Interview Magazine: Richard Linklater by Matthew McConaughey

By Matthew McConaughey

When, in 1989, then-28-year-old Richard Linklater rounded up a bunch of friends and ne’er-do-wells in his hometown of Austin, Texas, to film a lo-fi, shaggy-dog odyssey of a movie, he didn’t have a title, didn’t have what a studio exec might call a story, and had only $23,000. But Slacker, as his breakthrough feature came to be called, which followed various characters as they wander around Austin—just generally digging the scene and waxing poetic about life, outer space, and conspiracy theories—struck a nerve. When it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1991 (two years after Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape and a year before Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs), it caught one of those huge, zeitgeist-y updrafts of acclaim and floated off to the aerie of cult status. In retrospect, Slacker’s success now looks foundational, helping to usher in the mid-’90s heyday of American independent cinema and pave the way for a major American artist. more…