Richard Linklater

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A self-taught film buff with arty taste and a knack for tapping into the popular zeitgeist, Richard Linklater, 45, has never made a movie he didn’t like. Since breaking onto the scene out of his home base in Austin, Texas, with 1991’s freewheeling, docu-style comedy Slacker, he has passed on most of the studio projects that have come his way while exploring his less-commercial ideas—from the high school graduation blowout Dazed and Confused to the bittersweet dialogue romances Before Sunrise and Before Sunset —on the independent side. Paradoxically, his indie films have inspired the Hollywood studios to chase him even more aggressively.

Linklater’s biggest commercial success, 2003’s School of Rock, came about because two of his tiny but critically hailed films, the rotoscoped Waking Life (in which animators traced over live action, frame by frame) and the video movie Tape, caught producer Scott Rudin’s attention. Rudin convinced the reluctant director to inject his own laid-back style into the raucous rock-music comedy, which grossed more than $130 million worldwide.

On July 7, Warner Independent will release A Scanner Darkly, Linklater’s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s 1977 novel, in which the director expands on the rotoscope technique. Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, Winona Ryder, and more act out a dreamlike story set in a future world of anonymous cops wearing identity-hiding “scramble suits” who can “scan” the homes of justifiably paranoid drug addicts.

It captures Dick’s bleak wit and philosophical banter in a way that other adaptations of the writer’s work (Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report) have not. What Linklater does best is meander entertainingly—which is just what he did one afternoon with PREMIERE over lunch at an organic vegetarian restaurant in Austin. He was between postproduction duties on Scanner and Fast Food Nation, his drama inspired by the best-selling exposé, both of which are set to screen at Cannes.

PREMIERE: Your radical first venture into animation, Waking Life, jumped between many different styles, while A Scanner Darkly sticks to a far more unified, detailed, gorgeous look.

Waking Life was shot documentary-style with two handheld cameras, no light, for $2.3 million. Whereas Scanner was lit like a real movie: I used Steadicam and composed color-coordinated shots. I did want to take it up another notch in terms of storytelling and design. That said, Scanner is an $8 million independent movie. And it has movie stars, but the story—it’s crazy. We still shot the whole thing in twenty-three days.

The animators enhanced what you shot?

Yeah, I wanted the animators to go off what was there. It was very hard. We were working a year and a half solid. The design for the scramble suit [which changes constantly onscreen] took a long time. You can’t just push a button and repeat stuff, you have to paint everything. I’m still struggling with corrections. Scanner is more representational, like a graphic novel come to life. You are watching reality, but your brain on some fundamental level is questioning the reality of your perception. Is it real, or a human construct?

The animation is so detailed—especially in Keanu Reeves’s close-ups—that it captures every nuance of the performances.

There is not really a category to fit what we did here. There’s this extra layer of interpretation, but it’s the actors. And I’m afraid they won’t get the credit they deserve for their performances.