If someone had told me that hidden cameras had been installed behind the walls of my high school, and Rick Linklater had swiped the tapes to make Dazed and Confused, I would've believed every word. Everything from the feathered hair, and the stoned laughter, to the bleary-eyed apathy of these characters was plucked right out of my 1970s past. Linklater has a way with plucking. He did the same thing with his first feature film, Slacker, only that was about an older, perhaps more confused crowd from present day Austin.
Both of Linklater's films reek of cinema verite, although in reality they were scripted and blocked like any fictional film would be. So I thought it would be fun to make this interview look verite, when in fact I tweaked the hell out of it. After Jon had given us several lengthy interviews, I called Rick and had a brief but fun chat with him myself. Then I spliced my chat with Jon's interviews until I got one fluid conversation. I bet you wouldn't have been able to tell the difference! - Carla
Jon: Tell me your take on Dazed and Confused.
Rick: It's what I set out to do. Dazed was made more in the editing room than Slacker. The way it was shot, it was so obvious what it was going to be. Dazed has a big cast, 24 main characters, and a lot of cross-cutting. It's a lot more of a rock & roll movie, a lot of music and cutting to music and trying to get its energy. That was the most fun thing, the music. We used all period music, from May 28, `76 and before. So it's ZZ Top, Aerosmith, Ted Nugent... We couldn't get the rights to "Dazed and Confused," so we got another Zeppelin song.
Carla: I love the first scene showing a Camero packed with teenagers driving in slow motion to "Sweet Emotion."
Rick: I was under the influence of nitrous oxide getting my root canal, and that image came to my mind.
Carla: [laughs] It's something my sister and I would have put in the movie. I had a Camero, so it was perfect. One thing Mark and I noticed was there weren't any kids wearing braces. Did you overlook braces?
Rick: Actually there were some extras with braces. Most of the actors were professionals, and they didn't wear braces.
Carla: I just remember that in the `70s it seemed like everybody wore braces.
Rick:Yeah, it's like one out of five. I never had braces, just a retainer.
Carla: Oh, retainers were fun! Were you able to click yours on and off your teeth with your tongue?
Rick:Oh yeah, I'd pop it off with my tongue, and at lunch you'd just set it right on the side of your tray by your food.
Carla: Yeah, and nobody would care because they all had one next to their trays too.
Jon: When we talked before, you compared Dazed and Confused to American Graffitti, as everything that Graffitti was not. In Dazed, as in Graffitti, you have people moving through the night - one night, isn't it?
Rick: Yeah, one night. I call it Slacker with about four or five laps. You keep coming back to the same characters. All of them have their own story not all of them, but the main ones. I think they're younger than the people in Graffitti. Graffitti was a whole other time and place, and they all seem so much older. They were making big life decisions. The oldest kids in Dazed and Confused are juniors in high school becoming seniors, so it's not like they can go out in the world and start changing things or be different people. They're stuck for at least another year.
Jon: That's a weird twilight zone, actually.
Rick: Yeah, the future's on the horizon, so there's a little angst about that, but they know they have one more year to kind of fuck around, so that's what they're doing. More than anything, it's about being stuck where you are, and being frustrated. The thing about small towns is how creative people can be with their own space and how humans create a livable system, no matter how bad things are. You create your own world that you can survive in, or that you can get by in, psychically, through the day. That's what you see happening in the movie. There's always talk about how being a teenager is such an oppressive situation, domestically and institutionally, so riding around is a statement of freedom.
Jon: Drinking beer...
Rick: Drinking beer. Smoking a lot of pot, too. It's being hailed as a pro-pot movie. High Times had a half page on it: "hot movie for the 90s!" There is a shitload of pot, but I just had to be honest, because for teenagers, smoking pot symbolized rebellion and freedom from those oppressive circumstances. I don't have a real attitude one way or another about it, but kids have been brought up with this "Just Say No" stuff, and it seems sort of Orwellian that it's been pumped into their heads without much thought. It seems so dangerous.
We're all self-medicating in some way or another constantly. I guess that's how I view drug use. It brings it out in a real matter-of-fact way, and doesn't have an attitude about it, one way or another. It's not saying it's good or bad.
Jon: The people are just smoking dope as a cool thing to do.
Rick: Yeah, as teenagers do. And smoking a lot of it. The party really cranks up, and they're all hitting on bongs, driving around,smoking... it's so weird. I feel like I've gotten away with a lot of stuff.
Carla: What was in those joints they were smoking?
Rick: Well it tasted real bad, but it smelled like real pot. It helped the atmosphere. But I don't know what it was. We had fake beer too, "near beer," and it tasted horrible too.
Carla: How come you decided to do a movie about slackers, and `70s teenagers? Do you consider yourself to be in the slacker category?
Rick: Uh, yeah, it was the culture I lived in I would say.
Carla: Do you think the two groups are related?
Rick: Yeah, you could say Dazed is like a prequel to Slacker. You could pick people out of Dazed that would be smart enough to go to grad school but disenchanted, knowing what they definitely didn't want to do. So for me it's kind of autobiographical, you know, a freshman in high school in `76. I'm interested in the teenage mindset, and the energy of being a teenager.
Carla: Do you miss being a teen-ager?
Rick: Oh God no! [laughs] I'm very glad to be out of it!
Jon: We talked once before about Dazed and Confused, and I've thought since then about the condition of the teenager at that time, the postmodern teenager who's living in a world that's completely changed without anybody really acknowledging the changes, which result from the communications revolution and so forth. Do you get into that very much in Dazed?
