INTERVIEW WITH RICK LINKLATER
Director of "Slacker" and "Dazed and Confused"
by Jon Lebkowsky
[This interview was conducted while Linklater was editing "Dazed
and Confused."]
JL: I recall reading an interview you did after SLACKER came out,
and it seems to me that you had something very different in mind
for your next feature.
RL: I had eight different things I was working on, it could have
been any of them. When asked what I was going to do next, I
always said something different. Actually, that's how this new film,
"Dazed and Confused," came to be. I told a writer in Washington,
D.C. about it, and he called a friend who worked at Universal, and
it kind of got back to 'em. I just described my teenage movie. I
could have described anything, but I described that one....
JL: I take it this won't be another "American Graffiti..."
RL: Naw, it's got too bad an attitude. [Laughter] "Graffiti" was
nostalgic, it was that high school world everyone wished they grew
up in..."Dazed and Confused" is the world everyone *did* grow up
in.
JL: Does it have its roots in Texas, like SLACKER did?
RL: Yeah, well, not in quite such a big way...I mean, it doesn't
declare a town or anything...it's a small town in Texas...medium
size, you know, 50,000 people. It's not Austin, it's just a suburban
town.
JL: I grew up in a town of 30 or 40 thousand.
RL: Where?
JL: It was in West Texas, called Big Spring. Wide spot in the road,
y'know? At the time, it was a growing concern, because the had oil.
They had a refinery outside town. Now there's nothing there...oh,
they had an Air Force Base, but it closed, too.
RL: Oh, right, all that's changed, huh?
JL: And I remember some of the stuff we did when we were
teenagers, especially those long drives in the country.
RL: Oh, I know, it lets the imagination run wild, all that room to
kinda roam around.
JL: Yeah, looking out for the Hook Man.
RL: Yeah, yeah. [Laughs.] Yeah, he's out there somewhere.... I
think more people grow up like that than in big cities...you grow up
in some crummy little town somewhere, and then you gravitate
toward the big city first chance you get.
JL: Is there any alignment of this film with SLACKER? Any carry-
over, any sense of similar attitude?
RL: Oh, I think so, yeah. Some people are jokingly referring to it as
a "prequel" to SLACKER. It's not that simple, but it's got a similar
kind of drifting feel....
JL: Are you familiar with Bob Black, "The Abolition of Work?"
RL: Yeah, sure. Yeah, that's great!
JL: I was wondering if you read that, or if you considered that,
when you were working on SLACKER.
RL: A little. I remember even at the SLACKER opening I put a
reprint of "The Abolition of Work," just that one essay...I got a
bunch of free copies somewhere, and left a big stack of them at the
theatre exit.
JL: Loompanics has a full collection of essays...I was looking at
your book, and noticed that you're familiar with Loompanics.
RL: Oh, sure. Yeah, [referring to a reprint of "The Abolition of
Work"] they print this...you can buy this from them?
JL: You can order those for $1.00 apiece...
RL: From Loompanics?
JL: No, I don't think so...I think it's from Bob Black
himself...there's ordering information in here...Feh! Press.
RL: Do you think that is Bob Black?
JL: My guess was that it is...something he was publishing, maybe
at cost...he doesn't seem to be a greedhead...
RL: Be a what?
JL: A greedhead.
RL: No, no, he's quite the opposite, I would imagine.
JL: He probably advocates share-right, open copyright.
RL: Yeah, I'm like that, too. It's like, hey, you know...open
information. SLACKER was bootlegged extensively on video
before it came out. Now it's playing in countries where they never
really got the right to show it. What the hell.
JL: And have you read SLAM! by Lew Shiner?
RL: Never read it, no...
JL: In the back of this, he talks about Loompanics, and he says "A
major inspiration for this novel is 'The Abolition of Work' by Bob
Black..." This novel's about a guy who gets out of Bastrop prison
and moves to Galveston, moves into some rich lady's house that's
full of cats.
