I remember moving there and just think this is all I really want.

I just wanna be here, watch movies, make movies.

A lot of people thought, you know, you'd have to go to New York or L A to do what I do, but I was like, No, I'm just gonna make it work here.

And so I've been lucky.

That's that's what I've done.

Hi, I'm Richard Linklater, and this is the timeline of my career.

Would shock is amongst many short films I made when I was really teaching myself how to make films.

I've been working and Super eight up to them, and that was the fun excursion, my future of 16 millimeter stepping up in the world.

But it wasn't.

It's a short in and around it blissed out, drug fueled music festival in Austin in the summer of 85.

No one involved remembered probably being filmed.

Ecstasy was actually legal then, interestingly enough, they were making it illegal in the fall, you know I didn't have a lot of experience with film growing up other than going to him.

I remember in junior high I started playing with him a little bit.

I had a tripod and my cousin and I shot some films that summer and got a little creative with it.

I remember thinking I like film.

I like film.

I would do it, but I was playing sports and I was distracted, but it was always in the back of my mind film.

I just like the technical aspects of it.

But I was into photography and any number of other things.

But when I returned to it in my early twenties, I returned in a big way.

What do you do to earn a living?

I mean work the hell with the kind of work you have to do to earn a living.

All it does is fill the bellies of pigs to exploit.

Hey, look at me.

I'm making it.

I may live badly, but at least I don't have work to do it.

The idea of Slacker came to me.

Remember about two in the morning.

I was driving late at night on a long trip alone and the idea that film the narrative structure of the film kind of hit me in one shot like, Why couldn't you tell a story that moves from one character's the next?

The next?

I was 23 just in love with cinema and its possibilities.

And I was thinking, What is cinema?

What can it do?

Whatever its boundaries.

So that idea oven experimental narrative kind of hit me and then stayed with me.

And then six years later I was actually making that film.

But I thought about it for six years.

So much of the content and slacker is kind of found object art, something I heard it was in a conversation years earlier in Missoula, Montana, for instance, on the Madonna Pap smear, very intelligent, quirky friend of mine named Matt was theorizing on the pornography.

The future is that might be Madonna Pap smears.

And so I just remember that is that it's just a thought not original to me, but out there in the world via a conversation I was in.

And then it finds its way into this movie as a actual commodity, you know, There it is a Madonna Pap smear for sale.

But I always get mad credit for that.

And I've run into him a couple times over the years.

Always fun movies.

A little crazy, actually.

I haven't seen it just lately, But last time I did, I thought, Oh, what a weird mindset I must have been in.

Say, man, You got a joint?

Uh, no, not on me, Man.

Could be a lot cooler if you did.

While making slacker, I determined that Oh, my next moment.

Want to make this teenage movie I want to make It's just kids riding around looking for something to do.

That was my central metaphor for that movie.

It was set in the seventies.

You know, the music alone would be expensive, the recreation of the period.

So it was quote unquote, a real movie.

You know, I got to make a very personal film about what I remember high school feeling like all kind of synthesized through one night.

You know, the last night of school in 1976 1 of the great things about getting to do this is there is a cathartic aspect.

You do get to recycled things from your own experience, or that's where I really do work from a pretty specific autobiographical place, at least as a jumping off point at the time we did, Daisy confused.

There weren't a lot of teen movies there that the teen movie kind of ebbs and flows is being very popular in cinema, kind of going away.

It had kind of gone away, so there weren't a lot of big teen stars.

I knew they were out there.

There's always talent.

There's so many great actors in the world.

I was most excited about trying to find them.

When I look back at that experience, like for the most satisfying was just getting to know all of them.

Work with them, if you were to visit, are set on a given night.

You know, there's been a flecked and Matthew McConaughey.

And there's Renee Zellweger, who, although technically an extra, was immediately treated like a because he was so cool.

Every liked her so much he would sit at the table and have lunch with everybody you know she was.

Renee was Matthew's first movie.

He wasn't an actor, really at that point, but he'd come in on addition and I just thought he was pretty perfect for this one part.

You know, he got that guy.

He looked me in the eye and said, Hey, I'm not this guy, but I know this guy.

Six weeks later, you're sitting there at lunch.

And remember, Matthew, tell me.

Hey, I'm thinking about going out to L.

A.

I'm like, really okay, that says a lot.

You know, other people like, Hey, I'm gonna finish college and go to law school.

I'll be okay.

That too.

You know, you can't project or ever know what's inside the performer.

You know, some people just have to do it.

Some people are born to do it somewhere.

Sure, if it's what they want to do, you know?

So you can't really force these things.

You know, I believe if this any kind of God, it wouldn't be in any of us, not you or me, but just this little space in between.

If there's any kind of magic in this world, it must be in the attempt of understanding someone sharing something After doing two sprawling ensembles of slacker and dazed and confused.

I remember having this urge inside me toe take those methods of how I kind of shape, material and work with cast.

Remember thinking it's time to do that intimate story.

And I had been thinking about this since, remember, it was the fall of 89.

I was just kind of leaving New York.

I went through Philly and I was visiting my sister for one night.

I was leaving the next day and I just met this young woman at a toy store.

My sister and I, we wandered into a toy store and she was working there.

