1996 Richard Linklater interview

$30,000 may not seem like enough to make a movie, (although films like El Mariachi to Clerks have been lensed for less). $30,000 is the amount that was doled out to aspiring film and video artists through the Texas Filmmakers' Production Fund last year, and, if member of the TFPF board of directors and Austin-based filmmaker Richard Linklater has his way, that amount will be $50,000 this year.
"The NEA quit regional grant programs a few years ago," Linklater stated in a phone interview from his Detour Filmproduction office. "SWAMP would give out $50,000 for this whole region. The worst thing about the NEA turning its back on media arts is that people think that film is such a big business that it doesn't need any financial help.
"It's films that aren't Hollywood films," Linklater continued. "It's the experimental narrative features, shorts, documentaries, innovative video work that we're trying to help out." Filmmakers and video artists submit proposals which are moderated by a panel consisting of filmmakers, curators, and media arts people. Those awarded money can look forward to a few thousand dollars that might be the turning point in a project being finished.
Linklater himself was the recipient of a $2900 grant that allowed him to finish post-production on Slacker, his 1989 breakthrough. Linklater ran the film at the Dobie theater in Austin, one of the few independently owned movie theaters in the country, before it was picked up by a distributor.
"Film is an outlaw medium, you can have your cake and eat it too, if you're smart about it," noted Linklater who less than a decade ago was wondering how he could make a full time living at filmmaking. "My producer was working at a toy store," Linklater said. "We were all scrapping. Getting everybody to work for free: a filmmaker can do that once."
On Monday night, February 3, Linklater will present his new film subUrbia at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, with a reception held afterwards at Brasil. Tickets ranging from $25 to $100 will benefit the Texas Filmmakers' Production Fund. Based on the play by Eric Bogosian, Linklater calls subUrbia, "As close as I'll ever come to a Dazed and Confused sequel; and much more confrontational than my previous work."
Raised in Houston, Linklater recalled nurturing his film jones while working as a roughneck offshore. "I'd drive in to catch a double feature of Kane and Ambersons or Badlands and Days of Heaven." Linklater looks to films like Eagle Pennel's Last Night at the Alamo or Brian Hansen's Speed of Light or Invasion of the Aluminum People, which is a super-8 film, as the kinds of films that inspired him to pick up a camera.
"When you see the classics - when you see Fellini Satyricon and Roma – you go, 'I love cinema,' but you don't say 'I can make that.' It's when you see somebody with a super-8 or 16-mm camera, who's made something clever within a certain limitation You know you can aspire to that."