Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1029125
38 DGA QUARTERLY PHOTO: AMPAS DGA: You taught yourself how to direct. Your story is incredibly inspiring to aspiring filmmakers. How hard was that to do? LINKLATER: Hard but a fun way to spend your life. I'd had a baseball scholarship, but I had already dropped sports as I got more into reading and watching mov- ies, like four a day sometimes. You know, people think I am a big sports guy but they don't understand I did not pick up a sports page for 20 years. I did not watch a pro sports game. I can't tell you who won the World Series in 1987 or 1988. I had worked on Texas offshore rigs for 2½ years and had saved up like 18 grand. I bought film stock and a bunch of equipment. All I did was read, watch movies, edit film and get good at it. I found that this is what I wanted to do. I caught that great run of being a kid in the '60s so I have '60s awareness. I was little but I remember it, you know. It's an established fact, I hope, that that was the great time to come of age. And then the '80s was a really great time to go underground, to say "fuck you" to the Reagan years. What I needed was to obsess on making short films no one will ever see but that I'm doing to learn. I was going to teach myself this stuff because I thought I could. I studied people's careers, and read interviews. I thought, "Well, if you are going to make it in the film world as a director, you have to be such a self-driven, self-starter anyway. You have to have that so if you are the kind of person who is going to sit back and be educated instead of educating yourself, you are prob- ably not going to—it is such an active role." So, I said, "That's me anyway, I don't really like au- thority, I don't like teachers telling me what to do. I am going to do this alone and succeed or I am going to do it alone and fail privately." But I was going to get there myself. It would have been almost too much to be a film major and feel like I'm making a public declaration of what I wanted to do. I was going to do it, underground, my own way, and work really hard at it. I was good at electronics and woodworking, and I was just confident in my own grasp of the technical tools of filmmaking. If you aren't good at it, no one is going to be able to teach you to be really good at it. You learn best by doing it. I figured that if I was really a director, I'd be able to do it. Q: You went about making these exercise shorts. What did you do in those? A: I was so systematic and conscious about what I was doing, since I was making up for lost time. This was '83 to '85. It was like my own film school. I'm go- ing to do this editing exercise, then this lighting ex- ercise. I'll make this short from beginning to end and finish it, but this is what I'm trying to focus on. They were experimental, not narrative, strictly technical. Hitchcock said that, at first, your directing skills "It was bizarre to sit through test screenings [of Dazed and Confused] and hear the audience go ape shit and then hear the studio distribution people go, 'Well, we don't have any stars in it…'" ✯ Richard Linklater gets physical on the set of his high school coming-of-age film, Dazed and Confused (1993), which gave the director license to exercise full creative control over his ensuing projects.