RL: In Galveston?
JL: Yeah.
RL: I was just in Galveston...that sounds great...who is Lew
Shiner? That sounds familiar...
JL: Lew Shiner is a Texas writer who used to write science fiction.
I think he's living in Houston now, but he used to live in Austin.
There's a group of science fiction authors who have lived in Austin,
like Bruce Sterling, Howard Waldrop...
RL: His character was in a correctional institution...is this
autobiographical?
JL: Naw.
JL: The character in this book gets involved with a bunch of
skaters...I think that Shiner started reading Thrasher, and got
carried away. [Laughs]
JL: So DAZED AND CONFUSED is like a prequel to SLACKER,
in terms of attitude?
RL: Oh, yeah...it's kinda what the disgruntled teenagers are doing,
the ones who know that everything is pretty fucked, and hate the
whole power/social hierarchy that they're having to deal with. The
only difference between them and the characters in SLACKER is
probably just five or six years of reading time.
JL: College?
RL: Yeah, college. It's kinda like high school, they're still trying to
fit in with the others, but not doing too good a job, or certain ones
are doing too good a job....
JL: You grew up in Houston, didn't you?
RL: Houston, and some in Huntsville, Texas.
JL: So I guess this town is more like Huntsville than like Houston?
RL: Yeah, closer to Huntsville, but a lot of the experiences in it
really took place in Houston. It was weird going from a town of
20,000 to a town of 4 million...it's not that much different when
you're seventeen, you're doing the same things, riding around
looking for something to do. I think it was that aspect that made me
think that my high school experience wasn't that different from
anyone else's. The plight of the teenager never changes. The
oppression you're fighting is always the same.
JL: That's where it starts. That's where they start pushing you into
slots.
RL: Yeah, yeah. Even in the movie, the junior high's very old and
traditionally built, early 20th century, very beautiful brick, and the
high school's cold and institutional, ugly, boring, sterile...[laughs]
JL: That's the high school I went to!
RL: That's when they start getting you...you know, the whole
design of it, the prison feel.
JL: Do you see any connection between what you were describing
in SLACKER, the kind of people you were showing there, and the
hippies of the sixties, or the beatniks of the fifties? Other than just
rebellion?
RL: Yeah. There's always been a group...they seem to be labeled
through most generations, but the eighties group didn't seem to have
a label. As if mainstream society kind of forgot that people like this
still existed. It's not unique to any generation, I mean, every
generation has a group, a certain percentage that probably hasn't
changed much either over the years...a percentage of people who
just aren't buying into the trend of the day.
JL: It's hard to look at Ronald Reagan and George Bush every day,
and remember that you've got blood flowing in your veins...
RL: I know, I know. And I think it was even more intense in the
eighties. I have another movie I want to do that starts off in '85, and
is similar to SLACKER in a way, but deals more specifically with
people out of work, who eventually go off on their own tangents.
The eighties were a prime time to do that, but I think the difference
between the eighties and the sixties was that the media paid no
attention to it. The media is so corporately controlled, and these
people aren't a consumer group as much as the others, so the idea
was let's just phase 'em out, and forget 'em altogether.
JL: To me, that's almost forcing the evolution of this independent
scene, where you have zines and you have smaller independent
films, and guerilla television.
RL: Yeah, that's all you have. The major media is so...we need the
alternate channels of communication opened up through human
necessity, 'cause we're not getting it anywhere else. People can't
ever be denied, they're going to create their own network. That's
what's so cool about computers and videotapes and zines...
JL: They all seem to be connected. The people who do zines are on
the computer networks...have you ever done much with computers?
RL: Not a whole lot. I have, a couple, but I can't say I have...
