Dream Weaver

Richard Linklater on turning dreams into movies, and vice versa.

Richard Linklater’s movies feature lots of conversation, sometimes serving as plot, taking you places that you don’t quite expect, then turning again. The writer-director of the groundbreaking Slacker (1991), as well as Dazed and Confused (1993), Before Sunrise (1995), subUrbia (1996) and his not-so-well-received foray into Hollywood filmmaking, The Newton Boys (1998), is famously laid-back, and he seems comfortable with the whole cool-guy arty-filmmaker image. The Austin, Texas, native could pass for 20-something. (He’s really 41). He laughs easily and enjoys thinking aloud, running ideas around. He likes to take his shoes off, too.

In addition to making films, Linklater serves as artistic director for the Austin Film Society, which he founded in 1985 as a venue for unusual, non-multiplex films from around the world. It was through this program that he met Speed Levitch, the subject of Bennett Miller’s 1998 documentary The Cruise, who appears in Linklater’s new film, the animated Waking Life, more or less as himself. That is, Speed shows up on the Brooklyn Bridge, with stars, clowns, splashes and zaps flying around his head, holding forth on what might be understood as the film’s premise: "As one realizes that one is a dream figure in someone else’s dream, that is self-awareness."

Linklater says that Waking Life, "like everything I do, came from real life, it was a really formative lucid dream, like in the movie, a series of false awakenings. It seemed to go on for weeks and weeks, and got creepy near the end." He kept this idea at the back of his mind "for years," until he "saw some animated shorts by Tommy [Pallotta] and Bob [Sabiston], and then it clicked for me. It takes everything to that necessary level, realistic and yet imaginatively constructed, a contradiction."

Though the film follows an unnamed central character (played by Wiley Wiggins) through his own ongoing dream, it’s not precisely about that dream. Rather, says Linklater, "Films are so much like dreams that I don’t think films about dreams work, so this film had to be about something else. To me, it was about becoming aware in your dreams. You have what’s going on in your brain as you watch it, Wiley becoming aware of the story, and the audience becoming aware of that same narrative at the same time that he is. It sort of sneaks up on you and then takes over the whole movie. And then the film is actually aware of itself as a narrative, a story, a film. And that’s the Soderbergh joke at the end, that the film is aware of itself as an economic entity."

For viewers, Linklater imagines an unusual experience: "You have a lead character who realizes that he doesn’t even know his own name. You’re rudderless, but you’re in the position he’s in, you have a perspective. The film is nothing but structure and perspective." That perspective, he says, has to do with time: "The film is linear, moving through a projector at a certain rate. Time is moving, whatever you know or don’t know. It tells you that you don’t really need those hooks, you don’t need a character you can empathize with. You see so many movies that give you ridiculous reasons to care about a character, like his dog died." Instead, Waking Life encourages viewers to consider their own experiences of watching, while they’re watching. "Just like life," Linklater suggests, "Everything is a construct visually, but we’re all in a mutually agreed-upon reality."

Linklater also sees the film as investigating the relation between memory and identity. "Your brain isn’t a videotape," he says. "It’s a theatrical production, and you’re re-dressing the sets, changing costumes, changing emphases. You meld things, combining events, so they change over time." These changes become manifest when you seek experience outside yourself. "When you’re traveling," he says, you get those poignant moments, where everything is heightened. You can do that and never leave the room: It’s an operating system for some people. This whole movie’s a journey, he’s traveling in his mind. If you’re human, you don’t even have any choice: you’re kind of on until you’re off."

And while you’re on, you look for structure. "That’s what our brains do; we’re very comprehensible, pattern-seeking, storytelling creatures. We take limited visual data and create sense out of stuff that fundamentally makes no sense. But that’s how we’re able to move on and achieve anything in the physical world, I think. We’re able to ascribe a lot of meaning to something that maybe has none. Storytelling, that’s why we’re here."

No surprise, his career choice is a function of that impulse: "If you’re working in the film medium, you have to, on some level, hope for a big communication."