You said, oh, young people aren't going to the movies. Well, why is that? They have a phone that they're watching, you know, TikToks on, you know, so it's the attention span has been attacked. The human consciousness is under assault. So the world's changing and I can't think of one field that hasn't been widely,

• 1:03:00Speaker 01

  you know, affected. Think of journalism, every field. When someone asks me these questions, I go, well, how about your industry?

• 1:03:06Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  How about that industry? How about everything's consolidating? And even the world we knew of a certain era is, is rapidly having to adjust, change, go away. I don't, you know, I don't know if it's even filmed now. I think it's this bigger thing. Which is depressing. I'm against, you know, by the way.

• 1:03:23Sam Fragoso?

  What's the bigger thing you're getting at?

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  Just technology, you know, social media, technology, this thing that's invaded our consciousness. That's, you know, like boredom. Just take that, and this isn't an original thought, but, but an important one. Punk rock didn't, it comes, these things come out of boredom. My movies just kind of, there's a boredom and a sameness to the real world that you're trying to change. I'm going to write a song. I'm going to do a painting. I'm going to do a play. I'm going to make a movie. Cause I want to shake this up. I want to blow someone's mind. I want to jostle people and say, hey, this, look over here. This is fun, but this stuff sucks. You know, the world, but if, if everyone's kind of content with the world,

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  by, you know, never being bored and just being distracted with really, really low stakes, not very deep material. What can you do? There's not enough disgruntlement in the right way. For appreciation of art or the need for art. You know, so I don't know. I'm a big read more, be alone, follow your own subjective thoughts, find something and just don't let your consciousness be so invaded. You know, if you want to be original in this world, you got to put away everything and find out who the hell you even are, what you think.

• 1:04:38Sam Fragoso?

  When we're talking about our own consciousness, I can't help but think about the fact that we're entering this AI age.

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  Well, yeah.

• 1:04:46Sam Fragoso?

  Where they're trying to literally take people's consciousness, take people's work, recontextualize it and spit it out through a machine. You have worked with every kind of newfangled technology, rotoscope, going to DV cam, film, digital. What do you make of this? Like, does it intrigue you?

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  I've always had a more optimistic bend toward technological tools, you know, digital this and oh, we can, you know, anything that helps, you know, for post-production or colorization, you know, everything's just a tool to help you express yourself. I guess time will tell to what degree it's so weird, the way the business world is so excited about AI. And I just think it's because they can replace workers, you know? They can short circuit the labor force or the process needed for certain things. But I myself haven't utilized it much. I tested it a couple of times and just saw how lame it was for what I could possibly use it for. But I think, as always, I think we are slowly becoming the Philip K.

• 1:05:51Speaker 01

  Dick world that he predicted in the seventies. I'm thinking of Ubik, his book. It's like, oh, okay. So, but I just don't believe they're going to be able to fully do it. I still believe in it's not going to write the great novel or make the great movie. Good luck. It'll fill in a lot of things. It might be your personal assistant. It might, I, I look forward to helpful things, maybe this technology can do. But I, I think we're probably a little too paranoid.

• 1:06:20Sam Fragoso?

  You think so?

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  Just a tad, a tad. I've talked to some people who are closer to it, a lot closer to it than me. And it's like, they're not going to eat us alive, but.

• 1:06:30Sam Fragoso?

  I don't think AI will ever be able to make a Richard Linklater movie.

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  I'm not worried about it. If I was doing like CSI Miami or something, I think it maybe could write certain scripts to, I'd pick out one TV show because they're kind of rehashes of rehashes. But the fear would be a world that doesn't need originality anyway, anything special anyway. That's the greater fear is an audience that demands a certain, that wants something. But I have more faith in humans than that. We're looking for novelty. We're looking for something, some kind of connection. I don't know if that can provide that.

• 1:07:06Sam Fragoso?

  Well, all I know for certain is that, God willing, in, you know, 15, 16 years, there'll be this film that you've been working on, Merrily We Roll, that you've been working on in a kind of boyhood way.

• 1:07:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:19Sam Fragoso?

  In your office, do you still have that photo of John Huston up?

• 1:07:24Speaker 01

  I do have that photo.

• 1:07:25Sam Fragoso?

  And can you tell people what that is and what that means to you?

• 1:07:28Speaker 01

  Oh, there was just a photo, there's John Huston dying of emphysema hooked up to a, oh, you know, a breathing mask. Because his, you know, lungs, his breathing, you know, he needs help there. But he's making his last film, The Dead, what becomes his last film. And I was like, oh, he's in his, what is he there? Mid 80s, I guess.

• 1:07:50Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  Even as a younger person, I like that. I say, okay, that's how I want to be. Minus the mask. I hope to be.

