Sasha Jenson: I wanted to wear dirty overalls the whole time. I literally wanted to be Pig-Pen! I wanted to be that guy who’s kind of in the beginning stages of becoming an alcoholic, and at the end of the night, you look at his dirty overalls and you’re like, “What happened?”
The wardrobe people were like, “No, you have to look better than that.” But I’m still a piggy asshole in the movie.
Kari Perkins: To make the film the way Rick wanted it to look, he had provided all these yearbooks from 1976 from Austin and the surrounding area. One of the junior high kids had a T-shirt on that said “Lookin’ Good.” That was directly from the yearbook.
Keith Fletcher: Anne was going, “We’re gonna go all bell-bottoms and crazy T-shirts!” And I’m going, Who was wearing that stuff then? I grew up in Connecticut. In ’76, we were into the Ramones already. But everyone was still a hippie in Texas in 1976. Still! There was no punk rock overtones. It was all long hair, bell-bottoms.
Matthew McConaughey: I was called in for a hair, makeup, and wardrobe test, and I came out of the trailer, and Linklater, as he’s approaching, he does that great laugh. “This is great, man! What’s this here, a black panther tattoo? Yeah! The pipe around the neck! Oh look, the comb-over hair! The Ted Nugent T-shirt! How do you feel?” I said, “Yeah, man, I dig it.”
Katherine Dover: Matthew walked into his costume fitting and he loved Ted Nugent. He was like, “I am Ted Nugent!” I said, “I have a perfect outfit for you.” That Ted Nugent shirt fit his personality in the film as well as Matthew himself. He was obnoxious and brilliant. You couldn’t help but love him.
Kari Perkins: I had taken a Ted Nugent album [Tooth, Fang & Claw] to Kinko’s and signed a form saying I wouldn’t sell it, and they shrunk the image and they made a T-shirt transfer and I ironed it on T-shirts. And I didn’t even have a pre-fit with Matthew McConaughey at all. He just came to set and put it on like magic. Everything fit him like a glove.
Bill Wise: Matthew’s character had a Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes T-shirt. Especially with the tight jeans, there’s a little old-school macho, shithead grandstanding. Nugent was such an egocentric ding-dong! So when Matthew’s character steps out to smoke his cigarette and he’s got Ted Nugent on his shirt? It’s like, “This is how I roll, baby. You better deal with it, cause I’m gonna be here all fucking night.”
When he stands up and sells the peach-colored pants that only a few men can get away with, the comb-over, and the imaginary Yoo-hoo chocolate mustache, you could really make that character look small and empty and stereotypical. But the way Matthew played it, you’re sitting in the audience going, “I went to high school with that guy.”
Parker Posey: I saw his Polaroid and it was like, “Wow! I haven’t seen that guy before, but I know that guy!” [Makeup artist] Jean Black and I, we were like preacher ladies, just screaming, “Ahhhhhhh! Oh my god! This Polaroid is so good!”
I called my agent that night and I said, “You gotta sign this guy. He’s going to be a big fat movie star.”
Tracey Holman: McConaughey stayed pretty much in character for the whole shoot. His hair was done perfect, and he had that mustache and the tinged-with-marijuana attitude.
Scott Wheeler: He would be in character when he came home at night. He had the mustache and the hair and he would talk just like Wooderson.
Michael MacCambridge: The costume design was superlative. It was not like what you see in That ’70s Show, where everybody’s got bright, shiny clothes. It was very much mid-’70s, mid-America, faded blues, T-shirts. It got one of the things right that people so often get wrong in period pieces, which is that not everybody went out and bought new clothes at the same time. There was older stuff.
Jason London: A good buddy of mine grew up in the ’70s, and he gave me his puka shell necklace. He was like, “Dude, if you’re doing a movie that takes place in the ’70s, you have to have one of these. We all wore ’em.”
And Rick said, “I’ve got a very special piece for you.” And he pulls out this killer belt buckle that was also a smoking pipe. And it still works! Quentin Tarantino, the one time I got to meet him, he says, “Jason fuckin’ London! Please tell me you have the belt buckle. I’ll give you $200,000 for it right now.” But I didn’t sell it. I still have it.
