Of all the great American filmmakers that haven’t won the Best Director Oscar prize yet, Richard Linklater is up there with the most deserving. His filmography is as original and diverse as they come.
Linklater’s latest, titled “Apollo 10 1/2,” is now in theatres and available to stream on Netflix next Friday. It’s the most personal and heartfelt movie of his career - A rotoscope-infused dream that sucks you back into 1960s Texas.
I have interviewed Linklater twice now with, hopefully, a third time coming up next week. These are his 10 essential films (not counting “Apollo 10 1/2”).
1) “Boyhood” (2014)
You’ve heard and read countless raves for this 12-years-in-the-making masterpiece; what else is there to say? Linklater used everything he learned in his 25 year career to make this movie. The pacing, the direction, the editing, the writing and the acting are all what we’ve come to know as Linklater-esque. There’s an ever-growing maturity that is starting to comfortably creep into his work and, believe it or not, I think the man has many more great movies to come. What touched me most about “Boyhood” wasn’t just the sweet performances – especially by Arquette – but the way he makes the movie flow in such an organic and beautiful pattern. Many think it was about a boy growing up, but the film hit me hardest when it dealt with the bond between mother and child. It hit notes that felt so personal to me.
2) “Waking Life” (2001)
“Waking Life” is where Linklater decided to take huge risks and make personal, innovative cinema. It came out in 2001 when the theme of dreams and identity were very prevalent at the movies with the release of “Mulholland Drive” and “Memento”. Shot in Rotoscope and delivering vibrantly alive images, the film was a breakthrough for Linklater, unafraid to delve into topics that would become a source of obsession for him in the years to come: The meaning of life, dreams, freewill, consciousness and the passage of time. Its images linger in your head for weeks, months, even years – with every frame soaked in colors and palettes that have no limits to the shapes, sizes or imagination being used.
3) “Dazed and Confused” (1993)
This was the breakthrough. The first time I saw this movie I knew I had seen a damn-near classic. The atmosphere envelops you and makes you feel like you actually know every single person on-screen. The attention to detail is astounding. You are there in 1976 Texas, on the last day of High School for the graduates of Lee High. There are so many different characters, that, in a way, the film feels plotless. This was a sign of things to come for the young Texan filmmaker. Although a big studio picture, the narrative structure of “Dazed and Confused” was anything but conventional, focusing more on character than story. Linklater’s 25 year obsession with the passage of time is very apparent here as the film seems to take place within a 24-hour time frame and uses it to further explore the routes many of the characters are about to take in their lives.
4) “Before Sunset” (2004)
5) “Before Midnight” (2013)
Celine and Jesse. It started with “Before Sunrise” and then continued with the beautiful “Before Sunset” and capped off with the mature, pessimistic “Before Midnight”. Richard Linklater’s trilogy of romance in European cities has been building a solid cult following for more than two decades now. “Before Sunset” is a masterful examination of love, family life and conversation. Never has an audience wanted an on-screen character to cheat on his wife more than when Jesse shows up at Celine’s apartment in the climactic scene. Celine is indelibly played by Julie Delpy and Jesse is superbly played by Ethan Hawke. Linklater and his two actors wrote the screenplay and then endlessly rehearsed before turning the camera on. This organic style brings a real sense of authenticity to the films. These movies ask us questions about love that many studio movies refuse to ask. Is our view of love as a society conflicted? Or can we really love someone eternally, in the “forever” sense of the term? How much can we compromise until we end up losing sense of ourselves and our own independence? There is not one answer to any of these questions as Linklater has always been a curiosity seeker who asks more than he answers.
6) “The School of Rock” (2003
In “Boyhood”, Ethan Hawke’s dad creates a post-Beatles “Black Album” mixtape for his son. Something tells me it’s an idea Jack Black’s riotous imposter substitute teacher Dewey Finn approve of. “The School of Rock,” much like Cameron Crowe’s “Almost Famous”, is Linklater’s love letter to rock and roll. Black’s Dewey Finn is a firm believer of the power of rock and roll – he wants to pass down his knowledge to the classically trained students he substitute teaches. “I have been touched by your kids… and I’m pretty sure that I’ve touched them”, Finn exclaims to a horrified group of parents whose jaws drop at the comment. We get what he’s saying; he’s just passin’ the torch, man.
7) “Tape” (2001)
The passage of time gets dealt with again in this semi-experimental film that, with “Waking Life”, kickstarted Linklater’s second phase as a filmmaker after the ill received “The Newton Boys”. Taking place inside a hotel room in real time, “Tape” stars Linklater muse Ethan Hawke, Robert Sean Leonard, and an incredibly powerful Uma Thurman. In the ensuing hours our trio dissects a painful high school memory that may or may not be true. Linklater, the auteur, is in full display here with the film’s themes of memory, time and place taking center stage. However, the most fascinating aspect of “Tape” is that you don’t fully know what is fact and what is fiction. Some characters may be lying or might have just perceived events in a different way, it’s a scathingly topical 2019 movie that happens to have been released 15 years before the #MeToo movement formed. The 86 nail-biting minutes Linklater lays out are thought-provoking, to say the least, making it the unequivocal hidden gem of the Linklater canon.
8) “Bernie” (2012)
Tackling the real-life story of a Texan man who shot and killed a “companion” in the back, you might expect this to be one of the darker films in Linklater’s filmography. Suffice to say, what we got instead was quite possibly the most likeable murder-mystery in cinema history. Bernie Tiede, as played by a never better Jack Black, was a well-liked church going fella who didn’t seem to have a bad bone in his body. What led to him committing such a terrible crime? Linklater and Skip Hollandsworth’s screenplay tries to dissect the events and come to understand the mindset of a murderer. However, like most of the director’s movies, the answers don’t come easy. It’s a fascinating look at human nature and, if, at first, it seems like unfamiliar territory for Linklater, it couldn’t be more relevant to the themes and questions he’s been seeking answers to his entire career.
9) “Me and Orson Welles” (2009)
Linklater’s ode to the stage came and went faster than any movie he has released in his 25 year career. This despite solid reviews and an incredible performance by Christian McKay as a rambunctious, youthful, Orson Welles trying to prove his worth by staging a play of “Julius Cesar”. The film takes place in 1937 New York and the attention to detail is beautifully rendered as Linklater gives us something he’s never given us before: a period piece. This is a pleasingly simple but satisfying dramedy that pays tribute to one of the giants of our time and works as a skid crowdpleaser for Linklater, in between all the thoughtful dialogue-driven works of art he seems to consistently deliver.
10) “Everybody Wants Some,” (2016)
”Everybody Wants Some” is actually a spiritual successor to “Dazed and Confused.” A relatively unknown cast which includes Will Brittain, Zoey Deutch, Ryan Anthony Guzman, Tyler Hoechlin, Blake Jenner, Glen Powell and Wyatt Russell make up the ensemble which is an ode to the ‘80's as ‘Dazed’ was an homage to the ‘70's. The plot, much like the best of Linklater, is rather loose and nonconforming to narrative convention. In 1980 Texas, a college freshman (Jenner) meets his new baseball teammates (Will Brittain, Ryan Guzman), most of which happen to be disco-dancing, skirt-chasing partyers. The film, released right before the term “male toxicity” would sneak into the mainstream post-#MeToo, was met with breezy delight by critics. In “Everybody Wants Some” Linklater doesn’t just want to have fun either, he ends his film on a bittersweet note of maturity - the party may be over but the song remains.