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SXSWorld February 2016

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1 2 S X S W o r l d | F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 6 | S X S W. C O M ichard Linklater wants to make one thing very clear: the Austin filmmaker's latest project is not a baseball movie. Ever since it was first reported that the writer/director, who has been cred- ited with basically inventing the Austin film scene with his 1991 micro-budget cult comedy Slacker, was following up his Oscar-winning opus Boyhood with the ensemble film Everybody Wants Some, trades have pegged it as a baseball comedy. It's easy to understand why: the film centers on a new pitcher (Blake Jenner) on a highly-ranked college baseball team, who comes into his own in his new environment. Plus, Linklater has already made one such movie before, having directed the 2005 remake of Bad News Bears. But as Linklater firmly stresses, "There's really very little baseball [in Everybody Wants Some] - there's like one little practice. You're basically just amongst baseball players as they party. It's really just one big socialization party extension, and one long riff on that." In fact, the film shares more in common with Linklater's seminal 1993 classic Dazed and Confused—a high school movie that forged past any cliched conventions of the teen genre to deliver what he describes as a "non specific film about everything and nothing"— than Bad News Bears, which also featured his favorite pastime. Linklater actually dubs Everybody Wants Some as a "spiritual sequel" to Dazed and Confused. "This movie is kind of coming from exactly the same place as Dazed," he confirms. Chronologically, Everybody Wants Some is set in 1980, around four years after the events of Dazed and Confused. "It's a different time," explains Linklater. "It's as different as college is to high school— which is hopefully a lot better. Life is more fun, at least it was for me." "The characters in Dazed are having their fun and carving out their freedom in pretty narrow confines," he continues. "College is a whole new ballgame. It's what to do with all the freedom that's been dropped in your lap. What do you do with that newfound freedom ... who are you?" For those familiar with Boyhood, his last and most lauded film to date, the connection between the two projects is irrefutable: Everybody Wants Some essentially begins where Boyhood ended, with a young man finding his way in college. "In a strange way, this is a parallel film to Boyhood," admits Linklater. Still, he thinks of that film and Everybody Wants Some as two entirely different beasts. "Boyhood has an intimacy it shared with some of my last films, like Before Midnight," Linklater elaborates. "They're each very kind of intense in their own way." Linklater pegs Everybody Wants Some as a "big comedy"— some- thing he hasn't attempted since Bad News Bears. "It's almost assured it won't be on the awards circuit," he says with a sigh of what sounds like relief. "Comedies are automatically disqualified." Before Boyhood, which took him 12 years to complete, Linklater had been peppered with Oscar attention for his Before Sunrise trilogy, receiving two nominations for best screenplay over the years. His epic passion project placed him in an entirely new league, thanks to its Best Picture and Best Director nominations. It ended up winning with a Best Supporting Actress award for Patricia Arquette. Linklater equates taking Boyhood to the Oscars with winning the Super Bowl. "As it was all happening, I was kind of like, it will prob- ably never be this good again." The problem arose, he says, of "what do you do for the next season?" Linklater says he simply went with his gut in choosing to follow up a career benchmark with a low-key comedy that features no major stars or stakes. "There's always that kind of, what you do with your moment," he says. "I could have probably used that to do some big huge film or something, but I wanted to do this film. It's a film I've been trying to get made for a long time. Psychologically, I made it to maintain my own balance, my own equilibrium." Baseball and College Life Inspire New Linklater Film by nigel m. Smith R C O U R T E S Y O F PA R A M O U N T Fil m St il l fro m Eve ry b o dy Wa nt s Some

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