She was kind of flirting with me, and we had this kind of connection and I did something I would never do.

I'm kind of shy.

I wrote her a little note and slipped.

It turns that hey, I'm in town for you know what Do you wanna go get a drink?

Do something after and she wrote back?

Yeah, sure.

I'm like, Wow.

Okay.

And so we really spent that whole night, was walking around filling.

It was just kind of that magical thing that happens between people filmmaker that I am.

You know, even that night, I was very aware I was going like, you know, I want to make a film about this I remember talking to her about, like what he's talking about, said this.

You know, it is just this feeling, this feeling, this thing about discovering someone else, that infatuation, attraction, what it brings out in you all that I met Julie Delpy early on in the casting process like she was like the second actor I met.

But she never went away, even at that time was already a big star.

I didn't know him, you know.

You don't know one actor to you really meet them.

But we started talking and I was like, I love the way this guy's been like wars and we're still talking 26 years later.

That was a really special experience with 23 year old Julian Ethan with that particular story to tell.

That story was kind of a little miracle.

You know that someone even gave me two point $7 million or whatever to go do that little That little intimate film that was didn't make sense on paper.

And then what you doing here?

A fancy myself.

The social lubricate er of the dream world helping people become lucid a little easier, you know, cut out all that fear and anxiety stuff and just rock and roll.

Waking life probably is the longest gestation of any film I've ever done in that The idea for the story predated my interest in film.

Even it was based on a dream.

I had my senior in high school that moved around in my head for 20 years, and it never worked.

The film in my head didn't work.

It was too literal.

It just did never worked.

But when I saw this animation sample that these friends of mine were working on, it was this kind of computer based version of Rhoda scoping.

I was like, Oh, it just hit me rather quickly was one of those great mash ups of collision of, like forming content.

This idea had sudden wacko.

That thing that doesn't work in my head will work If it looks like that we were off to the races, I started talking to him about it again.

It was a film I couldn't really explain.

That's when I know I'm in good territory when I can't really explain the film I'm working on.

It wasn't conventionally scripted.

I had pages of notes and dialogues and ideas and scenes and again, another one of those miracles of like, Okay, can I get this film made?

I remember the time personally, just thinking like I was having trouble getting other movies made to it was kind of a default.

I kind of thought I'm just gonna Maybe this will be the last movie ever made.

I mean, no one wants to give me money to make a movie.

Had made some moves that Penn done well, So I was like, Okay, maybe the last movie.

You know, I just remember thinking I'm pouring everything into this one movie.

I think it's a good way to work.

Good.

That's perfect.

You're perfect.

Stay right there in a way, like school Iraq.

I feel like I've been in some way building up to that for a long time and not so much the immediate subject matter of it, but just the idea that I would do something like that.

I always saw the challenge of, like, you know, studio comedies like, I think I'm a comedy director.

Everything I do is funny, but to see, like an over comedy, I was always kind of critical.

Woz.

I had this opportunity.

It's like, Well, put your money where your mouth is.

You know, Let's see if you can make a studio comedy and it came to me at the right time.

You know, I turned down things for like, 10 years.

The producer Scott Rudin deserves really the matchmaking credit here because I instinctually did pass on it as like, Oh, it's kind of cheesy.

And then I got a call like Scott runs not accepting your past, You need to talk to us so well, what the hell does that mean?

Okay, I'll talk to him.

Another thing.

As a parent, my daughter was exactly the age of those kids.

I think.

Had I not had a daughter that age, I would not have been good for that movie and something in Jack's character.

I found very personal to me, kind of the slacker who societies looking down their nose, that is not productive person.

But in fact, he does have something to offer society.

We just had fun creatively.

It made me look at things and got well, am I gonna have fun creatively?

I'm working with good people.

It opened my cinematic horizons a little bit to think.

Okay, a story can I can work in the industry in a certain way and have fun with that and be successful with Don't worry about it, Bumpers.

You don't want the bumpers.

Life doesn't give you bumpers.

Unlike other films that I can say I had this, you know, multi year Jess stations and, you know, 20 years, 10 years thinking about boyhood actually had a very brief gestation.

What it had was the big idea that engendered the long process of making it.

I guess as a parent, I started thinking about I had a film to make about childhood.

When you talk about depicting Children, you're very limited to a moment in their life.

You can ask, for instance, a seven year old you can Okay, now you're playing 11 years old.

Now you're playing, you know, and I realized I had a bigger story to tell, but I couldn't crack it physically with the limitation of the actors.

And so I was just having trouble cracking the narrative of what I was trying to express about growing up.

It just wasn't working in my head, and I had given up on it.

I thought, OK, I'm going to return to my teenage ambition and write a novel.

And I sat down at a keyboard on my computer too, right?

And the idea of her boy had hit me at that very moment.

Await what if you filmed a little bit every year?

Yeah.

And then because I was gonna depict first through 12th grade and if I filmed it 12 times 12 shorts, put together with transitions.

Yeah, I would.

Yeah.

And I could just I saw the final film in one.

Poof.

It came to me in a flash, and then I just got going on it, You know, I got Ethan and Patricia.

Luckily, I have c gave me a couple 100,000 year to make it, and we just started summer, 02 And with no end in sight, 12 years is a long way.