• 1:07:57Speaker 01

  But I just, I love that. And film is, there's been a lot of great films by older filmmakers, for sure. Look at the age we're living in now. I can name five right off the top of my head that are making films in their 80s. So I don't think it's too far fetched to think if you get lucky, health and, you know, whatever wise, you could keep doing this. It's, I mean, it's very much a young person's medium, but then it's an old person's medium too. So it's a, it's a person medium. I don't think it matters.

• 1:08:26Sam Fragoso?

  You know, like this like desire you have to keep making work into your 80s and 90s. You know, you talked about Everybody Wants Some earlier, which is kind of based on your freshman year of college. And there's a scene right at the end of the movie with the two characters on a river. And the guy, the one character is saying, he's talking about how the Greek myth relates to his own life and Sisyphus and baseball.

• 1:08:56Speaker 03

  Is this your first choice school? Or?

• 1:08:58Speaker 04

  No, I applied to a few, but this is the best school that also offered me a scholarship.

• 1:09:02Speaker 03

  You mean you had to like, write a bunch of essays and all that fun stuff?

• 1:09:06Speaker 04

  Just one.

• 1:09:07Speaker 03

  Oh, what'd you write about?

• 1:09:08Speaker 04

  The topic was to take a Greek myth and relate it to your own life.

• 1:09:12Speaker 03

  So you wrote about Aphrodite and being a baseball slut?

• 1:09:15Speaker 04

  Kind of. Shit, no. I just took Sisyphus in baseball, just kind of.

• 1:09:21Speaker 03

  You wrote about that for your essay? How did you even like, those two things together?

• 1:09:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, I did, believe it or not. I mean, the point of the whole thing is that the gods intend for Sisyphus to suffer, right?

• 1:09:32Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:09:33Speaker 04

  Well, my point was that they'd actually blessed him with something to focus on. And something that he could potentially find meaning in. And it's a gift that he's striving at all, you know, even if it looks futile to others.

• 1:09:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:09:46Speaker 04

  I mean, yeah, it's ridiculous to roll a boulder up a mountain over and over and over again, but so is everything else in life. When you really think about it, especially a game.

• 1:09:54Speaker 03

  Things only mean as much as the meaningfulness that we allow them to have.

• 1:09:58Speaker 04

  That's where I tied into baseball. Just accepting whatever comes my way, you know? Good, bad, doesn't matter. What matters is just getting in that groove. Where the whole world kind of goes away and just doing what I'm supposed to be doing.

• 1:10:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was me mixing in that myth via Albert Camus, probably 50s interpretation. And then in a youthful, college-ish mindset of an athlete, you know, but I guess I've always felt that way. You know, that propels you forward when you go, well, everything's perhaps very meaningless, but so why not do everything you want to, you know? What are you waiting on? You know, it can give you strength to see a kind of a lack of meaning in things. It can kind of empower you as an individual to not see yourself in this meaningful thing. It's like, oh, you know, I've always kind of gone on that side of it.

• 1:10:56Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, the Sisyphus pushing up a boulder, is that? And when you're thinking about being in a groove, you on set making movies, is that what you're imagining?

• 1:11:06Speaker 01

  Definitely not a boulder. I pushed up a boulder once, which we talked about, you know, that producer I was working with on that boulder movie. He kind of, ah, you know, producers and directors. Yeah, we're cats and dogs. He kind of liked, he, a lot of war metaphors, a lot of war metaphors. I'm like, give me sports metaphors. It's a little more fun, a little more entertaining. You know, he, I was kind of like, yeah, I don't, I don't want to struggle. I don't want to, I just want to, you know, work hard and, and make it work and it's not competitive. And that's where the groove, you can find the groove in there somewhere and truly enjoy it, even though it's, you know, it's a lot of work, a lot of time, but you can, at the end of the day, you feel fulfilled because you kind of maximize something.

• 1:11:48Speaker 01

  So that's a much better feeling than you went through some huge, you know, but anyway, I'm not, I'm not seeking out like a lot of conflict in what I'm doing. Some people do though. Some people work from that. Again, you know, there's as many ways to do this as there are people doing it. So.

• 1:12:05Sam Fragoso?

  But when you're on set and you're an introvert having to be an extrovert and you're in the groove, like is that, is that, is that the place where you feel most like this is what I'm supposed to be doing?

• 1:12:16Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. And making a film to me is not extroverted, you know, it's just where I belong, you know? So that's it. I remember hearing a Johnny Carson quote a long time ago, you couldn't be more high profile, come out, do your thing, host a talk show. And he says, he felt most comfortable there. Like his own life kind of tweaked him out, but that, that little moment of hosting a show was that 90 minutes or whatever. And I was like, oh, that's kind of weird. You think that would be, no, he felt comfortable there. I remember as a kid going, what's that? That would make me nervous to do that. And I kind of feel the same way. You know, it's like, oh, I feel most comfortable rehearsing, making a movie. That's just, that's just where I feel like I'm not wasting any time, like I'm, I'm meant to be. And it's a, it's a good feeling, you know?