Kari Perkins: The belts the cast wore with bell-bottoms were unique to Texas. There was more regionality in that time period. The stores were local department stores. They weren’t big chains. So the way people wore things was different in Austin compared to West Texas or Chicago. Nowadays, everything is so homogenized that everything looks exactly the same. But back then, the belt buckles, the peasant blouses, the tight T-shirts, the snap Western shirts, all those were very much of this region.
Keith and Melanie Fletcher were just going out and shopping everything from all these small towns, getting all the good ’70s stuff, which, at that time, nobody wanted. The thrift stores and vintage stores were full of it.
Keith Fletcher: You’d wander into an old store and ask what they had kicking around, and they would take you down to the basement and they would literally have ’70s clothes with tags, still in their original packaging. It was amazing what was out there. We would drive 40, 50 miles outside of Austin and hit little towns, and you would be like, “Oh, this old store has 1980s Air Jordans sitting on the shelves!” Just crazy stuff.
Jason Davids Scott: The costume and wardrobe people were like, “I had this exact same piece when I was 16 or 17.”
Kelly Nelson: We were all reliving our childhoods. When I was 14, I lived in Ardmore, Oklahoma, for a while and there was a particular leather store there that made purses, so I had a purse that was custom-made. I carried it forever. And when I moved to Austin, I probably gave it to Goodwill or Salvation Army. I saw that purse in the movie, on one of the actors. I was like, Are you kidding me?
Keith Fletcher: It wasn’t just vintage. A lot of big companies were reissuing their ’70s stuff then, like Hang Ten, Converse, and Adidas. The junior high kids were wearing reissued stuff. Usually, if things like that were reissued, the colors would not be right, but Hang Ten and Converse were two companies that were totally authentic to the time.
Kari Perkins: That psychedelic-looking shirt that Wiley wore, I actually found that here in Austin. I think it was Neiman Marcus. I recall seeing those when I was in junior high in that time period.
Vincent Palmo Jr.: The shirt that Wiley wore, I literally had the same shirt when I was a junior in high school. I think I may have used it in my yearbook photo. It blew my mind.
Kim France: I visited the set to write something for Sassy. I grew up in Texas, and I thought Rick got Texas right in such a meaningful way. Even Affleck’s button-down shirt that had a quilted pattern on it, and his hair! It was parted down the middle, feathered back. That was the ideal boy in the ’70s.
(left to right) Joey Lauren Adams, Sasha Jenson, and Parker Posey.
Courtesy of Jason London.
Shana Scott: It was actually pretty hard to find kids in Texas with long hair. In ’91 and ’92, no one in Texas had it. If you look closely, the eighth graders have wigs. The only one who doesn’t have a wig is Wiley Wiggins.
Wiley Wiggins: Before I did that movie, I had the haircut of the backup bully from The Simpsons, with one-sided bangs over your entire face. I was used to always pushing it back. That’s why I’m always futzing with my hair in the movie. People still give me shit for that.
Ben Affleck: I hated my fucking haircut. The irony is, I basically reprised that haircut for Argo, because it was a similar period, but by that time, my hair had thinned and grayed enough where it looked a little bit more passable. For Dazed, they were ironing down my hair every day because I have wavy hair. I looked awful.
Joey Lauren Adams: Parker had a wig. Rory had a wig. It was almost like, if you’re more important, you get the wig. If you didn’t, you weren’t that important.
Rory Cochrane: When I went for the first meeting with Don Phillips, he wa
s like, “Don’t cut your hair.” Of course, I did cut my hair, because I had other auditions. So that’s where Slater’s whole hat thing came in. I wore that hat to the final audition to cover up my hair.
Jason Davids Scott: Rory Cochrane is so unlike Slater. He had really short hair and he’s kind of a slight person. You look at him and you see Jack Kerouac. He’s quiet and introspective.
Rory Cochrane: I had a friend, and his mom was a super-big hippie in the ’60s. She had the same hair as the character, and she did so much acid that her and her ex-husband thought that they were rowing in a boat and trying to get to shore, and they were in Central Park, you know what I mean? So I based the character on her.
