By Erin Free
“Vietnam was my whole childhood growing up, from the first time that I can remember to the time when I was about fourteen or fifteen,” Richard Linklater says. “I was already a freshman in high school when it was seemingly over…that’s like your whole life. But then, you know, pretty soon it’s just lost to history.”
58-year-old Richard Linklater digs back into his past for his latest film, Last Flag Flying, which powerfully binds the Vietnam war to America’s most recent military incursions in The Middle East. A cogent mix of humour, full-bodied characterisation, and rich social comment, Last Flag Flying follows three Vietnam veterans – Doc (Steve Carell), Sal (Bryan Cranston) and Richard (Laurence Fishburne) – who reunite when one of their sons is killed in Iraq. “It represents the military in a very specific but truthful light,” Linklater says. “Most people who go through the military have a love-hate affair with it. It’s hard to get through that, in any country at any time, and not feel a little screwed over. The chain of command, the bureaucracy of war…even if you’re not at war, just being in the military, it’s a tough experience. People have mixed feelings, and even more so in a time of war.”
The film, however, is more about men and how they bond than it is the military. “Males are kind of pack animals,” Linklater says. “They like to have these group experiences, whether it’s sports, or some kind of team, something that bonds you. They’re looking for physical connection, and maybe if it’s life threatening, the deeper the bond might be. This is a war movie, but it’s a comedy…it’s all these things on top of each other.”
The film is based on Daryl Ponicsan’s 2005 novel, which is a sequel to his 1970 cult classic, The Last Detail, which itself was filmed by Hal Ashby in 1973 with Jack Nicholson in the lead role. With names changed, Linklater’s Last Flag Flying is something of an unofficial, or “spiritual”, sequel to Ashby’s film. “I knew it pretty well,” Linklater says of The Last Detail. “But what we were doing didn’t really relate…it’s a different time, and a different vibe. But Daryl trusted what I wanted to do with the book, and we collaborated all down the line. He was a good collaborator, because I think he got, even though we were making a lot of changes, that they were his ideas too. I think that he trusted that I love those characters and just wanted to tell a story.”
It’s something that Richard Linklater is great at doing. Born in Houston, Texas, in 1960, he subsequently relocated to the cultural hub of Austin after kicking his college studies to the curb, and then immersed himself in film. Linklater founded a local film society and began putting together no-budget shorts and features, the most substantial of which was 1987’s It’s Impossible To Learn To Plow By Reading Books. In 1991, Linklater released a similarly no-budget film that would ultimately have an effect that he could never have dreamed about.
Made for less than $23,000, Slacker was a meandering, plot-free zone that played out like a cinematic baton pass, with the camera following a couple of characters in conversation before then hooking onto another group of characters and moving on. Unlike even the multi-character free-for-alls of Robert Altman, Slacker had no plot at all, and apart from general age and geographical location, the characters were totally unconnected. The film became an epochal, breakout hit at The Sundance Film Festival, and the term “slacker” entered the modern lexicon to lay a generalist term on the nineties’ over-educated, under-motivated brand of youth culture. More importantly, the film proved to a whole crew of regional filmmakers that you didn’t need to have Hollywood connections to make a good film on the cheap that would actually get seen by an audience.
“Slacker was the film that got me off my ass,” New Jersey-bred cottage industry and cult filmmaker Kevin Smith has famously said. “I viewed it with a mixture of awe and arrogance. I was awed by the fact that this passed for entertainment…that people would actually sit down and enjoy it as much as I was enjoying it. And then arrogance, because I was like, ‘Well, I could do this. I mean, if this counts as a movie, then count me in! I can try this.’”
Linklater laughs at Smith’s well-quoted appreciation of his film. “It’s sort of a backhanded compliment in a way,” he says. “I saw Raging Bull in college and I didn’t go ‘I can do that!’ But I didn’t even think Slacker would ever be seen. I was hoping it would maybe get shown at a film festival at best. I mean, you have a huge abstract hope; you wouldn’t be doing a film if you didn’t want to communicate with people. But really, it couldn’t have gone any better. It’s always flattering when people say that. I mean, I certainly have my list of films that I saw that inspired me. Films like [John Sayles’ low budget debut] Return Of The Secaucus Seven for instance…they may not be the best films, but they’re the ones that make you think you could do it.”
Though often dismissed for its simplicity and seemingly ramshackle construction, Linklater points out that there is a lot more going on with Slacker than its critics may have first glimpsed. “A lot of people saw Slacker,” he says. “There was a decade of fallout. Quentin Tarantino and I were talking about that once. We said that one year at Sundance every film was trying to be Reservoir Dogs or Slacker. But they were all failing because what was unique about Slacker was that it was unique to me. It looks simple, and the media says, ‘Oh, you just picked up a camera and it’s your first film,’ but I’d been making films for six years! That was just the first one that anyone saw! A lot of thought went into it technically; it’s a deceptively simple film in the same way that Before Sunset is deceptively simple. But it’s actually really hard. The amount of thought and prep that has to go into a film to get that feeling… it’s not easy.”
