Richard Linklater has to be the most easy-going, relaxed director working today. In short, he’s just like his own characters. You don’t really care about the direction you’re being taken, but you still want to hang out with them. During a press conference after the world premiere screening of Everybody Wants Some!! at SXSW on March 12, the cast of his new film made it clear that they too enjoyed hanging out with him as they made the movie.
Everybody Wants Some!! (reviewed here) is set in 1980, when Linklater was in college, and follows a Texas university baseball team. Blake Jenner stars as Jake, the freshman who joins the team and whose eyes the story is told through. The film has been billed as a “spiritual sequel” to Linklater’s classic Dazed and Confused, a slogan Linklater himself has embraced. After all, it’s right on the movie poster.
Linklater first had the idea for the film in 2002. “It hit me that, I want to deal with those years, being on a team, going off to college. So I’ve been thinking about this for a long time” Linklater said. “But I didn’t totally know what I would feel about it. I’ll be honest… with Dazed I had really mixed feelings about that age and that time. So I thought I would have that [in this case]. But after about the first rehearsal, I was around all these guys doing the disco dance lessons, I was realizing in my head, ‘Wow!’
“I guess because I was appreciating what was different from then to now and I really started appreciating the ‘then.’ A lot of it, these guys, were like ‘This is fun!’ And I’m like, ‘Dammit, this was fun!’”
Linklater said that many of those who read the script grumbled about how it just featured people hanging out. But there was a moment when it almost got made a few years ago, but that would have been with a different cast. Eventually, Paramount and Megan Ellison’s Annapurna came aboard to help make the movie a reality. It seems crazy to learn that the man behind Dazed, School of Rock, the Before movies and more would have trouble making a movie, but that was the case here.
The director said that he is now happy that he couldn’t get the film made at that earlier moment because he enjoyed working with the cast he had. That cast includes Jenner, Glen Powell, Tyler Hoechlin, Tanner Kalina, Juston Street, Ryan Guzman, Wyatt Russell, Quinton Johnson, Will Brittain, Forrest Vickery, Temple Barker and Austin Amelio. All of them were in Austin, along with Zoey Deutch, the only actress with a substantial role in the film.
“I felt like the coach who had drafted or recruited a great team,” Linklater said.
The actors gave insight into how Linklater directed. Apparently, he is as laid-back on set as he is off set. But Linklater was still very detailed. Powell noted how he would tell them not to do specific handshakes or bro hugs because no one did that in 1980. After showing the director some dance movies, Linklater would say, “You can’t do that. That’s the future!”
There is one specific thing that makes Everybody Wants Some different from Dazed, which was made in 1993 and set in 1976.
“When I did Dazed, that was only 16 years in the past, but it felt like a lifetime to me. This time, it was like technically 34 years in the past, but it felt closer in a strange way… or just not that much different [from today].”
Everybody Wants Some!! opens nationwide on April 1.