He's Having a Ball

By Joel Stein/Austin

You're thinking he went soft, or, worse yet, is doing it for the money. Why else would the indie director of Slacker and Before Sunset--a guy whose idea of an action sequence is to have two characters walk while they talk--do a remake of the '70s kids' baseball movie Bad News Bears? It's because, although his office building off the highway in Austin, Texas, is lined with framed posters of French auteur Jean-Luc Godard movies, Richard Linklater is not a film snob. He just likes to make movies. "I would have loved to have been a '40s studio director like Vincente Minnelli. You ended up with a real diverse career," says Linklater. "Now you don't get a call from Darryl Zanuck saying, 'Come do this movie on Monday.' So you have to do it on your own." He has already checked off teen flick (Dazed and Confused), western (The Newton Boys), romance (Before Sunrise), sequel (Before Sunset), animation (Waking Life), sci-fi (A Scanner Darkly, due in 2006), filmed play (Tape) and a kids' movie (School of Rock). If you've got a script for an Elizabethan musical, now might be the time to send it over.

Although he's 44, Linklater looks 28 and has a boyishness that makes his apparent curiosity about everything plausible. He punctuates sentences with a Beavis-like heh-heh of a giggle, or a shoulder shrug combined with a protruded-lip frown, like a 5-year-old's expression when you ask him if he poured Comet on the couch. He directed Bad News Bears, which opens next week, because, as an outfielder at Sam Houston State University who works out with the University of Texas team and built a diamond on his property, he has always wanted to do a baseball movie. And Linklater says he considers himself a comedy director, only usually of less overt comedies than this one.

Plus, Bears is a pretty dark kids' movie, with a script by the guys who wrote the liquored-up Christmas movie, Bad Santa. The new film centers on a drunken, lecherous former pro player (Billy Bob Thornton, taking Walter Matthau's role) who agrees to coach a bunch of talentless Little Leaguers in exchange for cash. "There's a good bit of rebellion and subversiveness in it and all the values I'd want to put out in mainstream culture," Linklater says.

What also makes Bears a Linklater film is the naturalness of most of the actors. "He gets these honest performances out of these kids," says the film's co-writer Glenn Ficarra, "not this Broadway, arms-akimbo stuff." Linklater casts people whose personality already matches the part and lets them be themselves. For the two biggest non-adult roles he used kids who had never acted before, but played ball. "You can't teach a kid to throw in three weeks," he says. "You get a baseball player who can be herself."

The only mistake Linklater thinks he made was allowing a video-game trailer stocked with junk food on the set. The kids, he says, "were all putting on weight." Unlike his local friend, reclusive writer-director Terrence Malick, Linklater doesn't think moviemaking is some big Sisyphean chore to fret over. "[Malick] is a guy who sees his movies and thinks, 'I would have done that differently.' I see mine and say, 'Given the circumstances, that's what I did and that's what I'd do again.' I don't know how much of a free-will guy I am." He feels the same way about success with audiences. "If Bears does well at the box office, great. But nothing is going to knock me off my game. Because I have some pretty low-budget films I want to do."

"That he can thrive in the independent and the studio world is pretty amazing," says Greg Kinnear, who plays an uptight opposing coach in Bears. "He's capable of understanding how to deliver what studios want and still keep a personal voice."

In the late '90s, after The Newton Boys flopped, Linklater was unable to get financing for any of his ideas, so he used a digital video camera to make Tape (three friends in a motel room talk about an old date rape) and the footage he would eventually turn into animation for Waking Life. "I was back to square one. There I was with my little videotape walking around the streets of Austin with my friends," he says. "I'm sure I'll be there again. Life is cyclical."

For a mellow guy, Linklater moves his cycle very fast. In 2003, he skipped out of casting sessions for a comedy pilot about low-wage workers he was making for HBO for a few weeks. He came back with Before Sunset--many critics' best film of 2004. He has made six movies in the past five years, plus that unaired pilot and three anti-Bush ads for MoveOn.org Sure, he seems like Small Budget Indie Guy, wearing shorts and making phone calls to set up a little shoot at a bookstore for a 12-year-long project he's hoping to turn into a movie. (For the past four years, and with luck, the next eight, he has taken three days a year to film a fictional story about a kid as he grows from first to twelfth grade.) But as Linklater makes the arrangements, the rest of his office looks like a mini Skywalker Ranch. It's packed with 50 artists on flat-screen computers working on A Scanner Darkly. They're using the same rotoscope process used in Waking Life to turn tape of Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, Robert Downey Jr. and Woody Harrelson into cartoons for Linklater's adaptation of the novel by Philip K. Dick, whose stories have been turned into Blade Runner, Total Recall and Minority Report. Linklater has managed to make A Scanner Darkly as a $3 million indie, getting the actors to work for scale, Dick's daughters to give up the book's rights cheap and, from the looks of the ages of his programmers, giving a lot of fresh-out-of-college kids their first job.

By not taking things too seriously, Linklater is able to get a lot done. He has about 10 films he has started working on, patiently waiting for them to get traction with studios, investors or actors. There's an adaptation of the nonfiction book Fast Food Nation, an Owen Wilson and Natalie Portman movie called The Smoker (about parents who try to hook their daughter up with her high school teacher) and a football movie he started shooting but lost financing for.

Perhaps because he's in Austin, or because he's so mellow, or because he still looks like a postcollege mop-topped, ex-jock vegetarian from East Texas, or because other than School of Rock's $81 million box-office take, his movies don't make much money, people think of him as the official spokesman for the slacker generation. "I had my chance to do that, and my instinct was to back away. 'Kurt Cobain just died, do you want to go on ABC tonight?' No, I don't. I don't want to speak for my generation that doesn't want to be spoken for," he says. "I'm an introvert."

But a confident one. "He believes in himself entirely," says Ethan Hawke, who has worked with him since 1993. "Most of the really talented directors I've worked with are crazy, wild, narcissistic egomaniacs. He happens to be a hell of a guy. He's a heavyweight intellectual but completely without pretense."

To wit, Linklater says he would be willing to do an action movie. Or a sequel to School of Rock, or a third installment of Before Sunrise, perhaps the lowest-grossing movie ever to spur a sequel. "We all give ourselves a lot of leeway, but we want consistency from other people," he says, taking swings in his office with his aluminum bat. He thinks it's about a fear of failure. In the test audiences for the film, the kids were glad the Bears don't win the championship game, whereas parents weren't.

As a parent of three, Linklater can understand that instinct, but thinks it's sad. Losing, after all, is common, whether it's not getting to make the Texas high school football movie Friday Night Lights (Peter Berg, second cousin of the book's author, got to make it), or having the western that you're still proud of bomb, or watching John Kerry lose an election. "Most of us are losers most of the time, if you think about it," he says.

If there's anything Linklater's movies have in common, it's that those are the kind of people he likes to tell stories about. --With reporting by Lina Lofaro

With reporting by Lina Lofaro