Richard Linklater‘s community of cinephiles has come a long way.
Since first starting the Austin Film Society in 1985 as a means to get indie and foreign films booked in the Texas State Capital (which local cinemas then overlooked), the non-profit org has mushroomed to include a 700-acre production lot on the site of an old airport, which has fueled a bustling motion picture production economy here in Texas, the world’s eighth largest economy. Recently Texas upped its film incentives to $150M annually over the next ten years. All this while Linklater has cultivated a 5x Oscar nominated career as a filmmaker, his latest Blue Moon about Lorenz Hart set on the opening night of Oklahoma!, up for two Academy Awards Sunday including Best Actor for Ethan Hawke and Best Original Screenplay for Robert Kaplow.
We spoke with Linklater recently, not only about Austin Film Society, but his next multi-year production opus, a feature take of the Stephen Sondheim musical Merrily We Roll Along, as well as the impact of AI for indie filmmakers.
Similar to his long-shot dramatic epic Boyhood which he made over 12 years, Linklater embarked on a 20-year journey with Merrily We Roll Along. The pic, which will be released via Blumhouse’s deal with Universal, stars Beanie Feldstein, Ben Platt, Paul Mescal, and Mallory Bechtel.
“Story wise, I’m about a third of the way through, time wise I’m a quarter of the way through,” Linklater says about Merrily We Roll Along‘s status. “It starts in 1977 and goes back to like 1957. It’s rolling along.” The whole notion of the film ala Boyhood is to capture on-screen talent as they age in real-time. No Irishman de-aging going on here.
Merrily We Roll Along revolves around Franklin Shepard who, having once been a talented composer of Broadway musicals, has now abandoned his friends and songwriting career to become a producer of Hollywood movies.
In terms of casting, he added, “Every year, there’s a couple of parts that someone is starting.” Will Linklater’s 9x leading man Ethan Hawke make his way into the movie? “Not yet,” teases Linklater.
Says Linklater about the immense journey which will be finaled around 2039, “I’m definitely tempting fate here. But we’re here for Stephen. He was there at the beginning.”
Well before AI’s trippy visual effects, Linklater experimented with rotoscope animation on his 2001 feature A Waking Life and his 2006 feature take of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly. While labor unions and others in Hollywood fret over AI, Linklater believes that the tech’s best use is in the hands of indie filmmakers. “They’ll do something cool with it. It’s about the ideas and the art — what do you do with it?”
“I see AI as a friend: How can you express yourself and do something you couldn’t do?,” he tells Deadline. “It will need a strong artistic hand behind it.”
“It’s going to be a huge factor in VFX. It’s going to be utilized in a great way, such as postproduction sound: a helicopter could fly into your shot and ruin it, and now you can get rid of it,” says Linklater about AI.
“The worry is that there will be a lot of slop whether it’s ads or cheap imagery,” he says, “I trust artists will do cool stuff.”
Austin Movie Mogul
“I had a parallel life before Slacker” Linklater says about the Austin Film Society, which he launched in 1985 before his breakout on the indie scene in 1990. “First it was showing movies, then we started giving out grants. I had originally received a grant for Slacker. Then when the airport space became available, we spoke to the mayor and Austin gave it to us.”
That was in 2001. Linklater tells us that Austin Studios has a lease for the lot until 2080 in what is the city-owned property. The Austin Film Society continued its extension with a theatrical venue (which is expanding to three screens), and the Texas Film Awards and Texas Film Hall of Fame.
Before any roar from the crowd at Austin’s Paramount Theatre, the Hall of Fame has a tradition in the walk-up to SXSW, lauding the Lone Star state’s most platinum in cinema at The Texas Film Awards, who are then inducted into the Texas Film Hall of Fame. Those lauded don’t necessarily need to be Texas natives, rather simply have ties to the state. Among those honored last Thursday was Brooklyn born Oscar nominee Julian Schnabel who grew up in border surfer town Brownsville, TX, an experience which Schnabel acknowledges shaped him as a painter and filmmaker. His latest movie, which world premiered at Venice, is the Oscar Issac, Gal Gadot, Al Pacino, Jason Momoa all-star crime ensemble In the Hand of Dante.
Also inducted into the Texas Film Hall of Fame at the 26th ceremony at Troublemaker Studios was Alien: Earth actress Sydney Chandler, who received the Rising Star Award. The actress literally launched her acting career during Covid, landing auditions from her Austin home; one of her first big screen breaks being Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling. Also honored were Austin citizen and actor Sonny Carl Davis (Thelma & Louise, Fast Times at Ridgemont High) and the 25th anniversary of Spy Kids, which received the Star of Texas Award; that production lighting a wick to the types of tentpoles which could be shot deep in the heart of Texas.
While Hollywood has always rode into Texas, even filming on a frequent basis there for the 1980s hit CBS series Dallas, Linklater, together with Rodriguez’s Troublemaker Studios, has built a film and TV infrastructure.
“Film and TV is such an essential part of our economy,” Austin Film Society’s Head of Film and Creative Media Holly Herrick tells Deadline. “Austin has seen the consolidation of industry, we’ve seen a downturn pretty much like other places in the United States. What keeps us very optimistic is the renewal of the incentive program at the highest level it has ever been renewed.”
“When we have support for the industry and access points for people to get involved, [those] are the core pieces of building a film culture,” she adds.
Linklater’s next ambition under the Austin Film Society remains revitalizing college campus movie theaters. Once a sub-distribution route for film prints and creating early word of mouth for new films from the 1960s-1990s, Linklater observes “many campuses have these moribund theaters sitting around.” While prints were always a hassle to ship around, it’s much easier now in the DCP era.
If there’s any savior to indie films, it remains the younger generation of 18-34. That’s who was there in the heyday of the 1990s explosion with Trainspotting, Pulp Fiction, and Linklater’s Slacker and Dazed and Confused, and so it will be going forward as the industry struggles with slow film festival acquisition sales and the encroachment of streaming. This past year, Linklater’s Cannes French New Wave celebration title Nouvelle Vague out of Cannes was snapped up by Netflix for $4M while Blue Moon went theatrical with Sony Pictures Classics.
Talking about theatrical’s survival in the streaming era, Linklater says “It’s been going this way for a while, that shift away.”
“Every filmmaker I talk to around the world remarks about how young the audience is; maybe there needs to be more new theaters and distributors,” he says.
“I think the audience is there if you talk to them,” he says. “You just need to meet them where they want to be.”
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