Linklater’s next film – the wonderfully freewheeling 1970s-set high school comedy Dazed And Confused, which now has a cult to rival that of Slacker – was his first film for a major Hollywood studio in Universal, and though the budget was small by their standards, it was huge for Linklater. Despite their comparatively minimal cash input, Universal were all over the film, badgering the director on everything from casting choices to music licensing. The whole process, however, steeled Linklater to the realities of studio filmmaking, and saw him develop a tougher exterior. “It’s never been as bad since,” he sighs. “I learned how to make a movie and deal with all the people involved. It’s been nothing but easy since. I’ve always got my movie made; I’ve never had a bad creative experience. I’ve had to fight the fights to retain the film – often it’s when you’re done and you’re showing it for the first time when the notes from the studio show up – but it’s never been that bad.”
Dazed And Confused is also something of a fantasy for Linklater. Though driven by a pitch perfect depiction of an American high school in 1976, the cast of cool and not-so-cool kids (played by the likes of Ben Affleck, Matthew McConaughey, Parker Posey and Adam Goldberg) peel around the streets of their Texas town in the kind of cars that Linklater could only have dreamed about driving as a teenager. “I’m from a kind of poor, working class background,” he says. “I was an offshore oil rig worker for two and half years in my early twenties, so I know what it’s like to have a crappy job. A lot of people running the film industry don’t. They’re of a certain class, you know? They probably had a summer internship and they graduated from the Ivy League and then they entered a large corporation. They do work hard, but they don’t know that kind of work. The thought of that kind of work would make them very depressed. It’s a pretty upper class industry, by and large. But every liberal, progressive-thinking person imagines themselves to be close to the working class, despite the fact that they don’t actually know anyone from the working class.”
Linklater has for a long time sought to get that working class on the screen (“I had a script about a guy who works in a factory,” he says. “I always tried to get films like that made”) but has met with constant resistance. Even the forward thinking US cable station HBO (home of The Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Six Feet Under) wouldn’t come to the party. Linklater’s 2004 TV pilot $5.15/Hr. – which was named for America’s minimum wage rate, and followed the misadventures of a guy working in a restaurant and scrounging to get by – was passed on by the network. “They thought it was depressing,” Linklater explains. “And I said, ‘No! It’s funny! It’s a comedy!’ The thought that you actually have to work for minimum wage…they just couldn’t deal with it. In other words, they don’t want to make films about people working and people don’t want to see films about people working. If you look at the media landscape, there’s a whole world out there that doesn’t exist.”
The ever laidback Linklater, however, doesn’t feel snubbed…even by a TV network that purports to specialise in the type of show that he made for them. “It’s still entertainment,” he says of HBO. “It’s got to be sexy. But the way things work out is usually okay. You roll with it.”
Though he’s struggled to get his working class background up on the screen, there’s one predilection that Linklater has been able to indulge in again and again: his love of big ensemble casts, often made up of unknown actors. While the much loved two-hander triptych of Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight (which famously follow the travails of two lovers wonderfully played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy) mark obvious exceptions (along with the little seen Tape), Linklater obviously finds working with a big cast to be a major turn-on: Slacker practically had a cast of hundreds; Dazed And Confused has over twenty essential characters; the teen ennui of SubUrbia is played out by a big group (including the likes of Giovanni Ribisi, Parker Posey and Steve Zahn); the semi-western The Newton Boys boasts a big name cast in Matthew McConaughey, Ethan Hawke, Vincent D’Onofrio, Skeet Ulrich and Julianna Margulies; the animated philosophical head trips of Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly were brought to life by a sprawling mix of performers; The School Of Rock and the baseball remake Bad News Bears (leading men Jack Black and Billy Bob Thornton aside) are largely driven by hordes of kids; Everybody Wants Some! tracks the lives of a whole dorm full of college baseball players; and even the extraordinary Boyhood – which focused on the “real time” growth of one young man – expanded outward to beautifully include the central character’s extended family and friends.
“It’s just the way my brain works or something,” Linklater laughs. “I like all of the different viewpoints. I like people; I like ensembles…who knows? Maybe it’s a Robert Altman thing. I like casting more than anything though. When you get someone who is just unique, you go, ‘Who’s that guy?’ and you can’t wait to bring out what you think is interesting about somebody. If they’ll let you do that, then you can really rock and roll with it. When I was doing Dazed And Confused, at the time it was a cast of unknowns, but the studio kind of accepted that they were going to be all unknowns, so we thought, ‘Let’s get the best unknowns!’ I think it can get awkward when you need a star for this character or that character. I was lucky at that point because there weren’t a lot of famous teenage actors. Now it would be all TV actors…but I could roll with that too.”
