Richard Linklater, born July 30, 1960 in Houston, Texas, and grew up in nearby Huntsville.

Attended college for a short time in Houston on a baseball scholarship, but his ability to play was impeded by an arrhythmic heart condition. He would have graduated in 1982, but he decided instead to take work on an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. During this two years he spent a great deal of his time alone, reading and going to the cinema to watch up to four films a day. He immersed himself in film culture, and began to believe it was a viable career move, so he saved his money to purchase a camera, projector, and some editing equipment, and experimented with the equipment by making numerous short films as a hobby. He moved to Austin where there was a more localized artistic community, and, in 1985, he founded the Austin Film Society, which is still active today, and works to bring fringe film to the Austin area.

Linklater’s first feature length film, Slacker, made for $23,000, was a success at the 1991 Sundance film festival. His early films were greatly autobiographical, and often were loosely defined, day-in-the-life narratives that spanned only 24 hours, and usually dealt with characters trying to find themselves. He has made numerous independent films through his own Austin-based production company, Detour Films, but has also been tapped to direct a few Hollywood films over the years.

As a director he believes his job is to mediate between the multitudes of creative energies that come together on a film set. He told Reverse Shot Film Journal, “Inevitably that’s what a director does. I think that’s why I’m doing this in the first place, why I’m not sitting in a room writing alone. What I live for is mixing it up with other people and artists, having a good time and expressing ourselves. It’s sort of like I create the sandbox, but I’m inviting people to come and play in it.”

At the end of the 90s Linklater had a flop with The Newton Boys that made it difficult to find investors for other projects he was working on, and, wanting to just keep making art, he decided to simply return to his low-budget roots. He digitally shot interviews and monologues with real life artists, philosophers, and writers between Austin, New York and San Antonio, and staged simple conversations between actors in short vignettes. The film that developed from the fragmented footage, entitled Waking Life, would once again exemplify Linklater’s attraction to loosely defined plot and immersive dialogue. It’s a film entirely about dreaming that’s structured around a single character as he quietly observes, and later actively participates in philosophical conversations involving other random characters from scholars and artists to everyday strangers and friends. The topics of discussion ranging from metaphysics to free will, social philosophy to lucid dreaming and dream telepathy, and existentialism to the meaning of life. In an interview with Filmthreat, Linklater refers to the film as “a kitchen sink movie”, due to the range of issues that it contemplates.

The edited live action footage was then handed over to 30 some animators who overlaid the footage with various styles of animation, a process called rotoscoping. Because multiple artistic styles were employed, the resulting film is a consistently shifting dreamscape that’s always in motion. Bob Sabiston, an animator who had developed a software program he calls Rotoshop, then took the animated sequences and smoothed out the jerkiness that is often present in rotoscoped animation with his software that interpolates (or estimates) between the keyframes that the artists had drawn. Since it would take too long for animators to animate each frame of the film, Sabiston’s program was used to automatically generate intermediate frames between what the animators had drawn.