JL: There's a lot of spontaneous interaction online, a lot of things
happening with no geographical constraint, so you have these
movements...a movement springs up on the two coasts, and it's here
so much faster. There's always been a connection between Austin
and San Francisco, for instance...when something happens in San
Francisco, the guys who are online know about it now...raves are
one example. There's a rave scene in Austin now...we went to a rave
a week or so ago, and most of the people I saw there that I knew, I'd
met online. And there really seems to be a real similarity in attitude
between slackers and hackers....
RL: Oh, yeah. Very much in the face of how you're "supposed" to
do it...open channels of communication and copyright
infringement...[laughter]
JL: And it's harder and harder to squash because there's too many
means of communication.
RL: They who think they're getting hurt by it are so outnumbered,
so greatly, and they don't quite have the means of control. I mean,
they try to, but it's beyond them. The numbers are on our side, I
think, if the law and other things aren't.
JL: We thought that in the sixties...I think the difference now is not
just in the numbers, but also in the infrastructure. We may have the
infrastructure...but I don't know, computer networks depend a lot on
the phone company and the government. I suppose they could yank
the foundations that support the networks, but that would be hard
for them to do now...
RL: Yeah, it's almost like they're so big that you can kind of use
them in your own way for your own means...but that's their fault,
y'know? That's the small price they pay for having world
monopolies on everything. The hand-me-downs in this society are
better than most, y'know? The freebies and the things you can kind
of latch onto....putting this in the best spirit....
JL: It used to be that you could live off the fat of the land, but that's
harder to do now. I guess in Austin it's not so bad...
RL: Yeah, but generally, like in New York City...I feel sorry for my
friends in San Francisco and New York, it's impossible. You have
to have your slave days just to pay the rent and keep going. That's
the toughest thing of all, maintaining your body so your spirit can
be free. It's tough.
JL: That's pretty much what SLACKER is about, right? Its success
seems kinda paradoxical.
RL: I guess I was surprised at the success of SLACKER. For all
these reasons, I thought it would totally be an underground film. I
figured I'd be trading videos and selling them in the back of some
magazine. That for me would be the most likely channel for it, if
anything, as I was making it. I think it's kind of a neat thing that
something like that could pop up, that the mainstream and the
underground are joined at certain places. Had SLACKER been
made in the sixties, it would never have got the distribution. They
didn't have distributors who dealt with films like this at all.
Whereas in the eighties there are these middle-level distributors
who kind of have a foot in both worlds, and that's where SLACKER
found a niche.
JL: In the sixties we always figured we would have to infiltrate
government agencies, the corporate world, and so forth, so people
have been doing that. So there's an accessibility there where there
may not have been any before.
RL: I know, and that's what happened. There are people who are
cool, they're from the sixties and the seventies, with these cool
attitudes...through their own interest and competence they find
themselves at some higher position, and whatever they're doing, for
whatever reason, they're up there but they're still kinda cool, and
have these kinda leanings...Hollywood's a lot like that, too.
Everyone in Hollywood imagines, on one level, that they're kind of
cool, innovative. Most of them are full of shit, but they think that
they're kind of radical and liberal, and there's that kind of
Hollywood liberalism that's kind of nauseating...but it's there, and
that can be pushed a little bit. Armchair liberals...that can be a good
thing, in the right circumstances that can work for you. Usually it
doesn't. That's the death of everything, any change, that kind of
attitude.
JL: There's definitely a political element in SLACKER. Were you
thinking politically when you made it?
RL: Sure, just my own scattered, eccentric politics.
JL: Do you think you're getting more focused with that?
RL: Not really. I'm no more or less focused than I was three years
ago, when I was first making SLACKER. I'm about the same, even
more disgruntled, I guess.
JL: To what extent was it theoretical, and to what extent gut-level?
It seems to be to be pretty gut-level....
RL: Yeah, it is. Gut level based on a lot of theory, but that's how I
guess I work. I read a lot and take it in, but once I come down to
putting it into any form, or any kind of representation, I quit
thinking and just feel, go with the gut, and what comes out is what
you really are.
JL: I really had a sense of the Austin scene. I never would have
imagined that anyone could have captured the drag scene the way
you did.