On Last Flag Flying, Linklater works with a slightly older ensemble than he’s used to, but he gets incredibly powerful performances out of the top-tier trio of Bryan Cranston, Steve Carell and Laurence Fishburne. “I felt very grateful that they really wanted to work with each other,” Linklater says. “Each guy said to me, ‘I really like their work, and I want to work with them too’. So from the beginning, we just sat around for a long time, read through the script, and talked about everything. They’re all very different, kinda like their characters. Sal, Bryan [Cranston], was kinda like, ‘I know this guy! I know guys like this, they drink!’ And Carrell’s like, ‘Why is Doc doing what he’s doing? I don’t know why.’ Fishburne was like a little bit of both. We all really did trust each other, and could take risks, and try things. They knew that I had their back. Kinda like soldiers: I’ve got your back, and I’m here for you. We wanted to instill that.”
Despite utilising this soldier-like mentality, Linklater didn’t actually work with the US military while making the film. “We weren’t asking for anything,” he says. “I didn’t need tanks, and I didn’t need troops. I just thought that they could’ve helped us on a little bit of stuff. But we didn’t need them. We could create all that. But that said, I had these military advisor guys, a couple of Marines, who helped us out tremendously. They’re guys who are retired from the military who make their living advising and doing things related to the military. Whether it’s media or specifics, they’re really great guys, and they loved the movie. They said, ‘Thank you for honouring what so many of us go through that people never see’, and they seemed to like it. We never had an antagonistic thing with the military, they just didn’t specifically endorse the film. But I got word that a head of staff saw it the other day and liked it. We do a lot of fundraisers and benefits for veterans’ organisations, and they like it. I’m happy about that, and I’m glad that they like it.”
As with Linklater’s most feted film, Boyhood (which was a rare awards season player for the director), Last Flag Flying provides the audience with a singular sense of warmth while never stooping to obvious sentimentality. Does Linklater consider the paying customer in the cinema when he’s making his movies? “As a director, I feel like I am the audience,” he replies. “I am the audience as I make it. Even with the logic of a story, I’m like, ‘Well, why would you do this?’ I’m the person in the audience saying during a horror film, ‘Just go out the door!’ You’ve got to think of it as a logical breakdown. As a director, you do represent the audience. But that’s mainly on a practical level, and a storytelling level. I want storytelling that’s good and clean, where there’s motivation for whatever purpose. I’m just trying to achieve the intentions and reach the potential of it. But I don’t think of it emotionally. I don’t think, ‘Oh, this is the point that we’re going to’…I can’t really count on that. I’m always surprised a little bit by what people find the most moving. You never totally know.”
As someone who has moved from no budget films through to indie productions and major studio films (delivering both smash hits and big box office disappointments along the way), Linklater is uniquely positioned to mark the differences between these richly varied strands of filmmaking. His verdict, however, is not the one you’d expect. “I went through more hell on A Scanner Darkly – this little indie film – than I had on The School Of Rock, Bad News Bears, and any of those other films all put together. The head of the company that was co-financing the film…well, he had all the answers. He saw a different movie and he was going to push that on us. That was just terrible. So it’s not like it’s ‘studio influence: bad, indie film: good’. It all just depends on the people you’re dealing with.”
Though there’s nothing even remotely bullish about Richard Linklater, when the issue of directorial final cut comes up, he talks simply and in a surprisingly straightforward way about one of the most infamously complicated concepts in the American film business. There are enough stories to fill a book (or ten) about filmmakers who have had projects wrested from their control and then bent out of shape by studios keen to craft something more commercial and sellable out of the material. It’s happened to directors as tough and ornery as Sam Peckinpah and Michael Cimino, but it’s an experience yet to rate on Linklater’s list of career low lights.
“I’ve never had to re-shoot anything,” he says. “I’ve never had to go back in and totally recut the movie. I still haven’t had a creatively bad experience where the final film isn’t what I wanted for whatever reasons. As the director, you really do have control over all of those elements. I’ve heard about directors that go, ‘I didn’t have final cut and they went and cut the film behind me.’ But it doesn’t matter if you have final cut – TAKE final cut! It’s got to mean enough to you! The first time I was on a film, they said, ‘You’ll have your cut and then…’ and I went, ‘No, no, no…listen, I know it’s not in my contract that I have final cut, but I assure you that every cut in this movie will be mine. I will preview it, I will try things, I will be collaborative, but everything cut will be my cut.’ And they were like ‘Oh, okay, he must have a point of view.’ If you sit there like a wallflower, you are going to get crushed. It’s an industry of big egos and strong opinions and there is a moment when you have to step up with your own.”
But when the loose, laidback and generous-of-spirit Richard Linklater does step up with his own strong opinions, you can bet all of your hard earned cash that (a) they wouldn’t be screamed out in a battering display of that aforementioned ego, and (b) that they’d be backed up to the hilt with a keen sense of intelligence and decency. Maybe if Hollywood caught onto a little of Richard Linklater’s Texan groove, it would be a much better place…
Last Flag Flying is screening now.