I drew a marijuana leaf on my shirt, and just walking around Austin, I would ask to wear the clothes and the hair. Austin’s a lot more progressive now, but there were still some very conservative people that would throw beer cans at you and call you a hippie, and if you got in an elevator they would put their kids behind them, like they were protecting them from you.
Jason London: That first day, getting in wardrobe, all of us were looking at each other like, “Oh my god!” I remember seeing Adam Goldberg with his big ’fro, and just dying; it was so perfect. I don’t think we thought, like, “Okay, we have to act ’70s.” But as soon as we put the clothes on, we did.
Michael MacCambridge: When ’76 came, I’d just turned 13, so it felt almost like an out-of-body experience when I visited the set. I was writing a feature for The Austin-American Statesman, and when I walked out there and saw the cast, these feelings whooshed over me, like, “Hey, isn’t that the guy that wanted to kick my ass? Didn’t I have a crush on that girl?” I really felt like I’d gone back in time.
Richard Linklater: I’d stand on the set and see people in the flare pants and the shirts, and the girls dressed a certain way and the music, and it was like, “Oh my god. I’ve re-created my high school.” It sent a shiver down my spine.
Chapter 10
If You Don’t Like Your Character, Change It
“He never made you do it. He always somehow got you to do it.”
Adam Goldberg and Marissa Ribisi.
Courtesy of Jonathan Burkhart.
Before the cast showed up in Austin, Linklater sent everyone a letter. “Come to Austin WITH SOMETHING,” he wrote. “Know this movie. Know your character so we can forget about it and build something new, something special, in its likeness. As I’ve said before, if the final movie is 100% word-for-word what’s in this script, it will be a massive underachievement.”
Linklater wanted the actors to bring their own backgrounds to their roles, and they did. Judging by how the actors described their roles at the time, they saw a little of themselves in their characters.
Jason London viewed Pink as a kid who was sick of “small-town-ness.” “Dad was probably a high school football player, his mom’s probably a churchgoer, and he’s faced with the decision of whether he can play football, because his goals are higher than playing football,” he told Kahane Corn at the time. London had spent much of his own childhood in Wanette, Oklahoma, a churchgoing town with fewer than 400 residents, where a lot of people’s lives revolved around football. Like Pink, he hadn’t wanted sports to be his future.
“He probably fears his old man,” Ben Affleck told Corn about his character, O’Bannion. “He has the kind of family where his dad gets pissed and whacks him occasionally.” Affleck’s own father was a severe alcoholic, and he’d later admit that “it was very, very difficult and scary to live with him.”
Cole Hauser also imagined that his character, Benny, was scared of his dad. “His father’s probably a drunk,” he told Corn at the time. “He probably used to slap me around a little when I was younger.” Hauser is the great-grandson of Warner Bros. founder Harry M. Warner, and the son of Wings Hauser, an actor best known for playing violent, psychologically unhinged bad guys. Cole declines to discuss his homelife, beyond admitting that it “haunted” him while he was making Dazed. (He became an emancipated minor at age 15.) But he says he was a jock in high school, and he always saw Benny as someone who channeled his rage at his dad into sports. “The aggression of football, and the aggression of paddling kids, it all kind of lines up,” he says.
Allowing the actors to help shape their characters was generous and unusual for a director. But it also shows a keen emotional intelligence on Linklater’s part. He was 31. He knew he needed younger people’s input to make this high school movie feel authentic. So he treated the ensemble as if they were a team he was coaching. He guessed that the more everyone felt like they were participating, the more invested they would be in achieving greatness. But moviemaking, like sports, is not a democracy. The people who excel get to play the most, while the others have to watch.
Richard Linklater: If there’s one thing that defines me more than anything else, it’s probably being a teammate.
Tommy Pallotta: Knowing that Rick was a baseball player is a key to understanding how he approaches directing. Baseball is an endurance sport. It’s a 10-month season. You travel a lot. You strike out a lot. You lose a lot. You show up and you keep on grinding away. He’s the master of creating an environment on set where people aren’t afraid to fail.
