He's Having a Ball

摘要

You're thinking he went soft, or, worse yet, is doing it for the mon-ey. Why else would the indie director of Slacker and Before Sunset—a guy whose idea of an action sequence is to have two characters walk while they talk—do a remake of the 70s kids' baseball movie Bad News Bears? It's because, although his office building off the highway in Austin, Texas, is lined with framed posters of French auteur Jean-Luc Godard movies, Richard Linklater is not a film snob. He just likes to make movies. "I would have loved to have been a '40s studio director like Vincente Minnelli. You ended up with a real diverse career," says Linklater. "Now you don't get a call from Darryl Zanuck saying, 'Come do this movie on Monday' So you have to do it on your own." He has already checked off teen flick (Dazed and Confused), western (The Newton Boys), romance (Before Sunrise), sequel (Before Sunset), animation (Waking Life), sci-fi (A Scanner Darkly, due in 2006), filmed play (Tape) and a kids' movie (School of Rock). If you've got a script for an Elizabethan musical, now might be the time to send it over.