Floating through un-reality

Filmmaker Richard Linklater defies convention with latest film Waking Life

When Richard Linklater named his production company Detour, he couldn't have come up with a more fitting moniker. As one of America's most original and bravest filmmakers, he's always chosen the road that's right for him, even though it wasn't necessarily the easiest route to take. His first major film, Slacker (1989), was a classic of experimental narrative which featured over 100 characters; and his 1993 Dazed and Confused was a successful ensemble piece that portrayed the lives of American teenagers in the '70s. While Before Sunrise (1995) and The Newton Boys (1998) had little success critically, his 1997 SubUrbia, about young, disenfranchised Americans at a crossroads in their lives, was a hit.
Linklater is back with an extraordinary pic, Waking Life, the voyage of a young man looking for answers in his life. But this is no ordinary movie; here Linklater first shot in live-action and then animated it all.
Tandem talked to Richard Linklater, 39, at the Toronto International Film Festival.

You filmed Waking Life and Tape, a three-hander starring Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman and Robert Sean Leonard, all at once?
"We shot Waking Life before Tape. I shot, edited, locked picture with Waking Life, and then we were in the animation process. That took an entire year. So while we were doing that, I was working less and less on the animated side. Y'know, the animators were doing about 15 seconds a week each so I was looking over their shoulders, sign off on a character, have a few general meetings, but I was still involved in other major aspects of it that I really couldn't do a big film. So Tape was the perfect film I could squeeze into that schedule. We rehearsed it in two weeks and shot it in one week, and then I was back in my office editing while I was still doing Waking Life. So it's interesting the way they both came to the finish line at the same time. I think I would've been very frustrated if I had not done Tape in the interim. It would've seemed that Waking Life took forever. It dragged a lot out of me, took up too much time."

With Waking Life did you know you were reinventing the medium?
"I was very aware that I was doing something different. But how can you not? It was experimental new territory the whole way. But it was really very exciting to be doing something that you know had not been done before, that you're inventing. The whole thing was so much about the process, creating it as we go, but I saw the film as a metaphor for that. The film is aware of itself as a film, and in its own process it's being created in what it is and what it isn't. I think it's aware of its own newness. It was a pretty wild process. It was like cinema meets computer."

Tell me about the process.
"We cast it, rehearsed it, shot it just like a regular film, only we were shooting it with two DV cameras [Sony TRV900 and PC1]. Then we edited it, locked picture, then started the long process animation. I wasn't very much of an animation fan, or I never saw myself doing animation. But then I met Bob Sabiston, my partner on the film, who had written this software. He's both an artist and a computer designer. The way the computer took all its cues from the human world was so human-based, real people, real gestures. The whole thing was wild. And it kind of taxes your brain as you watch it, because part of your brain is accepting this model as reality, like the way it sounds and looks, and yet there's this painterly reinterpretation of this real. There's was a question early on: Can someone watch this for a feature-length films? I never doubted it. And I thought it would work great with this story that I'd been thinking about forever."

Let's talk about the story.
"It's like an exploration of a lot of things. To me it was the notion of identity, reality, and a lot of fundamental questions that you're confronted with at an early age. I found myself 20 years out of school when those questions seemed so real, so vibrant like you thought you would have an answer sometime soon for all that. But then you get older and then it gets really more ambiguous, the mystery gets deep. It's less answers and it's more imaginative realms of thoughts, or places you want to go in your questioning, in your human inquiry. But I'm not a person going through the world looking for answers anymore. I don't really think they're out there in that specific way unless you want to get really fundamentalist about it. I don't really need answers. It's more poetic to go through life. I just like the ambiguity of reality, I guess you could call it."

But the script covers every philosophical theory imaginable.
"Kinda. The great thing about this film is I did a lot of research on the brain, lucid dreaming, out of body experiences. So I ran the gamut of pretty hardcore science to really out-there mystical, New Age kind of thinking. So it's fun to see the way people respond to the different realms of consciences that can be brought on by various waves. You can have an unreal experience through meditation, drugs, have a temporal lobe seizure, a near-death experience. I like learning just the physiological basis, what's going on in your brain? But if you can explain it, it doesn't negate the experience. The experience is everything."

How autobiographical is Waking Life?
"It's pretty close. I think I'm one of those people, my unreal life, my dream life, even as a kid... the first image in the film is of a boy holding on to a car's handle and being pulled up into the sky. That really happened to me, that's a really early memory of mine. Children don't have this built-up notion of what reality it is, that you build up over your life as your brain constructs this huge notion of self and who you are and what's real and what wasn't. I like those kind of feelings, and held on to them. Floating, it's a metaphor for thinking, always going forward."

How well will this film do commercially?
"I don't know. The film is about identity, free will, the notion of freedom. So it doesn't really belong in cinema. There's no place in the narrative for this kind of material, so it was fun to hitch this material onto the wagon of this story of this guy passing through this experience. I'm one of those people who always have a need to express that experience. Whether others will get it, I don't know. I think it communicates on some other level, and people who might be attuned to it will have their own relationship with it. It seems like the right medium to that idea right now."

Waking Life is currently playing in local cinemas.

Publication Date: 2001-10-21
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=518