RL: I guess that's from living around there, being a part of it but
not really being a part of it. I was always a filmmaker. I didn't think
I ever really knew what was going on in Austin. I just go to a lot of
movies, the library, and just walk around a lot....
JL: There's a kind of osmosis.
RL: I was the camera in this movie, just kind of floating around
and hearing things and following people. But I guess I never felt
that connected to it. It seems like I'm most connected now, whether
I like it or not.
JL: There's always been this set of people who live around the drag.
I was like that, I was a drag vendor, wrote for the Rag. Lived in a
house on 32nd street where Janis Joplin used to live, and when she
died, the girls downstairs said her ghost passed through the house.
RL: Great story. I think Janis lived in just about every house...!
JL: I know, I know. That's what I thought, too!
RL: When I lived behind Mad Dog's,. everybody said she'd lived
there for a while.
JL: She may have, she probably lived in a lot of houses.
RL: I think she did. Sounds like she moved around a lot. Yeah, it's
a neat scene, I like it, being there in the shadow of the University. I
moved from the film house, but I still live near there.
JL: The scene changed a lot from the sixties through the eighties.
RL: I'll bet.
JL: People started building everywhere in town.
RL: Yeah.
JL: And the Armadillo World Headquarters came down.
RL: That must have been a nasty period. I think I moved here on
the tail end of the big business corporate everyone-trying-to-get-
rich-off-of-Austin phase. I got here pretty much during the bust
period, or just moving into bust.
JL: I think that Raul's and Club Foot were a reactions to that, I
mean initial reactions.
RL: Yeah, it's like they're reactions, and they end up getting
swallowed up by it, because they always own the lease. You can
have your fun for a while, but if you don't own it, you're out.
JL: How did you decide on the narrative form for SLACKER?
RL: I'd been thinking about it for years and years. It was one of my
first film ideas. I remember I was riding to Houston at about three
in the morning, and I just had this idea. When you're just starting
work in films, then everything's a possibility. Had I ever gone to
film school, I probably never could have thought of it. But I
remember just riding and thinking, "Why can't a film just go from
one thing, to the next, to the next, to the next...." Cinema is perfect
for a structure like that. The film is just totally real and wide open
like that, in the way that people perceive cinema as real, kind of
seemingly real.
JL: There are few films where you could do that and pull off any
kind of continuity.
RL: Yeah, but I think, because I thought about it and then I
actually made the film six years later, that I had this six years of
gestation time, to think, How would this work, how would it be
able to still not...on one level it's very alienating, but on another, it's
kind of engaging. It came down to the neighborhood, or kind of
capturing a group or a feel or an environment, have that be the star,
and all the people coming through it are just momentary travelers.
The star is really that segment of Austin.
JL: You've probably heard this before: I went to see the film, and I
had quite a laugh, I thought it was pretty funny, but I took my wife
to see it, and she cried, and was really depressed.
RL: Wow. I love that.
JL: Completely opposite reactions.
RL: I know, isn't that amazing? I had people who come up and say,
"Yeah, it's so depressing." But I've had people go, "First time I
laughed, but the last time, it was really dark and depressing." Some
people say the opposite, "I thought it was really depressing, and
then, next time I went, I just laughed and thought it was funny," and
I was like, "Wow, this is really strange...." It really comes down to
what the individual feels about their personal relation to the kind of
life that the film depicts, and how they judge that way of life.
JL: Yeah, I think it's really a strength of the film, that it can elicit
such diverse responses.
RL: I even see it in myself a little bit. I'll look at it one time, and I'll
just go, "God, I was insane, what was I thinking?" If I wasn't doing
this film, I would have been an assassin or something. [Laughter]
And then other times I can see it, and just laugh and go "Ah, you
know, it's just some crazy ideas." I think it just really fluctuates
with where your mind and body are at that moment. But I've met
people in other towns who say, "Oh yeah, I lived in Austin for a
while. I can't wait til this comes out on video, I'm gonna rent it and
watch it. Any time I ever think I miss Austin I'm gonna watch it so
I'll see what I'm not missing at all." And other people watch it, and
they move to Austin, or they move back. That's about the gamut
right there, isn't it?
