Richard Linklater: American dreamer
Jaime Jeske
Films
April 04, 2002
Interview
An American dreamer
by Sheila Johnston
The maverick director Richard Linklater explains the unique look of his
latest film
The best way to describe Waking Life, according to its director, Richard
Linklater, is as a cross between Yellow Submarine and My Dinner With
André: an extraordinary mix of state-of-the-art animation and high
philosophical enquiry.
The main character, a young man (Wiley Wiggins, the star of Linklater's
Dazed and Confused in 1993), is hit by a car at the beginning of the
film and enters an altered state of consciousness. Is he awake or
asleep, he wonders, dead or alive? In a dream from which he can't seem
to awake, he goes on a journey of discovery which involves more than 30
people, all with their own conflicting explanations of the meaning of
life.
"There are several themes," Linklater says. "Identity. Freedom. The
future. Waking lives, dream lives. And what is reality? I was trying to
replicate the mindset of a young person discovering the world and the
intensity of that time when you think that, at the end of the road,
there might be answers to these fundamental questions.
"The film is just seeking; it's not offering any answers. It would be a
real drag if it was telling you what to believe."
The result divides audiences. The leading Chicago critic Roger Ebert,
who has seen the film three times, was left exhilarated by its sheer
energy and passion. Others have found its fusillade of theories, many as
half-baked as only American cracker-barrel philosophy can be, simply
irritating or confusing.
"It's a level of discourse that you can study in college or read about
in your free time. Why should it be threatening in a movie?" asks
Linklater, who, at 41, has clearly retained his own youthful curiosity.
"That's what life is: a lot of different things coming at you from
different directions."
But the film's most striking and pleasurable feature is its unique
visual conception. The director had always planned Waking Life as an
animated project. "It would be terrible as a live-action movie," he
says. "But it was only when I saw what Bob's software was capable of
that I thought: 'That's the way the film should look.' "
"Bob" is Bob Sabiston, a soft-spoken computer boffin, who refers to his
technique as "interpolated rotoscoping."
Here's how it works: Linklater shoots Waking Life as a live-action
video. Then, as Sabiston explains, "you feed the video into a computer
and draw directly on top of it on to the screen with graphics pens. It's
a bit of a misnomer to call it animation, because it is more like
painting.
"You make a brushstroke, go forward a few frames and do another one. The
computer makes up the frames that you skipped. It's a time-saving
device, but it's particularly apt here because it makes the animation
very dreamlike and fluid. The artist works with the performances, trying
to capture the nuances in every frame. I've been using the technique for
three or four years with documentary subjects. It works well with real
people because it lets you capture subtle gestures."
That's the first big difference between this and conventional animation:
the astonishingly lifelike way it is able to capture people's tiny
natural reactions: a sideways glance, a double-take, an attempt to butt
into a conversation.
The second difference is that Shrek, for instance, or The Lion King will
employ hundreds of artists, assigning them to different characters while
still maintaining overall an homogenous design. Waking Life, by
contrast, offers an enormous range of graphic styles, from Warholesque
to Impressionist to a look almost reminiscent of classic Disney.
"That was intentional," Sabiston says. "We had 30 people working on the
film, whom I picked precisely because they had varying approaches. Some
were comic-strip artists and some abstract painters, and we gave each
maximum freedom."
Linklater adds: "I loved the idea that the movie would look very
different from character to character. These are all original people and
it makes each one as distinct as we all want to be."
Did anyone object to the way he or she was designed? "Some of the actors
snuck into the studio and were kind of snooping around, but they always
knew from the outset that they would be animated."
Waking Life and Linklater's next film, the digital video drama Tape,
represent a return to his spirit of experiment after The Newton Boys
(1998), the director's disappointing excursion into big-budget costume
drama. Prizing his status as a maverick, he made no effort to seek
Hollywood funding for Waking Life (which cost a little over $1 million
to make): it was picked up for distribution by Twentieth Century Fox
after causing a stir at the Sundance Film Festival.
"I could never have convinced a studio to finance this," Linklater says.
"It was great never to have to conceive it as a 'product' or to think
about the audience or the genre. It was just this cool thing we were all
working on without having to talk about it. I'm lucky I ever got it
made."
*Waking Life opens on April 19; Tape opens in June
Copyright 2002 Times Newspapers Ltd. All rights reserved.
Jaime