Richard Linklater

Linklater created Detour Filmproduction (an homage to the 1945 low budget film noir by Edgar G. Ulmer), and subsequently made Slacker for only $23,000.

It went on to gross more than $1.25 million.

The film shows an aimless day in the life of the city of Austin, Texas showcasing its more eccentric characters.

While gaining a cult following in the independent film world, he made his third film, Dazed and Confused, based on his years at Huntsville High School and the people he encountered there.

The film garnered critical praise and grossed $8 million in the United States while becoming a hit on VHS.

This film was also responsible for the breakout of fellow Texas native Matthew McConaughey.

Richard Stuart Linklater (born July 30, 1960) is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter.

He is known for making films that deal thematically with suburban culture and the effects of the passage of time.

Linklater founded the Austin Film Society in 1985 with his college professor Chale Nafus, University of Texas professor Charles Ramirez-Berg, SXSW founder Louis Black, and his frequent collaborator Lee Daniel.

One of the mentors for the Film Society was former New York City critic for the SoHo Weekly News George Morris, who had relocated to Austin and taught film there.

For several years, Linklater made many short films that were exercises and experiments in film techniques.

He finally completed his first feature, It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books (which is available in The Criterion Collection edition of his second feature, Slacker), a Super-8 feature that took a year to shoot and another year to edit.

His films include the comedies Slacker (1990) and Dazed and Confused (1993); the Before trilogy of romance films: Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and Before Midnight (2013); the music-themed comedy School of Rock (2003); the adult animated films Waking Life (2001), A Scanner Darkly (2006), and Apollo 10 1⁄2: A Space Age Childhood (2022); the coming-of-age drama Boyhood (2014); and the comedy film Everybody Wants Some!! (2016).

Linklater is known to have a distinct style and method of filmmaking.

Many of his films are noted for their loosely structured narrative.

The Before trilogy and Boyhood both feature the same actors filmed over an extended period of years.

He has received several Academy Award nominations and won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin International Film Festival for his work on Before Sunrise.

He also won a Golden Globe Award for directing Boyhood, which is one of only nine movies to receive a perfect score on Metacritic.

In 1995, Linklater won the Silver Bear for Best Director for the film Before Sunrise at the 45th Berlin International Film Festival.

His next feature, subUrbia, had mixed reviews critically, and did very poorly at the box office.

In 1998, he took on his first Hollywood feature, The Newton Boys, which received mixed reviews while tanking at the box office.

With the rotoscope films Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, and his mainstream comedies, School of Rock and the remake of Bad News Bears, he gained wider recognition.

In 2003, he wrote and directed a pilot for HBO with Rodney Rothman called $5.15/hr, about several minimum wage restaurant workers.

The pilot deals with themes later examined in Fast Food Nation.

The British television network Channel 4 produced a documentary about Linklater, in which the filmmaker discussed the personal and philosophical ideas behind his films.

St Richard of Austin was presented by Ben Lewis and directed by Irshad Ashraf and broadcast on Channel 4 in December 2004 in the UK.

Linklater was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for his film Before Sunset.

Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly both used rotoscoping animation techniques.

Working with Bob Sabiston and Sabiston's program Rotoshop to create this effect, Linklater shot and edited both movies completely as live-action features, then employed a team of artists to "trace over" individual frames.

The result is a distinctive "semi-real" quality, praised by such critics as Roger Ebert (in the case of Waking Life) as being original and well-suited to the aims of the film.

Fast Food Nation (2006) is an adaptation of the best selling book that examines the local and global influence of the United States fast food industry.

In 2015, Linklater was included on the annual Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world.

Linklater was born in Houston, Texas, the son of Diane Margaret (née Krieger), who taught at Sam Houston State University, and Charles W. Linklater, III.

He attended Huntsville High School in Huntsville, Texas, during grades 9–11, where he played football for Joe Clements as a backup quarterback for the #1 ranked team in the state.

For his senior year, he moved to Bellaire High School in Bellaire, Texas because he was better at baseball than football and Bellaire had a better baseball coach.

As a teen, Linklater won a Scholastic Art and Writing Award.

Linklater studied at Sam Houston State University (where he also played baseball), until dropping out to work on an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

He frequently read novels on the rig, and upon returning to land, developed a love of film through repeated visits to a repertory cinema in Houston.

At this point, Linklater realized he wanted to be a filmmaker.

He used his savings to buy a Super-8 camera, a projector, and editing equipment, and moved to Austin, Texas.