Richard Linklater's new comedy Everybody Wants Some is being described as a "spiritual sequel" to his 1993 comedy Dazed and Confused.
Everybody Wants Some follows a group of friends navigating their way through their first weekend of independent university life in the 1980s. But the film is also a sort of follow-up to Boyhood, picking up where that movie ends.
Linklater admits to both of those facts. "At the very beginning of Boyhood I felt the character would be going to college, but I had no idea," Linklater says. "And then here I had this script written about halfway through Boyhood that's about that first weekend of college. So they are kind of related. They're cousins. And this one sort of picks up right after that one ends."
But what Linklater enjoyed most about Everybody Wants Some was the chance to revisit the 1980s. "Culturally it was a fun and interesting moment to look back on," he says. "I saw my cast disco dancing and they'd say, 'Wow this was fun. You did that?' and I'd say, 'Yeah, we really did.' I'd see them getting into it and realise, 'Yeah that was a pretty good time wasn't it?' But I think there was a real cultural backlash as the 80s changed. The Reagan era was really negative in a lot of ways. So this was really the end of an era. You never think that things are going to move backwards, but they really did."
Linklater has always enjoyed exploring how people shift and change in his films. "It's part of the magic of cinema," he says. "You can really recreate a moment in time and get it exactly right or close to it. I remember seeing movies that were period films growing up and thinking it must have been filmed in that era. Time helps because movies can become history. Like Shakespeare's plays. Julius Caesar was written so long after those events, but our sense of history tends to go there."
And he hopes that he learns something from each film he makes. "I can't help but think I'm a better director," he says. "I'm more confident. I know what I've done. I can suddenly see what went wrong in my other movies, in little ways. I do that in every movie, and you just carry that forward to your next opportunity to get it right. That's how the coach would approach it!"
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