A new doc­u­men­tary reveals the casu­al genius of Richard Linklater

There’s a key scene in Richard Lin­klater: Dream Is Des­tiny where the famed Amer­i­can direc­tor reads through an old jour­nal from the 1980s, writ­ten dur­ing his years work­ing on an oil rig. It com­pris­es var­i­ous film ideas, writ­ings and script drafts, and in the back is a metic­u­lous­ly kept log of pur­chas­es. Lit­er­al­ly every cent is account­ed for, reveal­ing a young man who spent every con­ceiv­able spare moment at the cin­e­ma in his home­town of Huntsville, Texas – a town described as hav­ing 15,000 peo­ple and one stop sign.

“Movie, movie, movie, Pep­si, gas, movie, movie, Pep­si, gas, beer, movie…” Lin­klater reads aloud, before talk­ing about devour­ing every­thing that screened at his local the­atre. It’s a fleet­ing, nos­tal­gic scene, but it feels piv­otal in as much as it reveals two traits inher­ent to any suc­cess­ful film­mak­er: an unbri­dled pas­sion for the art form and a method­i­cal, prag­mat­ic head to trans­form scat­tered ideas into ful­ly formed cin­e­mat­ic realities.

Lin­klater has a seem­ing­ly dichoto­mous per­son­al­i­ty in Louis Black and Karen Bernstein’s fea­ture doc­u­men­tary, com­ing across as easy going to the point of almost appear­ing lack­adaisi­cal. ​“He’s so Bud­dhist he doesn’t even know he’s Bud­dhist,” is how one acquain­tance describes him. And yet he so believes in the work that he will fight tooth and nail to see projects through to com­ple­tion, regard­less of whether they turn out to be award-win­ners or theatre-clearers.

This tem­pera­ment has clear­ly won him a lot of admir­ers and reg­u­lar col­lab­o­ra­tors who appear in the film, such as Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy, Jack Black and Matthew McConaugh­ey. All of whom give the impres­sion they would do any­thing with, or for, Lin­klater. In fact, his faith in the abil­i­ties and intel­lect of his actors almost baf­fles some of those he works with, so hands-off and trust­ing is he in his direc­tion­al duties. ​“I’ve nev­er heard him use the word ​‘no’,” says McConaugh­ey, while Hawke goes as far as cred­it­ing Lin­klater with sav­ing his life, so pro­found­ly nour­ish­ing was the expe­ri­ence of work­ing on Before Sunset.

Dream Is Des­tiny projects Linklater’s role as an out­sider film­mak­er, some­one who eschews con­ven­tion and indus­try kow­tow­ing in favour of a qui­et life in rur­al Texas, ​“He doesn’t care how Hol­ly­wood sees him,” says Hawke. Lin­klater him­self attests, ​“If you get too close to the indus­try, it thwarts think­ing.” For every flirt with main­stream suc­cess or major stu­dio pro­duc­tion, Lin­klater claims he has always tried to sub­vert the Hol­ly­wood sys­tem, to use the oppor­tu­ni­ty to fol­low up with some­thing per­son­al and unex­pect­ed. In the doc­u­men­tary he focus­es on the fall­out of 1998’s The New­ton Boys, stat­ing that the film’s box office fail­ure act­ed like a reset switch. It’s no coin­ci­dence that he returned to low-bud­get film­mak­ing with Wak­ing Life and Tape in the ear­ly 2000s.

Above all, the doc­u­men­tary paints Lin­klater as a mas­ter of the mile­stone, hav­ing a knack of hon­ing in on piv­otal moments and life expe­ri­ences and extract­ing nuanced dra­ma from them. Nowhere is this more evi­dent than in 2014’s Boy­hood and the Before tril­o­gy. He jokes about Before Sun­rise for being, ​“The low­est gross­ing film ever to spawn a sequel,” and how the only three peo­ple in the world who want­ed it to be made were Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke and the direc­tor him­self. If Dream Is Des­tiny reveals a sin­gle truth about Lin­klater via its retrac­ing of these long-term jour­neys, it’s this: he is a man with an unwa­ver­ing com­mit­ment to cin­e­ma. Despite the highs and lows, through the lo-fi indies, the eso­teric ani­ma­tions or the glossy stu­dio pic­tures, you get the feel­ing Lin­klater would rather fail on his own terms than be a suc­cess on some­body else’s.