His Life Is But a Dream

When he was a boy in Texas, Richard Linklater thought he might grow up one day to live in a cartoon. “The cartoons you watched, it just seemed like they were all having so much fun,” says the director of “Slacker” and “Dazed and Confused.” “Seriously, I think I was in the first grade before it was made clear to me that I would be a human my whole life and that I couldn’t be the Pink Panther or Bugs Bunny. I wanted that range of opportunity they had.”

The longing for the cartoon life never really deserted Linklater, to judge from his latest film, “Waking Life,” which utilizes a new technique marrying digital animation to live action in a story that might be said to be about the metaphysics of dreams. But he would prefer to put it another way. “It sounds so boring to say this is a movie about dreams because it’s not really about , it’s more like the effect of....It’s about the fundamental questions you can’t answer.”

Indeed, “Waking Life,” a Fox Searchlight film scheduled to open Friday, is not a movie easily summarized, categorized or merchandized, although it’s being called “the first independent computer-animated feature.” Like “Slacker,” it is something of a shaggy dog story, or, to put it more grandiosely, a nonlinear meandering through the oddly enchanted post-grad universe of Austin and beyond. In the opening scene of “Slacker,” the low-budget indie hit released in 1991, Linklater, playing himself, unwound an impassioned rant about the nature of reality to a memorably unresponsive cab driver who didn’t seem to care one whit about the question of whether life could be a dream or a dream could be life. (Those cabdrivers.)

“They’re really the flip side of one another,” Linklater says, on a recent morning in Los Angeles, when asked about the apparent connection of “Slacker’s” opening sequence to “Waking Life.” As usual, he was in town for only 24 hours and would be flying home before dark to the land of George W. Bush and Lyle Lovett. He winces at a reporter’s mention of Bush being the latest symbol of Texas. “I tell people Nader got 38% in my district. Austin is a city apart culturally and politically from the rest of Texas.”

“Superficially, it’s my own personal film history,” he says about the two films. “In one way, the dream I’m talking about in that cab is the dream this movie is based on. It’s one of the dreams I would have over the years that I took as big experiences.” His dream was, very much to the point, a “lucid dream,” meaning he was aware that he was dreaming and wondering where that state of consciousness ended and the other one began. “Most dreams you just wake up and say, ‘Oh, that was a dream.’ But lucid dreaming is to know ‘Oh, I’m in a dream right now.’ I would say lucid dreaming is one step deeper than regular dreaming.”

The film, he says, “was my way to finally research and learn more about the whole lucid dreaming process, this thing that had always come pretty naturally to me, being conscious in your dreams. I figured out that I had some sort of temporal lobe instability--that’s where you have hallucinations or see things as real that aren’t.” Possibly a gift for a filmmaker, but, he acknowledges, “it could be dangerous.”

Such mind-bending reverie, in any case, inspired “Waking Life,” a sort of cross between “My Dinner With Andre” and “Yellow Submarine,” in which a few actors (including Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy and Adam Goldberg, all Linklater film veterans) and many nonactors are transformed into artists’ renditions of themselves by computer animation while discoursing on the meaning of life, love, free will, identity and, yes, dreams, to a soundtrack of playfully somber chamber music with a tango beat. It’s all talk, no action--let’s just say “Rush Hour 3” it’s not.

Wiley Wiggins, the actor who serves as the central character on a quest possibly to discover the meaning of it all, concedes that “Waking Life” is hard to describe. “It’s a whole big mess of stuff,” he says. “Stuff you worried about in college, the timeless questions that never got answered.”

Linklater long wanted to explore this idea in a film but realized the difficulty of making a film about an idea in the first place. It wasn’t until he encountered Austin computer animator Bob Sabiston and his new software about three years ago that he saw the possibility of leaping beyond the literal realm of cinema. “Live action never worked in my head for this, but when I saw what Bob was doing, I thought, ‘That’s the way it should look.’ Because that’s the way your brain reconstructs memory and dreams.”

Sabiston, a graduate of MIT and a graphic artist, invented a process that extended an old technique known as “rotoscoping,” or painting on film. The new technique allies hand-drawing with digital effects, creating a softly floating movement of gestures and facial expressions--so floating, in fact, that it can leave some filmgoers feeling seasick.

More than 30 artists worked on the film, each drawing different actors. “The audience it’s going to appeal to is not the Hollywood plot-driven audience,” Sabiston predicts, “the people who just want that rocket-ride type of movie. This is for an audience that wants to see something different. I think that anyone who sees it is going to remember it.”

Known as Rick to his friends, Linklater, at 41, has the fresh-scrubbed face and Prince Valiant bangs of a theater major working at Disneyland. He grew up in Houston and the prison town of Huntsville, 50 miles north, where he played high school football, did a lot of dreaming and figured he’d become a writer.

“To me that was the only outlet. I wasn’t a musician,” he recalls. “I hadn’t discovered film yet. I was always the guy who went to the writers’ fair after writing a weird sci-fi short story. I always thought that’s the kind of film I would make one day. But what came out was this kind of documentary realism.”