• 1:12:57Speaker 01

  I mean, I, it's how I look at it. It's, arts are great that way. You're just, it's all about maximizing yourself and self-actualizing and in the, everyone you're working with, you're just trying to actualize, manifest the best version of what you're trying to do. So it's, the, the assignment's pretty simple. In the big picture.

• 1:13:17Sam Fragoso?

  The assignment for you, at least the way you've done it, is to excavate the parts of your life and make meaning of it by turning it into a film. And I read that quote from Before Sunset, where he's talking about the clay and how you shape it. And I thought we'd end on that note to the reader that Thomas Wolfe has in his book, Look Homeward, Angel. Do you want to read it? Yeah, start there.

• 1:13:43Speaker 01

  This note, however, is addressed principally to those persons whom the writer may have known in the period covered by these pages. To these persons, he would say what he believes they understand already, that this book was written in innocence and nakedness of spirit, and that the writer's main concern was to give fullness, life, and intensity to the actions and people in the book he was creating. Now that it is to be published, he would insist that this book is a fiction, and that he meditated no man's portrait here. But we are the sum of all of the moments of our lives. All that is ours is in them. We cannot escape or conceal it.

• 1:14:25Speaker 01

  If the writer has used the clay of life to make his book, he has only used what all men must, what none can keep from using. Fiction is not fact, but fiction is fact selected and understood. Fiction is fact arranged and charged with purpose. Dr. Johnson remarked that a man would turn over half a library to make a single book. In the same way, a novelist may turn over half the people in a town to make a single figure in his novel. This is not the whole method, but the writer believes it illustrates the whole method in a book that is written from a middle distance and is without ranker or bitter intention.

• 1:15:10Speaker 01

  A beautiful disclaimer. Like, I'm gonna piss off a lot of people in my hometown of Asheville, North Carolina. My next book, I'll talk about that. There's an angel there. I've been to there a lot. I always look up there and think, oh, Thomas Wolfe. You can see why he was such a hero to the Beats and everybody since. He was just ahead of them. And that thing, that leap we talked about, making your own life fodder for your art. You know, there's something very fundamental about it, but you have to make that leap mentally. No one can do that for you. You have to find that in yourself and think, okay, I'm gonna go down this path and I'm not gonna worry so much about how it affects everyone. I care about what I'm expressing here.

• 1:15:54Speaker 01

  And, you know, I might ruffle a feather here or two. You know, sorry. It's not with bitterness, it's with, you know. And he's basically saying he's doing an amalgam of all these characters. But they know who they are. You know, be friends with a writer at your peril. You know, you're gonna end up in their novel.

• 1:16:10Sam Fragoso?

  Well, I have to say, I thank you for making that leap. And for, what is it here? Selecting and understanding fact and turning it into fiction and charging it with purpose, which you have done for a long time now.

• 1:16:24Speaker 01

  And not every film I do comes from the absolute, but you personalize it. You take it in and you cycle it through your system. So, a good story can come from everywhere. But I do find myself pulling from my own life to a unnerving degree sometimes.

• 1:16:40Sam Fragoso?

  Well, it's been to our benefit and I so thank you for it.

• 1:16:45Speaker 01

  Well, Sam, it's really great talking with you. And I'm still on the fence if you're spinning your wheels here and you should be doing something. I don't know, I'm having trouble judging you. You're so good at what you do. It would be kind of weird in this world to encourage anyone to not do something they're very good at. But I will remind you, I turned down a lot of things I was good at to go out on this other path that no one encouraged me to. That was my own, that was kinda like. So, being good at something can kinda be a curse. It can get in your way. I'll throw that out, too.

• 1:17:17Sam Fragoso?

  Is this a hung jury?

• 1:17:18Speaker 01

  Maybe, maybe. A little bit of a hung jury, Sam. Only you, again, you and the depths of your being can really decide where to allocate all your time and full efforts and exist in this world at the same time. Another challenge.

• 1:17:33Sam Fragoso?

  This is a lot to put on me at the end of a podcast.

• 1:17:35Speaker 01

  It is. I've turned it around on you, buddy. You know, you, you, you put it on me for an hour plus. I will turn it on you, man. You gotta figure it out. You gotta figure out what you're doing with your life energy. You gotta get on with it.

• 1:17:46Sam Fragoso?

  Well, we have to go, so I'm gonna say I thank you for caring. And I, I appreciate you, you accepting this invitation to come on because it means a whole lot to me.

