Dream weaver Ten years ago, Richard Linklater created a cultural catch phrase and established himself as a rising independent filmmaker with Slacker, a film about a bunch of Austin residents who wandered around, talked a lot, often about crackpot ideas, and basically did nothing. His new film takes that premise one step farther. Not only is the hero idle, he’s asleep. The film, like life itself, might be all a dream. "I think I was tapping into that part of my brain that wants to make narrative in that way," Linklater notes about the Slacker similarities. "I wasn’t remaking it, it was me digging into narrative to try and get how my mind works. To me that’s the only precedent for the movie, and you don’t have to know Slacker to have this movie work however it’s going to work. It’s closer to the way my brain works." Maybe his brain works in the same way, but some of his ideas have changed since Slacker redefined hip alienation. "Ten years later, I hope that I’ve had some sort of growth. I see the world a little differently. Slacker to me depicts a certain kind of disconnect between society and the individual, and between one another. I think it might be more postmodern in that way. Whereas I would hope that Waking Life is seen as offering a certain kind of connectedness. That, even though obviously we have this biological separateness, there’s some psychic connection. The film suggests that we’re all connected on other levels, and I was sort of interested in exploring that notion, and how that might be so, even beyond life." Although the philosophy might differ, the starting point in both films is literally the same street corner in Austin. "It’s kind of personal to me, and an in-joke," Linklater observes. "It’s a different location now because they’ve torn down some buildings and it looks different, but it fits into some parallel world to Slacker, with the exact same dropoff place where the guy — played by me, strangely — gets dropped off in Slacker. In Slacker, the guy just sort of drops me off anywhere. I just want to suggest that all roads end up where you’re going to be anyway." Which is? "I don’t necessarily think it’s dreams, I think of other worlds existing simultaneous. There’s nothing more simple than ‘Oops, it was all a dream.’ You know that’s pretty fundamental to film, and it doesn’t really nail it, it’s too simple and completely unsatisfying for an audience. But I think lucid dreams are very different from regular dreams . . . " "Lucid" dreams? "A lucid dream is just that contradictory notion of being awake in your dreams. Like, to know I’m in a dream, I know I can float through that wall, or we can talk about Greek mythology, or you can tell me something interesting. It’s kind of an interesting place because it’s more distinct than typical dreams, because I think you’re so conscious of them, you’re awake, they feel very real. There’s a big tradition of it. Right now there’s a lot of academic research. There’s a thing called the Lucidity Institute in Berkeley, and there are guys who’ve written several books. It’s about becoming awake in your dreams, so what happens in the movie is hopefully what happens to the audience in relation to the story, like you become aware of the story like you become aware you’re in a dream." So how does one tell if one is in fact in a dream? "Like the guys says in the movie, printed words are very unstable. I know a lot of writers who imagine they’re reading in their dreams, like it feels like they’re reading, but the key is if you look away, like in mid sentence, then look back, you can’t quite find it. I incorporated a lot of that into the movie, also the idea of light levels you can’t really adjust." He’s referring to the scene in Waking Life when the dream hero learns that one way to determine whether you’re awake or dreaming is that in a dream it’s impossible to adjust the lighting. Linklater gets up, walks to the light switch in the hotel room in which we are having this conversation, and pulls the dimmer. The room gets darker. "I kind of have to do that," he says. "It’s one of the things that I test myself with. If you ask yourself if you’re in dream, you have to validate it. It’s a discipline, like anything else." — Peter Keough

It’s virtually impossible to reproduce with any exactness the experience of seeing this animated film from Richard Linklater because the episodes tend to drift in and out of your brain, along with the buoyant, phantasmagoric images. What remains is the feeling of the movie — a strange mixture of the whimsical, the cerebral, and the melancholy — and its free-form, sea-swept visual style. Linklater shot the actors in high-definition digital video with handheld camcorders. Then the animator, Bob Sabiston, and his team took over. The last step was "painting" over the animated frames via Sabiston’s pioneering computer program, providing a wash of color that ebbs and flows across the screen. Directing a production of a Tennessee Williams play once, I asked a costume designer to suggest the wavering glimpses of color in Monet and Turner paintings, and he came up with the brilliant idea of painting the women’s gowns so the light picked up layers of color in mysterious, peek-a-boo swirls. That’s what Waking Life looks like. Everything on the screen is permanently afloat.

Issue Date: October 25 - November 1, 2001