JL: The second or third time I saw it at Dobie, I walked out the
door with my friend Joseph, and we walked over to Quack's...
RL: Seemed kinda familiar there...
JL: Did you ever feel out of control?
RL: No, surprisingly, it was very controlled in a certain way. The
making of it, you mean? While we were making it? No, I felt kind
of in control of the chaos, because it was so highly structured, I
knew what was coming next, I knew how it ended, I knew all that,
so it was just... I describe in the book, those two seemingly different
aspects, one completely controlled and structured, and the other,
completely open to anything, how those kind of coexist. But I think
those coexist in everyone, there's a rational side of all of us, and
there's a poetic, inspired, open-to-anything side.
JL: Order and chaos.
RL: Yeah, order and chaos and where they meet.
JL: Strange attractors.
RL: Yeah. They need to coexist a little bit, just to get to the point
where you can enjoy the chaos, and get something out of it.
JL: Balance...
RL: Yeah, yeah, and that's what SLACKER was the whole way, it
was just a balancing. So I always felt in control, because I was in
control of the whole. As for specifics, they were open enough for
things to change. Like with Gina Lalli, just in what happens in
every scene...she told me this story traveling into India and
hearing...and the smells, it was so vivid, I liked the story so much, I
said "Hey, let's work that in." I was open to that, it was something I
never could have written myself, but it was so, to me, in the spirit of
that scene, that we just did it.
JL: You were saying that you would write sample dialog....
RL: Yeah, I'd say here's the scene, and we would work through it.
Sometimes it was really close to what I wrote, and then sometimes
it would just become something else entirely, but I was there to go,
"Yeah, yeah! Better, better! Write that down, good!" I like working
that way, it's really collaborative...the nuts and bolts of what the
film is, its structure, what it's about, you have to feel very deeply,
kind of be in love with that. But from then on, film's very much a
collaborative medium, you're capturing life, so you can't try to
control it, you just have to get in harmony with it, get in touch with
it, go with that energy, and it returns to where you're alone in an
editing room with a couple of other people, and you're back to total
control over the image and the sound and what you can do with it,
and how you can structure and control that. So it kind of comes in
full cycle.
JL: Did you carry any of the actors forward to this new film, or are
you doing any kind of repertory thing?
RL: No, they're so much younger. These are high school kids, so no
one in SLACKER really qualifies. They're all too old.
JL: I assume you read Generation X? There's a lot of people using
that term like they use "slacker," to describe or to stereotype a set of
people. The other description for the Generation X bunch is
"twenty-nothing," I've heard people describe themselves that
way...But in SLACKER, you had all ages.
RL: I don't know where it all came down to twenty-something. We
had a lot of people in their thirties and beyond, quite a few. When
you think of it after the fact, they kind of narrowed it down to --
what? maybe 75% of the people were in their twenties, but it was
never meant to be seen as exclusively that.
JL: Yeah, I guess Generation X is more focused on a particular age
group.
RL: Doug's book is really about that, that's how he was thinking,
that's what he set up to capture. He thinks in a big generational
way. SLACKER's really specific to those people, and all the stuff
about twenty-something and GenX, that came much later.
JL: You weren't thinking that way.
