Deadline: 1st July 2017

Send Features To: directorschairlamb@gmail.com

Hello everyone, it’s time again to reveal the director that will be highlighted for Director’s Chair and, since School of Rock was recently featured as Movie of the Month, I think now would be a perfect time to cover one of my favourite directors, Richard Linklater.

Now the early films of Richard Linklater helped to exemplify the American independent film scene of the early 90s, with their focus less on plot and more on exploring the lives of groups of quirky characters, with Linklater basing these films on his experiences in Austin, Texas, in particular Dazed and Confused being inspired by Linklater’s time in high school in the 70s. His next film though, Before Sunrise, is the film that helped create the most interesting aspect of Linklater’s career, his use of time. With the sequels to Before Sunrise each having an interval of 9 years from the previous film, along with Linklater working with stars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy with the script, these films helped to capture a naturally evolving relationship through its ups and downs. This idea of time was taken to its extreme by Linklater in Boyhood, which he filmed over 12 years, capturing the changing lives of his cast and the nature of the world around them, going through different important cultural and historic events, helping to make Boyhood a brilliant time capsule of the first decade of the 2000s, even if the focus of the film was limited to middle class white people. Even his other films like Dazed and Confused, Everybody Wants Some and Me and Orson Welles feel like time capsules, capturing a period of nostalgia through romanticized eyes.

Another interesting element for Linklater is his use of animation in Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, mainly his use of rotoscoping, the process of filming the actors and animating over the live action footage. The way Linklater used rotoscoping in these films helped to create a surreal tone that helped give these films a unique power that traditional forms of animation probably wouldn’t provide. We also have to thank Linklater for introducing some lasting talents to us, particularly in Dazed and Confused with the introductions of Ben Affleck, Milla Jovovich, Parker Posey, Renee Zellweger and, most famously in that film, Matthew McConaughey.

So with that little introduction done, I would like to see any features done by you on the films of Richard Linklater, review, podcast, whatever. Send them to me on directorschairlamb@gmail.com by July 1st. If you want a reminder of Linklater’s filmography, just look below.

• It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books
• Slacker
• Dazed and Confused
• Before Sunrise
• SubUrbia
• The Newton Boys
• Waking Life
• Tape
• School of Rock
• Before Sunset
• Bad News Bears
• Fast Food Nation
• A Scanner Darkly
• Me and Orson Welles
• Bernie
• Before Midnight
• Boyhood
• Everybody Wants Some

Thank you for reading this and I look forward to reading/listening to whatever you send me.