Richard Linklater: A lot of directing is like being a coach. You bring a team together with a common goal, no competition between them. And the coach wants you to be great, to maximize your potential, not just for yourself, but maybe because he gets a victory and he wins the championship and then he gets hired at the next job up the line. I want you to be great because I wanna make a good movie and I want you to be proud to have been in it! That’s just been the way I’ve gotten the best results. Cooperative, collaborative atmosphere, but one goal.
Ethan Hawke: There are very few artists who come to the arts with the mind-set of an athlete, but baseball is the key to understanding Rick. At its core, baseball is a very zen game—it’s patience intersecting with spontaneity—and Rick is the most naturally zen person I’ve ever met. He is genuinely present. He invites actors to offer their true self, and in return, he gets the best of them. I’m not saying he sits around reading the Dhammapada or the Tao Te Ching. He’s just slightly detached, and he observes.
Chrisse Harnos: As an actor, you often feel an authoritarian thing with directors. There’s something in actors that we want to please the director. It’s almost part of our job. But Rick was one of us. And we knew that right from rehearsal.
Joey Lauren Adams: We were there for like three weeks rehearsing, which was very rare. I don’t know if I’ve ever had that.
Ethan Hawke: Hollywood filmmakers are terrified of rehearsal because all they care about is the camera. Rick makes the actors feel like he couldn’t give a shit about the camera. He cares about life.
Matthew McConaughey: Look, it starts when Rick and Don Phillips throw this pizza party to look around and see, how do these young men and women get along in real life? How do they move? What are the conversations? Who gravitates to who? And then Rick would be like, “Show up, and be doing what you would be doing, with who you would be doing it with.”
Adam Goldberg: When we got the part, Rick sent us these letters about how to attack the rehearsal process.
Marissa Ribisi: The letter basically said, “You are these characters, and these characters are you.”
Tracey Holman: That’s the way Rick seems to work. In Slacker, some people really weren’t acting. They did it naturally. There was a lot of themselves in the role.
Joey Lauren Adams: I just remember Rick’s letter saying, “If you don’t like your character, change it. Just know it when you get to Austin.” Most movies aren’t like that. There’s not that freedom. It’s just a bunch of older white men writing it, and there’s not a connection to the material.
Richard Linklater: As a filmmaker, you can’t take yourself that seriously as a writer. If there’s a very specific dialogue, and you don’t change it, and it’s all in the cadence, like David Mamet
or Aaron Sorkin—that’s more of a theater thing. It usually doesn’t work in film at all. I was always going for a much more lived-in thing.
Adam Goldberg: The actors were part of the rewrite of the script. Now, I’m not saying that should be a part of every movie, but for a movie like Dazed, it should’ve been. I didn’t have any frame of reference for a movie like that. Slacker had a very rigid, dogmatic structure, so while it was not “about” anything, the experiment was dogmatic and clear. With Dazed, I was like, I don’t know what the fuck this is about! But I know that it’s high school and it’s gonna have a texture and a tone. And that was worked out in a rehearsal.
Nicky Katt: I’ve heard Rick quoted as saying, “The rehearsals aren’t necessarily for you. They’re for the filmmaker. Because I don’t know what I’m doing! I’m exploring this thing.”
Russell Schwartz: Oh, Richard always knew exactly what he wanted. He never made you do it. He always somehow got you to do it.
Richard Linklater: I want to empower you to collaborate with me. I do know what I want, but if I say that, we’d have a confrontation. Directors are arch-manipulators, there’s just different ways to do it.
Bill Wise: Rick gives you free rein up to a point, but it’s always Rick’s vision. If it isn’t happening, it’s, “Try it again, but differently.” You never hear the word “no” on a Richard Linklater set.
Ben Affleck: There are filmmakers who really believe that suffering is tied to good art, and maybe they have a point. But what I saw in Rick was, that wasn’t the only way to do it. It could be collaborative. It could be respectful. It could be joyful.
Jason London: I look at my experience doing that movie much more fondly than I look back on my experience in high school. We were the poor kids in a school of snobby rich kids. My experience in high school wasn’t fun.
Alright, Alright, Alright Page 14