Richard Linklater wanted his first studio film, Dazed and Confused, to be an “anti-nostalgia” movie. After all, it was all about being a high school kid in the ’70s—which obviously sucked, right? But then, something funny happened. First, the cast and then the audience came to the opposite conclusion. For all the bad hair and warped hazing rituals and unreconstructed patriarchal bullshit, the ’70s looked like a pretty great time to be young, hot, stoned, and completely unencumbered by responsibilities.
Released in 1993, and jam-packed with future stars as yet unspoiled by success—Matthew McConaughey, Parker Posey, Ben Affleck, Renée Zellweger, Joey Lauren Adams, Anthony Rapp, and Adam Goldberg, to name a few, plus Milla Jovovich, then the only famous one of the bunch—Dazed flopped at the box office, then almost immediately caught on as a cult phenomenon. The execs at Universal may have thought they were buying American Graffiti for a new generation, but what they got was weirder—and much cooler. There’s no corny plot to slow things down. Really, there’s no plot at all—just a deeply felt portrait of high school kids (and one notable older guy) smoking, drinking, laughing, lusting, arguing, fighting, and livin’. Just livin’, man.
For the cast, it was a hedonistic—and totally unrealistic—initiation into the world of filmmaking. Shooting in Austin, Texas, Linklater created a permissive and democratic environment where those with star quality, ingenuity, and a knack for improvisation—like McConaughey, Posey, and Adams—could grow their parts, while others, including Jovovich and her then boyfriend, Shawn Andrews, faded into the background. For Linklater, beset by dubious studio minders eager to fit his quirky vision into a proven template, it was an agonizing ordeal. And for the ’90s teens in the audience, like me, it was a thrilling “fuck you” to the world of scolding adults. To the extent that there is a plot, it centers on star quarterback Randall “Pink” Floyd (Jason London) and his deliberations over whether to sign an anti-drug pledge foisted on him by his coaches. “What are they gonna do next, give you guys urine tests?” scoffs his intellectual friend Cynthia (Marissa Ribisi). That line got a big laugh back then. I wonder what young people today even make of it.
Anyone young or old who wants to experience Dazed and Confused on the big screen will have a chance starting this Sunday, when theaters across the country mark the film’s 30th anniversary (Christ, has it really been that long?) with a series of “Dazed Day” screenings of a new 4K restoration. To mark the occasion, Linklater Zoomed in from his ranch in Austin to discuss the cast, the chaos, and the film’s afterlife as a beloved time capsule.
Vanity Fair: Dazed and Confused was your first studio picture, and your immediate follow-up to Slacker, a movie you made for five figures that got you tagged as a “voice of a generation.” What was that like?
Richard Linklater: There was all this Gen-X talk because of Doug Coupland’s book, Nirvana, grunge. They were just kind of putting trends together, and Slacker seemed to fit a niche. It’s kind of quaint now that mainstream culture would even give any attention to an underground, anti-establishment, anti-narrative film. It was kind of interesting, but it quickly became less interesting. What I wanted to do next was just this film about my high school life. And then that got kind of laundered into it too.
You mean the voice of a generation aspect of it?
Yeah. Even though if you really look at the dates, I’m slightly older. I was born in 1960, which is the end of the baby boom. So whatever, it’s not the kind of thing you think about when you’re trying to express yourself, but it didn’t hurt. And this is what’s lost today: the idea that you could make a weirdo film like Slacker, but it’d be a kind of a cult hit on its own indie terms, and then a studio would like your script and give you $6 million to just make a film. That is just never happening again. Studios just aren’t in that business. So I was fortunate. I wrote a script and they liked it. They thought, Oh, this could be a fun high school movie. It was kind of in a genre.