Rick: I think you feel that as an atmosphere. These kids have been through it, they grew up with TV, and they refer to that every now and then. They kill time... a lot of them are pretty cynical. Our parents had their ears glued to the radio listening to FDR, a good man who was there to protect us... but by the time we were teenagers, it was like, "What crook is in office now?" There wasn't any of that belief in the institutions. But I see that as very healthy, a healthy cynicism, which is realistic... for the first time, I think the people who were coming of age were not in some dream about the world they were living in. They'd been slapped around, and they'd grown up realizing cold hard facts about life.
Jon: Before, you couldn't really scrutinize the world you were living in the way we've been able to, actually since the `50s but more so since the `60s and `70s...
Rick: The information age. Mega information. That amazes me, that there are kids who are so plugged in, whereas back then you were reliant on mass media.
Jon: I meet a lot of kids online, and I'm shocked when I learn how young some of them are. They're really bright, and they've figured things out that I hadn't figured out when I was 30 or 35. I was still working on these puzzles, and they know. I used to be impressed that we knew so much more than the college grads 50 years ago by the time we had a high school education, but now, by the time you're out of middle school, not only do you have the facts, but you have some of the understanding. You don't really have the maturity to handle the understanding, sometimes, and I think that really bowls `em over. Hackers are a good example of that. A little knowledge is dangerous.
Rick: Yeah, some of these kids are living hooked up to a computer and a modem. Wiley Wiggins was telling me about a friend of his who's not in school anymore. He's young, about Wiley's age, quit school, and he's online all the time.
Carla: I heard you guys just spotted Wiley coming out of a drug store.
Rick: Coffee shop. It's kind of a slacker location, a happening place called Quackenbush. It has a big espresso bar.
Carla: Oh, I was there with Jon and the rest of the bOING bOING crew!
Rick: That's where Wiley was discovered. I like to say he's a fifteen year old with all the bad habits of a grad student. Smokes cigarettes and drinks espresso all day.
Carla: He seems like a natural talent.
Rick: Yeah, he was the one we picked out of several hundred people we met.
Carla: Did you pick anyone else off the street?
Rick: Kind of. We recruited some kids from high school hallways.
Carla: Those lucky kids!
Rick: For fucking up their lives? (laughs)
Carla: Toward the beginning of the movie, the kids are at someone's house, and they're drinking out of these wax paper cups with bright yellow and orange swirls, and it was so nostalgic to see those again! They used to be so popular. How'd you remember those?
Rick: There are companies who give you that kind of period stuff. Or people in the art department find you stuff. Trying to keep the period accurate was fun.
Jon: How about violence in the film?
Rick:Yeah, it's a big part of it, actually. It's a real abuse of power, the seniors have initiation rituals into high school. I see it as a socialcritique of the abuse of inherited power. It's pretty abusive, some people think it goes too far.
The girls get initiated more formally. They pick `em up from school, the eighth graders, and lay `em all out, dump stuff on `em. It's this big party, run `em through a car wash and that's it. The guys, however, are running for their lives, and the seniors have these paddles, and when they catch `em, they beat `em.
Jon: Sounds pretty realistic.
Rick: Yeah, and when they catch them, it's harsh. I put music behind and it's kind of ironic. Wiley [Wiggins] gets the hell beat out of him. They catch him after a baseball game. They bend him over a car and they all wear him out, to Alice Cooper's "No More Mr. Nice Guy." It's one of my favorite sequences in the movie, just the way it works, the cutting, and what I had in mind there -- to pull it off felt good. It's harsh, but those were really cruel times.
Jon: Wiley said you had some realistic fight scenes.
Rick: Yeah, at the beer bust itself we had a very realistic fight scene. You get the whole pack mentality. There's going to be guys who, if they don' t pick up a girl, will get into a fight. Every one of those parties I went to, inevitably somewhere in the evening there was some kind of fight or disturbance. Human design flaw, I would call it.
Carla: So what kind of projects do you have lined up?
Rick: A couple of different things. One's about two construction workers.
Carla: Why construction workers?
Rick: I've worked in construction. For now I'm still learning a lot. I feel more comfortable doing things I know really well. I wouldn't be any good at doing a Die Hard 5. I wouldn't be the right guy. But I can do things I know really well. I know what being a teenager in the `70s is like.
It's weird. Some people look at Dazed as an indictment of teenagehood. Teenagehood has a lot of energy, and there's a certain fun and exuberance there, but at the same time it's pretty fucked up too. So I think Dazed has both. One thing I refuse to do with the movie is pass judgement. Some people look at it and say "cool!" And other people look at it and say, "God, look at all these people wasting their lives! How depressing." So it really comes down to where you're coming from.Carla: Yeah, it just depends on how you interpret it. It's probably just an extension of the person who's watching it.
Rick: Yeah, absolutely.
Jon: There seems to be a pagan revival now, people who want to know their bodies, get back to their essential nature without acknowledging any distinction of spirit vs body.
Rick: That's healthy. That comes back to drug use. It seems that most people have a need to transcend, to find a spiritual quality. It's just how that gets answered. You can be a Bible-thumper answering that need, or a new-ager. We all find our own rituals and our own methods of answering that spiritual need.
Jon: It's important to have something you can focus on that will take you away from your egocentric concerns.
Rick: Right.
Jon: Where you can actually get beyond yourself. Christianity does that for some, but people who reject Christianity because it's been so dominant in our culture are having trouble finding where to plug in so that they can get outside themselves. A lot of them are doing twelve-step programs.
Rick: Yeah! And you kind of need to... plug into some other kind of ideology. It could be any kind of dogmatic thing.
Jon: Cinema! [laughter]
Rick: Cinema, yeah, that's what I'm plugged into. It became my view of the whole world, I think. That's my twelve-step program. END