RL: No, you try not to think that way. You want to give people
their room and their credit, give them their space. I never really got
that there was much of a difference. The older people in the movie
aren't any different than the people in their twenties. The old
anarchist guy, he might as well be 21. He's a little wiser, more
experienced...there is a kind of continuity there. He's a little
different, but the attitude was never much different. The guy who
comes out of Quack's, Mars landing and all that...I was always
thinking it was a younger person, but he came in for an audition, I
looked at him, and I said no, it's him. Because to be this paranoid
and to have this much information and really believe it, it really
takes that extra decade or two. When you're young, if you're 21 and
you're thinking like that, it's kinda fun, right? As you get older, and
you pile on more, it would be a little more real, that much more of
it. So the age is important there, that couldn't have been a younger
person doing that, it had to be someone older, just like the old
anarchist. Age is weird, that's why I think I really wanted to do this
teenage movie, because I was really interested in who I was at ages
14 through 17, and what I was thinking. There's a real continuity
between that and who I am now. It's those same rebellious feelings,
and knowing that everything is screwed up, you just kinda hate
everything.
JL: When you're a teenager, you have the sense that everything's
screwed up, but then one of two things happens, either it gets
buried, or you learn more.
RL: Yeah, you either start lying to yourself, and believing the lies,
or you go with it, and try to transform that somehow in your own
way. It's dangerous territory, but that's what you have to head into,
if you're really going to get anywhere. In certain people I see ones
who are going to challenge and create something new, and others
who are just going to go along, kind of stay with the pack, with all
the rewards of being part of a group.
JL: Do you ever have the sense, in talking to groups of people that
have seen SLACKER, that it's made some fundamental change in
their perception?
RL: I like to think in a good way, though there's certain people who
say it kind of justifies a time period in someone's life. Some say hey,
that's great, because it validates a real thing that no one seems to
acknowledge, that it's something you do go through. It's almost like
they can show their parents, and they can go, hey, this is how I live,
and this is what we do. It's not shiftless and unproductive, it's
something else. I think before it was tangibly in some form some
thing that was out there that people complain about. I guess parents'
relations with their kids who are in college or just out of college,
and haven't really got that manager's job at the local burger stand or
whatever, and they're busting the 23 year old's balls, saying, "Hey,
what're you gonna do...." "Hey, man, I'm just figuring things out,
I'm gonna hang on for a while." I would feel great if that became
not such a bad thing again, to just kind of drift and find yourself.
JL: It's probably gonna have to be, because there's not going to be
any jobs to plug the guy into.
RL: I know, that's the bottom line to all of it. I remember I did a
talk show on tv, it was me and Doug Coupland. And this girl called
in and said, "I don't know what these guys are talking about; I'm at
the University of Michigan, and there's 40,000 of us busting our
butts studying," and I was thinking, "Great, and there'll be a
telemarketing job when you get through busting your butt
studying." You'll have a telemarketing job waiting for you, if you
want that...there's nothing else out there, so hey, have at it. You
don't know that until you get out of school, if you buy the whole
line. You don't really know that, until you go, hey, there really isn't
room for us in this, it's not set up that I prosper.
JL: There's a lot of people out of work, who don't have any money
at all.
RL: Yeah, at all. And it's worse now, only getting worse. We're
gonna go through some tough times, but I'm kinda optimistic about
the 90s. All that, the poverty, and the people who are totally out of
it, is gonna necessitate some kind of change, on some level.
JL: For a while I thought that apathy was too great, but apathy
seems to be waning.
RL: I don't know if people are any more apathetic. The people at
the bottom of the economic spectrum aren't really opposed to each
other like the controlling divide-and-conquerors would like to think.
Once so many people realize that they're really all on the same side
and fighting for the same thing...
JL: That's kind of an empowering thing...
RL: ...then you have a large group that can effect some change.
JL: We sound like political organizers.
RL: Yeah, yeah. That I'm not, never. I don't have much faith in
that, either. It doesn't need to get too organized, it just needs to get
.. I have a great trust that if those feelings are out there, the will of
the people can ultimately come through.
JL: : It's kind of an anarchic thing, it seemed to me, and I was
looking at this about ten or fifteen years ago, that there were forces
that would develop in the general population, where things would
reach a certain critical mass, and it didn't matter what the
government did, it didn't matter what the politicians did, something
would happen and it would happen because people had a feeling
that it needed to happen.
