Interview: Richard Linklater, film director

Published on Thursday 26 November 2009 19:41

Director Richard Linklater has made a name for himself with films about ordinary young people coming of age. His latest work is no different, except this time the person concerned isn't ordinary at all

• Newcomer Christian McKay is outstanding in Me and Orson Welles

RICHARD Linklater has always been fascinated by coming-of-age stories. The film that made him followed a bunch of twentysomething bohemians, himself incl-uded, riffing on nothing much in particular in the city where he still lives today, Austin, Texas. Slacker had no discernible plot, budget, or indeed point, but it defined a generation. Then Linklater did it again with Dazed and Confused, this time directing a host of future A-listers getting stoned to 1970s rock. After that came Before Sunrise, the backpacker's Brief Encounter, following Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy's 24-hour, core-shaking romance when they meet on a train bound for Vienna. Linklater's greatest films explore that period in life when anything is possible. He is very good on the process of becoming, and his latest film is no exception. It's just that this time one of the people coming of age is Orson Welles.

"There is something about those years," Linklater says of our twenties when we meet in London to talk about Me and Orson Welles. The film follows the then fledgling 22-year-old director in the week leading up to the opening of his landmark Julius Caesar in New York. "There's that idea that after you are 25 your personality is set, which is kind of a depressing thought." He grins, not looking depressed at all. At 49, he certainly looks like he's still comfortably lodged inside his 25-year-old self. There is a youthful innocence about Linklater. The perennial slacker, he would make the perfect body double for The Dude in the Coen Brothers' Big Lebowski. It's the baggy cut of his denims, the short-sleeved shirt, the trainers, the surfer hair. It's his geeky enthusiasm for cinema, the way it took him years to realise that "filming was an industry and not just this magical artform".

Actually, I'm not sure he's realised yet. "People loved the script for Me and Orson Welles," he says. "But everyone kept saying Hollywood doesn't make this kind of movie anymore. Umm, I guess not. I was working off the old industry model that doesn't really exist. No-one sends you a memo, you know?"

"Those years are very vibrant and telling," he continues of his interest in our twenties. "I like the idea of people becoming who they are. I'm interested in the difference between who you are and who you want to be. In my own life I didn't end up doing what I thought. I originally wanted to be a writer, then I found my medium and that was it. I dedicated my life to film. I discovered that I was someone else."

In Me and Orson Welles, there are two coming-of-age stories. Welles, in an outstanding performance by newcomer Christian McKay, is already the ferocious, impossible and uncompromising genius who, just four years later, would make Citizen Kane. He is determined to prove himself with his fascistic and ruthlessly edited Julius Caesar at the Mercury, the theatre he founded in 1937. Richard – played with blue-eyed charm by High School Musical's pin-up Zac Efron – is the romantic ingenue who wangles himself a part playing the lute in the production. It's a lovely film, both sweet and cynical, full of innocence and world-weary experience, wit and clumsiness. Very Richard Linklater, in other words.

"People think they know Welles, but they don't know this era, theatre being an ephemeral art that is hard to document," he says. "He was only 22, but you can already see this genius dealing with his own power. It's phenomenal… the confidence. As daunting as it was to portray Welles at any point in his life, I thought, here is an interesting moment. But Welles and Shakespeare! It was intimidating. "He knew exactly how to grab the audience's eyes and ears," he continues. "Even walking into a room he could wow you. He was the kind of guy who would go to a party with a rabbit in his pant-leg just so he could produce it two hours later. A showman to the end."

Linklater is also a sucker for the period, and Me and Orson Welles is his love letter to the Thirties. He personally selected the soundtrack of Thirties jazz standards, played by Jools Holland and his band, and shot the stage scenes in an art deco theatre on the Isle of Man to make the interiors as close to the Mercury as possible. "Everything from that period resonates with me," he says. "I always felt a little out of place, like I would have liked to have been a studio director in the Thirties. Look at the careers – Billy Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch. I saw this as an old-fashioned movie from that era, a bit screwball. Orson Welles, of course, never went near that genre. He never directed, much less acted in, a screwball comedy, and yet here he is, kind of living in one. I thought that was charming. And there is a speed about it – everyone in this movie is on their feet."

He studied photos of the production, read memoirs, listened to rehearsal recordings and copied the lighting, stage design and wardrobe of the original meticulously. The most important part, of course, was finding his Orson Welles. "When we were going through the list of actors nothing felt right," he recalls. "I remember saying, 'I bet our Orson is in London doing Shakespeare at the RSC.' We should widen our search'." It turned out he was at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe doing a one-man show called Rosebud: The Lives of Orson Welles. "Later, I got an e-mail from Robert Kaplow (whose book the film is based on] and he said, 'There's this guy in a 50-seat theatre in mid Manhattan way, way off Broadway, doing a show.' I had to go check it out. I talked to Christian after and thought what a wonderful guy. Even though this was his first film, he brought so much. He has this bigness. He's a king actor, as Welles would have said."

It's not surprising to discover Linklater's passion for the Thirties. His films share their pace with all that snappy dialogue, youthful glamour and wit. "Me and Quentin (Tarantino] joke and say if no-one will finance us we can always make cheap movies about people talking," Linklater says, and he admits that a few of his films, including a "Dazed and Confused gets to college type film", are currently looking like they're not going to get made. "The difference is that Quentin is doing whatever huge movie he wants and I've actually had to do that small movie of two people talking." He laughs, taking it with good humour.

Yet, I wonder if it irks him that he has remained so resolutely small-scale, School of Rock aside. "No, it's about people being where they should be," he maintains. "When I saw Inglourious Basterds, I was like, 'Hell yeah, he's been talking about that forever'. He did it right and I was so happy. I think when people see Before Sunset they feel the same about me." It's true. Even when Linklater is making a grown-up Hollywood movie with big-name actors like Me and Orson Welles, he manages to imbue it with an intimate, indie sensibility. "It's always like, 'Here I go again… here's another bunch of people hanging out'," he laughs.

Linklater grew up in Houston, Texas, in a town with one cinema that had one screen. He had no idea that filmmaking could be an art; "it was just entertainment". After a spell working the oilrigs in Mexico when he was 20, he returned to college and started voraciously watching films. "I remember the year that Star Wars came out," he says. "My favourite film was Annie Hall." He saved money, bought his own equipment, moved to Austin and started making films.

Way before Linklater was a filmmaker, he was coming up with ideas that he thought were novels. They ended up being scripts. "I thought about Waking Life for 20 years before I cracked it," he admits. "I thought about it before I was even a filmmaker. And I thought about Before Sunrise for five years because it was based on an actual experience." Nine years later, the trio of Before Sunrise came back together to make Before Sunset and every now and then they talk about the next one. Linklater, it turns out, sees everything as a potential movie. "I always saw the world through a cinematic prism," he muses. "That's why I can make a film about anything."

&#149 Me and Orson Welles is released on 4 December