How could Richard Linklater possibly follow up Boyhood? With a “spiritual sequel” to one of his most beloved movies, Dazed And Confused. Alright, alright, alright...
The teenagers in Richard Linklater’s 1993 movie, like teenagers the world over, feel hemmed in, oppressed. They may have spent the entire afternoon and evening cruising hotrods, scoring beers and getting high, and are now drinking and making out at a keg party that will run to the light of dawn, but waiting at home are picket fences and manicured lawns, parents and rules. Just imagine the freedom that awaits when they graduate high school and hit college. Just imagine the shit they can get up to then. Just imagine Linklater’s new movie, Everybody Wants Some!!.
“You know, I think I have to say that this is my “spiritual” sequel to Dazed And Confused because I don’t think you can technically have a sequel without having the same actors and characters,” Linklater laughs down the phone from his home in Austin, Texas. He has reason to be happy – everybody, it seems, does indeed want some of his latest venture; critics are raving, with Rolling
Stone calling it “a beautiful, hilarious film… ridiculously fun and deceptively deep.”
The 55-year-old director chuckles again, pointing out he couldn’t do an actual sequel because all the Dazed actors are now in their late-30s and early-40s. “If you just imagine the young guys in
Dazed And Confused, like Mitch [ Wiley Wiggins], four years later going off to college; it’s 1980, he’s once again a freshman. In Dazed, he’s a freshman at high school. Now, he’s a freshman going to college. Imagine that. You leave all your old friends and town and family behind, and you’re confronted with all the freedoms. Dazed was my high school party, this is my college party.”
The key word there is “my”, for just as Linklater poured his own high-school experiences into the freewheeling action of Dazed And Confused, accounting for the keen anthropological eye, so he ransacks his own college past at Sam Houston State University for Everybody Wants Some!!. He might have left early, in 1982, to work on an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico before becoming a figurehead of the burgeoning US indie scene in the late-’80s, but he still had two years’ worth of material to cram into the three-and-a-half-day timeframe of his new film.
“It’s not specifically autobiographical, but all of it… much of it really happened, put it like that!” he says. “To me, university is about freedom. Dazed was about getting away with as much as they could within some pretty strict circumstances. This, it’s kind of the opposite. You’re unleashed on the world as a seeming adult, even though you’re only about 18 years old, and you’ve got all this freedom. You can stay out all night. You can sleep at someone’s house. They can sleep at yours. It’s kind of crazy what you can get away with. You can drink in the afternoon if you want. There’s no regulation. You’re suddenly a free agent in the world. This is about what to do and how to handle the absolute freedom of that. It talks about identity; with all these choices, that’s when you really have to confront who you are and who you want to be.”
It’s the above that accounts for the “deceptively deep” part of that Rolling Stone quote. The rest of the movie is the “ridiculously fun” bit. “Yeah, the movie is basically one long party!” says Linklater, his voice doing a tonal equivalent of a high five. “People call it a college movie, but there’s really no college in it! It ends with, like, the first second of college – it’s set in the time you show up, before class starts. It’s wonderful because you don’t have a paper due, you don’t have to be studying for anything, you haven’t even gone to class! It’s kind of the last moment where you’re just completely unburdened with anything.”
New faces
Blake Jenner. Zoey Deutch. Tyler Hoechlin. Ryan Guzman. Glen Powell. Ringing any bells? But before you think EWS!! features a low-rent cast, consider this: before Dazed And Confused gifted its young ensemble a host of memorable roles, Matthew McConaughey, Ben Affleck, Milla Jovovich, Joey Lauren Adams and Adam Goldberg were nobodies, too. Throughout his career, Linklater has evidenced an uncanny knack for unearthing talent, and he’s confident he’s done it again.
“Blake Jenner has a wonderful quality. He’s an everyman, really fearless”
richard linklater