• 1:17:55Speaker 01

  Well, no, it's wonderful. It's wonderful to talk with you. I'm a, I'm a fan of your, of your show. I get a lot out of it. Again, as an introvert, you sit there alone. This is my chance to be around smart people. I get something out of, because I don't alone in my library so much.

• 1:18:10Speaker 01

  Hence the birth of a great medium, podcasts.

• 1:18:13Sam Fragoso?

  Richard Linklater, uh, thank you for coming on.

• 1:18:16Speaker 01

  Well, really nice spending this time with you.

• 1:18:57Sam Fragoso?

  MUBI is a global film company bringing great cinema to the world and to you. Everything at MUBI is handpicked with an emphasis on visionary filmmakers and movies worth discovering. One new movie is called Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, from writer-director Jane Seanbrun, who made the film I Saw the TV Glow. The film stars Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson. It follows a young director tasked with resurrecting Camp Miasma, a once-beloved slasher franchise that after years of sequels has fallen out of favor. Looking for inspiration, she visits the reclusive actress who starred in the original film. But what begins at an attempt to revive the franchise soon pulls the two women into a blood-soaked world of desire, fear, and delirium. It's a world-expanding

• 1:19:43Sam Fragoso?

  Genre bending movie for one of the most distinctive filmmakers working today. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is now streaming exclusively on MUBI. You can try MUBI free for 30 days at MUBI.com/talkeasy. That's MUBI, M-U-B-I dot com slash talkeasy for a whole month of great cinema for free.

• 1:20:15Sam Fragoso?

  And that's our show.

• 1:20:17Sam Fragoso?

  If you enjoyed today's episode with Richard Linklater, be sure to share the program on social media, tag us at Talk Easy Pod. If you want to go above and beyond, you can leave us a review on Apple, give us five stars on Spotify. I want to give a special thanks this week to Janet Pearson, Ethan Hawke, Nathan Heller, Sarah McCray, and the Academy Library. I also want to thank the teams at Paula Woods Consultants, Detour Film, Netflix, and of course, our guest, Richard Linklater. To learn more about each of his two new films, visit our website at TalkEasyPod.com. For more episodes with other great filmmakers, I'd recommend Steven Soderbergh, Francis Ford Coppola, and Ava DuVernay.

• 1:20:59Sam Fragoso?

  To hear those and more Lemonada podcasts, listen on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. You can also subscribe to Lemonada Premium, which includes ad-free listening at lemonadapremium.com. You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram at Talk Easy Pod. If you want to purchase one of our mugs, they come in cream or navy, visit TalkEasyPod.com/shop. Talk Easy is produced by Caroline Reebok. Our executive producer is Jenexa Bravo. Today's talk was edited by Roman Richard and Finn Nolan. It was mixed by Andrew Bastola, and it was taped out of PodStream Studios in New York City with special assistance from iHeart Media. Our music is by Dylan Peck. Our illustrations are by Chris O'Shanoy.

• 1:21:44Sam Fragoso?

  Photographs today come from Kyle Manning. Research assistance, Austin Kelly. Graphics are by Ethan Sinica. I also want to thank our team at Lemonada Media. I'm Sam Fragoso. Thank you for listening to Talk Easy. I'll see you back here on Sunday with author Salman Rushdie. Until then, stay safe.

• 1:22:21Speaker 05

  I'm Dan Heath. On What It's Like to Be, I interview people about their jobs. Here's a married couple that drives a long haul truck together.

• 1:22:29Speaker 06

  We backed up and they loaded fresh dead rats.

• 1:22:32Speaker 05

  I mean, how many rats would you guess were back there?

• 1:22:34Speaker 06

  There were 32,000 pounds of them.

• 1:22:37Speaker 05

  32,000 pounds of frozen dead rats.

• 1:22:41Speaker 06

  As that's it.

• 1:22:43Speaker 05

  Find out what it's like to be a long haul trucker, a couples therapist, or an FBI agent, all on the podcast What It's Like to Be. History gets written, then rewritten, sometimes by scholars correcting the record, sometimes by committees deciding what a generation of kids will and won't learn. The version that makes it into the textbook isn't always the only story. It's the one that won out. That's the kind of thing Ground News was built for. It shows you how outlets across the spectrum tell the same story, side by side, so you can spot the shading for yourself. Ground News gives each outlet a factuality rating, so you know how much weight to give the source, and shows you who owns it,

• 1:23:27Speaker 05

  so you know what's behind it. The Nobel Peace Center called it "an excellent way to stay informed, avoid echo chambers, and expand your worldview." So go to groundnews.com/rz. That's G-R-O-U-N-D-N-E-W-S.com/rz for 40% off unlimited access vantage plan. Get it yourself or gift it to someone who'd rather know than not. Use my link, groundnews.com/rz, so you get the discount and they know I sent you. If you're a fan of learning all sides of history, then Ground News is for you. One more time, groundnews.com/rz.