An existential cartoon

>> Richard Linklater triumphs with his animated epic Waking Life

by MATTHEW HAYS

Catching a film like Waking Life first thing in the morning can be a confusing thing. Questions wander through your mind, like 'Am I still dreaming?' and 'Did someone actually make a movie like this?'

Indeed, someone did. And I did catch Waking Life first thing in the morning this past September, at the Toronto International Film Festival. As if David Lynch's Mulholland Drive wasn't weird enough, one day later I sat through this--essentially Linklater's animated, existential journey--a reworking of his live-action film Slacker, this time superimposed with the paintings, drawings and etchings of a small army of talented animators.

Linklater, who appears in the film himself in animated form, looks something like a cartoon in person. He has big, expressive eyes, perched in a laid-back face. There's something very, very Zen about this man. He's chilled, in a pleasant, southern California kind of way (even though he lives in Austin, Texas). Picturing him doing yoga is not such a stretch.

First things first: though his latest is clearly a defiantly independent feature, Waking Life was not a reaction to unhappy working conditions during The Newton Boys, his big-budget, all-star Western outlaw movie that didn't manage to take off at the box office.

"No, no, not at all, I wasn't put off by the big-budget experience," he says, convincingly. "It's all been wonderful. Big film, big toys, if that's the story you're telling. Every film has its appropriate size and scope. I've never done a film and thought, 'Oh, this is too big for me,' or 'This is too small for me.' I just always kinda go with the flow."

The flow is certainly something to go with in Waking Life. The film has a central character ponder the meaning of life, consciousness and existence itself, bumping into thinkers along the way who offer their thoughts and feelings. The live-action bits of Life took 25 days to shoot. The crew was bare-bones, the kind associated with guerilla documentary filmmaking. That in the can, Linklater then used a friend's software design, 16 of his own computers, his office space and about a year's hard work. The cast Linklater assembled--including Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke, Steven Soderbergh and Wiley Wiggins--is matched by the varied range of animators culled to bring the film to life, including Jean Caffeine, Pat Falconer and Eric Power.

An animated Slacker

The experimental feature is at once surprising and yet almost expected from Linklater, who first burst onto the arthouse scene in '91 with Slacker, a pleasing little oddity made up of vignettes of 100 different people, all viewed over a 24-hour period. Then there was the film I would regard as his masterpiece, Dazed and Confused, a '93 film about coming of age in the '70s so bitterly astute it felt more like Linklater had created a time machine than a mere movie. Linklater continued to experiment with his two-hander romance Before Sunrise in '95 and the Eric Bogosian-penned Suburbia in '97. Newton Boys, while competent, felt like a let-down for those of us wanting to see more trademarked Linklater nonconformity. Life will sate groupies' appetites, of that I've no doubt.

The idea for Life came to Linklater 20 years ago when he was a wee teen. At one point, he recalls, he experienced an entirely odd moment when he couldn't figure out if he was dreaming or awake. The moment went on for some time, making it add up to more than a mere moment. This line between consciousness and reality has fascinated Linklater ever since.

That anecdote out of the way, the artwork, ads, promotional posters, concept and overall feel of Waking Life does lead to the question: how much LSD did Linklater drop before this thing came to him? "Really, drugs didn't have so much to do with it," he insists. "What you're talking about is a state of altered consciousness. You can get that in a lot of ways. You can fast for a long time, you meditate for a long time, you can do drugs. You can have a temporal lobe seizure. Drugs are probably the easiest and take the least amount of discipline. Looking back on it, I was never a big druggie, people looked at me like I was kind of straight.

"I'm just prone to thinking my dreams are real and having mild hallucinations. I don't think it's about personality. I think it's just the way your brain works. If you have this temporal lobe instability, you're more likely to do these sorts of things. Out of body experiences, childhood memories, hallucinations--they're all going to seem real to you. Dreams and life were always one and the same for me. Just because something didn't technically happen doesn't mean it's not real."

What dreams may come

Linklater wanted Waking Life to feel much like a dream. There's a key scene in which a character announces that he's going to recount a dream he's had. At that point, he says he knows that people always brace themselves for boredom when someone announces they're going to recount a dream, but he doesn't care, he's going to retrace his dream anyway. All of Life feels much like the announcement; this is a truly audacious, unapologetically self-indulgent film, one that people are going to have to trust the filmmakers enough to go along on the ride for. For his part, Linklater acknowledges the dream point but would like to think the movie "is more about existence and levels of consciousness."

Linklater reports that Life was as elaborate as it was inexpensive. His dreamy casting included returning to a favourite prof he'd studied with at University of Texas, Robert C. Solomon, whom Linklater simply asked to repeat one of his talks for the camera. "On the one hand, this film is intensely personal, on the other it's wildly collaborative," says Linklater. "A lot of the cast came up with their own scenes and then they'd work with me to try and make them work in the larger film. A lot of it came from conversations I was having with them. I was trying to meet interesting people, in particular highly intelligent people.

"You don't really get a lot of that in movies. Instead, you often get smart people playing dumb people and then the audience can rally around and feel superior. This had to be about ideas you would have to consider. You couldn't feel that the characters were simply irrelevant."

Drawing freedom

As with his cast, Linklater tried to give the gaggle of animators involved as much creative latitude as was possible. "I liked working with the animators, it was a lot like working with the actors. It's who they are, their skills, and you're giving them room to express themselves. We liked the idea of a whole variety of looks. With most animated movies, the animators have to get the knack of one style and then imitate it. This was the opposite, this was about individuality. Instead of everyone doing the same thing, each was different. Even the lead character changes from scene to scene."

Getting the look right meant everything to Linklater. One sequence has a character flying overhead in a dream state. He spent a day shooting while hanging out of a helicopter, but the shots didn't turn out precisely right. Luckily enough, a nearby neighbour was a hot-air balloon flyer. That provided the perfect filming opportunity.

And while the film does follow in a non-narrative tradition Linklater established with Slacker, the filmmaker acknowledges, like anyone, a thirst for a good old-fashioned story. "Tell me a perfectly crafted story! There's a great satisfaction to that and we're trained to crave that. At the same time, cinema has such vast possibilities. The more one thing becomes the norm, the more too bad that is, if on page 15 the same thing happens, and on page 80 the same thing happens, in every screenplay. I think I'm just always trying to approximate the thought process. None of us live in three-act structure lives. Everything isn't perfectly ordered.

"What's that Cassevetes film in which he says that Hollywood's like a trick, you know, it makes us unhappy. Our romances aren't like that, our lives don't work out like that. That doesn't mean you're underachieving, it means you're alive. You can be the most rational person, but these lies still affect you. Fiction plays a big part in all our lives. Humans are very pattern-seeking, storytelling beings. We will render the most incomprehensible things comprehensible through stories. Even the most horrendous things. WWII--who can make sense of that? We will create a narrative out of history, even when it's just random shit happening.

"We create a narrative thread out of things to try to understand them."