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Richard Linklater
Director / Screenwriter / Producer
1960 - 
Born July 30, Houston, Texas
Key Production Country: USA 
Key Genres: Comedy Drama, Ensemble Film, Comedy, Coming-of-Age
Key Collaborators: Sandra Adair (Editor), Anne Walker-McBay (Producer), Lee Daniel (Cinematographer), Ethan Hawke (Leading Character Player/Screenwriter), Bruce Curtis (Production Designer), Julie Delpy (Leading Character Player/Screenwriter), Matthew McConaughey (Leading Character Player), Jack Black (Leading Player), Tommy Pallotta (Producer/Cinematographer), Graham Reynolds (Composer)

Recommended: Slacker (1991), Dazed and Confused (1993)*, School of Rock (2003)^, Before Sunset (2004)^, A Scanner Darkly (2006), Me and Orson Welles (2009)
Worth a Look: The Newton Boys (1998), Waking Life (2001)^, Fast Food Nation (2006), Bernie (2011)
Approach with Caution: Woodshock (1985), Before Sunrise (1995), SubUrbia (1996), Bad News Bears (2005)
* Listed in TSPDT's 1,000 Greatest Films section; ^ Listed in TSPDT's 21st Century's Most Acclaimed Films section.

Links: [ Amazon ] [ IMDB ] [ TCMDB ] [ All-Movie Guide ] [ Senses of Cinema: Great Directors ] [ Film Reference ] [ Wikipedia ] [ Official Website: Detour Film Production ] [ A.V. Club Interview (2006) ] [ 1997 MovieMaker Interview ] [ Guardian Interview (2006) ] [ A.V. Club Interview (2012) ] [ Linklater's Top 10 Criterion DVD's ] [ Filmmaker Interview (2006) ] [ Filmmaker Interview #2 ] [ Future Movies Interview (2010) ]
Books: [ Richard Linklater (Contemporary Film Directors) ] [ The Cinema of Richard Linklater ]
 
Dazed and Confused (1993)School of Rock (2003)Before Sunset (2004)Waking Life (2001)
 
     
  "Inventive director known for pointed yet playful explorations of the post-postwar generation. After dropping out of college, he worked on an oil rig and parked cars before filming Slackers, a documentary-style look at the students, ex-students, and hangers-on in the college town of Austin where he grew up." - (The MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1994)  
     
  "Texas-born director whose grinding studies of modern youth angst have won him something of a cult following...It will be interesting to see, as seems likely, Linklater's nihilism clash with mainstream American cinema." - David Quinlan (Quinlan's Film Directors, 1999)  
     
  "Richard Linklater's films constitute an intelligent reconfiguration of the 'youth movie' for a generation torn between self-conscious cultural savvy and the time-honoured desire to connect...Linklater homes in on a uniformly garrulous generation's fumbling stabs at communication under the weight of solipsism and endless theorising, the loose-looking sprawl of his films belied by their emotional acuity and seemingly effortless narrative economy." - Kevin Harley (Contemporary North American Film Directors, 2002)  
     
  "I've always been most interested in the politics of everyday life: your relation to whatever you're doing, or what your ambitions are, where you live, where you find yourself in the social hierarchy." - Richard Linklater  
     
 
Please note that the rating given for this director (see top-right) is based only on the films we have seen (listed above). Films by this director that we haven't seen include It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books (1988) and Tape (2001).
 7+
 

"In Linklater’s films, words are action. They express personality, identity, conflict, attraction, rejection, sympathy, alienation, affection, evasion, disclosure, and concealment. Mostly, they represent attempts to make sense of the world, to understand people and places and events, and an individual’s relationship to all of those things. Many of the riffs are funny, some are disturbing and some are just nuts—Linklater shows an uncondescending interest in the things that genuinely crazy people say, the possible insights they enfold and the range of discomforts they provoke." - Jesse Fox Mayshark, Post-Pop Cinema: The Search for Meaning in New American Film

 
 
Top 250 Directors
21st Century Top 50 
Ranked 31st on The Guardian's 2004 List of the World's 40 Best Directors
501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers
 
See Also
Robert Altman
Noah Baumbach
Sofia Coppola
Amy Heckerling
Allan Moyle
Michael Ritchie
Eric Rohmer
David O. Russell
Kevin Smith
Steven Soderbergh
Ben Stiller
Whit Stillman
 
Richard Linklater's Favourites
Carmen Jones (1954) Otto Preminger, Citizen Kane (1941) Orson Welles, Fanny and Alexander (1982) Ingmar Bergman, GoodFellas (1990) Martin Scorsese, In a Year with 13 Moons (1978) Rainer Werner Fassbinder, The Mother and the Whore (1973) Jean Eustache, Los Olvidados (1950) Luis Buñuel, Pickpocket (1959) Robert Bresson, Some Came Running (1958) Vincente Minnelli, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) Stanley Kubrick. Source: Sight & Sound (2002)
 
 
 
         
         

 

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