The stuff movies are made of

Director Richard Linklater talks about dreams, Philip K. Dick and his magical, revolutionary "Waking Life," a thinking person's cartoon about the meaning of life.

By Jeff Stark

Nov. 20, 2001 | Half of Richard Linklater's new film, "Waking Life," is hogwash, but that just may be the point. The respected director of "Slacker," "Dazed and Confused" and "Before Sunrise" takes an unexpected turn with his new film, which is an animated feature that follows a single, oddly passive character through a series of encounters with amateur philosophers, college professors, barroom sages and dreamed-out hipsters. Each of the characters engages with the protagonist in some way, generally by delivering a monologue on the character of our existence, the meaning of life or the nature of dreams. The speakers discuss existentialism, evolution, the problem of language, lucid dreaming and a dozen other subjects from the metaphysical to the mundane, as our hero listens to them intently.

It could be heady, or boring at worst, but the vividness of the performances and the alluring, almost hallucinogenic nature of the animation makes it an unforgettable cinematic experience. The great equalizer -- what keeps the bad ideas just as fun to watch as the good ones -- is that "Waking Life" as a film is beautiful and inventive and unusual. The film uses an animation technique called rotoscoping. The actual action was shot in video, then edited, then turned over to a phalanx of individual artists who each "painted" a scene with the help of a computer. While the technique each animator used is different, the rotoscoping gives the film its dominant texture -- it's a bright, saturated but nearly lifelike world that nevertheless vibrates like a dream.

Our hero -- played with a deadpan innocence by Wiley Wiggins, the amusing stoner from "Dazed and Confused" -- arrives back home in Austin, Texas, and soon finds himself in an oddly rarefied environment in which everyone has something interesting to say and planes of perspective behind him shimmer and float. The rotoscoping has the uncanny ability to give each character a marvelous physical distinctiveness with just a few puddles of color. Light plays on characters' faces as shifting fields of different hues; strands of hair blow in the air, curve, become geometric and disappear; and subtle jokes and split-second visual puns abound.

Some of the characters we hear seem to be a bit out of it. One guy explains that time stopped in 50 A.D.; another spouts one cliché after another while driving a boat with wheels from a train station to a residential neighborhood; another is a homicidal killer. For Linklater, that's part of the point. "Waking Life," for all of its smarts, isn't a critical film. As in dreams -- and life -- ideas come and go. It's up to the individual, the viewer, the dreamer, to sort it all out.

And, trickily, besides the theories spouted by the characters, two of the movie's intellectual puzzles are hidden. One is figuring out the structure of the film, which appears plotless -- like Linklater's episodic, low-budget quasi-classic "Slacker" -- but isn't, and the other is the numerous ways the film is self-conscious, giving viewers cinematic joke after cinematic joke.

Salon talked with Linklater by phone from a New York hotel suite. He was in town to promote "Waking Life" and his next film, "Tape."

I read a lot of reviews of your film, because the film is opening piece-by-piece, and I had the luxury to read them as they came out. And I noticed that a lot of them use language like "college dorm-room talk" and "undergraduate stoners."

Oh, isn't that aggravating?

I was wondering how you felt about it, because it seems so limiting: The implication is that philosophy is all fine and good while you're a college student, but after that you don't have any need for it.

It's very weird, and it says a lot about people when they say it's like being a freshman in college. That's how the public deals with anything that deals with thought or philosophy. It's an affront to them in the current sensibility, to be looking for meaning, when obviously they have it all figured out. So they have to put it in a box.

Are you surprised by that reaction?

Nah, not at all. You see it all the time. And that's just a few people, and usually the ones who have to write about it in a serious way and that's just their way of trying to sum it up. Or whatever. But people who have seen the film, who don't have to account for it, say, "It reminds me ... like I wish I had more time in my life to read." There was a time in everyone's life when they had more time to put toward such issues. And they kind of miss that.

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