He’s referring to “Slacker,” his feature debut of 10 years ago, which drew comparisons to Bunuel and Altman and praise from the Washington Post (“a work of divine flakiness”), Roger Ebert (three stars: “we don’t get a story but we do get a feeling”) and Rolling Stone (“shrewdly hilarious”). Linklater’s documentary realism, using real people rather than actors, had a satirical touch but nevertheless took at face value the febrile musings and arrested development of college grads seriously at odds with the job market.

He was one of them, except that he wasn’t a college grad. Having worked blue-collar jobs, he lived the life of a student in Austin and attended classes at the University of Texas, but never enrolled. “I even had a library card,” he says proudly. “I’m their best nonstudent ever.”

Film school? Forget it. “Once I’d gotten interested in cinema, I’d already read so much and I had my own equipment, I was making my own films. Then I checked out a couple film classes and figured that would be going backward. Instinctually, I always had a thing to do it on my own and not listen to anybody.”

The cult success of “Slacker” plopped him into the good company of esteemed far-from-Hollywood indie directors such as John Waters, Whit Stillman and Ross McElwee. He stayed put in Austin, following the example of Texas screenwriter Bill Wittliff (“Country,” “Lonesome Dove”), who, when he flew to Los Angeles for meetings, tried not to stay overnight.

“I love Hollywood on one level,” says Linklater, finishing some scrambled eggs in the unlikely slacker setting of the Palm Room at the Four Seasons. “That it’s this dream factory that brings people here from all over to use their imaginations to create another world. But the business overruns that and forces you to be a businessperson rather than an artist. I like my own thoughts to be uncluttered with opening weekend grosses and per-screen averages. I’ve been really lucky to stay where I am and still be a kind of industry person.”

He doesn’t have a personal jet or a summer place in the south of France, but he says, “I’m doing OK. I’ve got some land 35 miles outside of Austin and a cabin. I’ve got a cool apartment downtown. I’ve been frugal, in my life as in my films.” He has an 8-year-old daughter, Lorelei, who appears in “Waking Life.” But he has never married. “Once again, it’s an institutional thing. I can’t get with it. Her mom and I get along great, we’re fine, but I can’t live with anybody. I wouldn’t want to put anybody through that.”

“Waking Life,” despite its different technical style, has more in common with “Slacker” than the movies Linklater made in between: the high school rite-of-passage comedy “Dazed and Confused” (1993) the Vienna postcard romance “Before Sunrise” (1995), his adaptation of the Eric Bogosian play “SubUrbia” (1996) and the offbeat Texas bank robber saga “The Newton Boys” (1998). With “Waking Life,” he’s back in the stacks again, so to speak, flipping through theories of consciousness, language and communication.

Real or ersatz philosophy professors appear on camera declaiming metaphysical ideas. Kierkegaard is mentioned. Characters say poetic things like, “On really romantic nights of self I go salsa dancing with my confusion” and “The worst mistake that you can make is to think you’re alive when really you’re asleep in life’s waiting room.” Two men end a conversation by turning into clouds.

The tone is whimsically serious, creating a mood of earnest inquiry that requires more viewer participation than the average Hollywood romance or comedy, yet the film backs away from the sort of cerebral heavy lifting that would contravene its state of drowsy pleasure. It’s not always easy to follow, but it goes down easy.

“I think it helps to see it more than one time,” Wiggins says. “It’s a fairly abstract movie. The trick is not to take it too seriously.”

Linklater’s effort to offset the possibility of pretense creeping into such a milieu is clear from his inclusion of a cameo featuring director Steven Soderbergh repeating a story about Louis Malle once confessing to Billy Wilder that he had just made a $2 million film about a dream within a dream, and Wilder replied, “Then you just lost $2 million.” It seems very much a comment on his own quixotic enterprise.

Although the computer-animation component is state of the art, the live-action stage of “Waking Life” was decidedly low-tech, using hand-held “consumer-level cameras” while retaining the guerrilla methods of filmmaking Linklater learned long ago. “We were sneaking under chain-link fences,” recalls Wiggins, “finding locations wherever. We had no concern about image quality so we just did whatever we wanted. It was like making a movie with a few friends.”

The director is vague about what the film cost. “What did we say?--it amounted to the donkey wrangling on ‘Shrek.’ A few million.” The film was partially underwritten by the cable channel Bravo, which also financed another upcoming Linklater film, “Tape,” an adaptation of a play by Stephen Belber, starring Ethan Hawke, Robert Sean Leonard and Uma Thurman.

“Tape,” which Hawke brought to Linklater to direct, depicts an intense, jealously fueled reunion set in real time in a motel room. It turns on the question of whether a high school one-night stand 10 years ago qualified as “date rape” or not. The only thing the movie shares with “Waking Life” is its concern with the mutability of memory, raising the issue of what is real in retrospect when time alters the perceptions of even the participants in an event. A Lions Gate release, “Tape” opens Nov. 2.

Linklater says he knew from the beginning that “Waking Life” would be a tough sell because films are already considered another level of reality. “Films are dreamlike enough as we watch them. I wanted to confront that issue and make it aware of itself. The film is aware of itself the way you are aware that you’re dreaming in a lucid dream state.”

Acknowledging that “Waking Life” asks more of the viewer, he says, “It’s the difference between being an active participant and a passive observer, which is all most films expect of you. I’m saying there’s another possibility out there, both in a dream state and in movies.”