It’s counterintuitive at first that, in his 2001 rotoscoped film Waking Life, Richard Linklater would fly himself in a hot air balloon to capture the tops of buildings getting smaller and smaller as the unnamed dreamer character floats away into the sky. After all, it’s an animated film—this image could be created from whole cloth. Linklater’s cinema is founded in real material, real places. While Waking Life is by definition an animated work, it’s still one that’s filmed, with Linklater and producer Tommy Pallotta operating miniDV handicams to gather the footage that become the reference for rotoscoping. This allows for something very grounded—particularly with regards to performance—while simultaneously embracing the watery-ness of its hyper-fluid, surreal art style.
This approach should be considered, too, as a development in style by Linklater through his Trilogy of Wandering (which I describe in brief detail in a recent piece for The A.V. Club), wherein Linklater designs three films about communication (or the impossibility thereof)—It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books, Slacker, and Waking Life—around youth listlessly moving from one place to the next.
In each, Linklater has an ardent commitment to location. Plow, with its practically no-dialogue, banal odyssey, is made up basically just of location. Slacker is far more populated, filling the scenes with a coterie of turn-of-the-1990s Austin weirdos. Slacker riffs on Plow, and Waking Life riffs on Slacker in return. For instance, there’s an inciting car accident at the start of both Slacker and Waking Life on 24th and Nueces St. in West University in, not 100 feet from the Austin house that Linklater and Lee Daniel lived in in the Plow-Slacker era. The square grayness of The Castilian, a student housing building for UT Austin, has the look of 1970s corporatism creeping into this neighborhood full of late 19th-century/early-20th century houses (in Waking Life, its first floor homes a Subway, and if you check Google Maps now it has been replaced by an Insomnia Cookies—that itself being a document of changing consumerist culture); now, most of that block on Nueces has been torn down for parking garages.
That’s not to say that Linklater doesn’t “cheat” location. In the scene where Louis Mackey asks Wiley Wiggins’ dreamer what’s the more ubiquitous human trait (“fear or laziness?”), the bar where Wiggins is sitting is completely different to that of Mackey’s, with the incontinuities fixed in the rotoscoping process. In this instance, the animation tool serves as a much quicker and easier fix to problems that, say, Orson Welles had while going through the incredibly long shooting process in making Othello, where he’d have to match footage between shots in the same scene that were filmed hundreds of miles and a year apart.
The reason Linklater is so militant about his commitment to the image is because of an almost religious belief in its ontology, which fellow filmmaker Caveh Zahedi elucidates in a scene that was initially a warm-up test for another scene in Waking Life. Here, the dreamer watches Zahedi on the big screen explain André Bazin’s belief that cinema can capture the Christian idea of Creation as it happens, as opposed to letting it simply slip away, making every moment necessarily Holy. Film, in this sense, is a tool for seeing more than it is for making. Linklater is drawn to cinema for this very reason: while all films appear to be largely constructed and contrived, their real magic lies in the act of capturing.