RL: Right
JL: And as people begin to understand that they have that power,
you can override apathy with some sense of empowerment.
RL: If you have enough people feeling a certain way, I always thing
that will happen.
JL: And if you've worked for the government, as I have, you begin
to realize that government is not much of a solution for anything.
JL: Are you happy with the business end of filmmaking now? With
SLACKER, obviously you were having to worry about funding.
RL: Yeah, that was a total pain, because I didn't have any money.
But with that lack of cash was a certain freedom, that you feel even
as a poor person or a rich person, you have a certain freedom, but in
between it's hell. Usually a felt kind of in between, like I had
enough money to make it, but not really enough.
JL: Do have major studio backing for "Dazed and Confused"?
RL: Yeah, we're doing it for Universal, but it's there lowest-budget
movie in four years, so it's not enough to do it right, it's just enough
to, like, here, go make your stupid little weird movie, and it's like,
okay [laughs].... And then they just squeeze it out of you from there.
JL: You turned a profit, you can do it again!
RL: Right! Here, here's how much you have and it's not enough,
and have at it, good luck!
JL: Are you going to get the rights to Led Zeppelin's "Dazed and
Confused"? I wondered if you lifted that form the Led Zeppelin
song...
RL: Yeah, you can use titles. At first it was just kind of a joke. I
didn't have another title, I had others, but nothing that captured
something...
JL: It sounds pretty apt to me [laughter].
RL: Yeah, SLACKER, that name kind of came up in production,
and I remember committing to it...
JL: I finally looked it up in the dictionary yesterday, I think it fits.
RL: Oh, yeah, it definitely does.
JL: Do you think you want to continue working with big studios?
RL: It depends on the film. I always knew that for this film, there
was no other way, but I have a lot of SLACKER-type films I still
want to do, low budget. I'll have absolutely no one working above
me, where I can do whatever I want. Once you take money from
somebody, that kind of ends...but if you do a certain few things, you
can still get that kind of creative freedom, which I felt I had on this
film, I was kind of smart about it. Being so low budget helped. I
didn't have executives looking over my shoulder the whole time. I
got away with everything I wanted to get away with. [Laughs]
Certain films, yeah, you need it, but for certain films, it'd be the
death of it, to have a studio behind it.
JL: I asked you about the actors a while ago, did you select the
actors the same way you did for SLACKER?
RL: In a certain way, yeah...there's professionals, but I'd still say
they're selected in the same way. We went through thousands of
actors, and I met the ones that seemed like cool, authentic people
that just happened to be actors, too. Then we ended up with a lot of
kids who had never acted before, too.
JL: From around Austin?
RL: Four or five from here, the major ones, Two of the biggest ones
were from here. They're young kids, eighth graders going into high
school, but they're both just real natural. I met a lot of interesting
young actors. They were excited, because they're not used to being
treated like an artist. You're an actor, and the director says hey, say
this line, and do it like this, and don't ask questions. But I would
say, So what do you think? What would you be thinking here?
Really involving them in the whole process, making it real....
JL: But you were trained as an actor yourself?
RL: Yeah, yeah, I trained as an actor, so I know how I like to work.
JL: That reminds me, I'm supposed to ask you whether you
memorized that monolog that you spoke in the film...?
RL: Sure! I wrote it, then rehearsed it alone, filmed it alone...the
camera was mounted on the hood, I turned it on, the clapper board
went down. I only did two takes, and used the second one.
JL: I didn't see the cab driver in the book.
RL: Oh, Rudy? Yeah, we couldn't find him for a long time. But
we've recently found him.
JL: Yeah, he was pretty good. He didn't bat an eye.
RL: I wish we could have found him. But he quit working for
Roy's, and we lost track of him.
JL: SLACKERS do tend to drift.
RL: Yeah, a hundred people over a couple of years means major
address changes and drifting.
