You learn from everybody.
— Richard Linklater
I guess I don't have a grandiose view of the world in general, and I never believe it when someone else has a grandiose moment.
I've done my part to 'ruin' Austin.
I'm the kid who wanted to grow up and be Bugs Bunny. I was very, very disappointed when I realized I couldn't grow up and be a cartoon character.
I always thought that I had a pretty diverse body of work, I mean, as far as subject matter. Teenage rock and roll movie; romance; '20s Western. On paper it looks different, but then there's similarities in the vibe of them.
I played baseball in high school, and in some parallel universe, if I had not gone into filmmaking, I may have been the coach cursing at the kids.
Some films really do take years to get going, but I'd say that most of the films I want to do are slightly smaller projects. Some could be sketches. They're not all oil paintings.
I'm lucky that I get to jump around, do a big-budget comedy and then a smaller film. I don't even make a big distinction between them.
As a little kid, you go where your parents drag you. You have no agency, no dominion.
I look up and go, 'I'm living in the world I visualized a long time ago.' From making movies, to the Film Society, to just being in a film world. It's a life that I wanted to inhabit. I think everyone has the opportunity to do that in this world - it's just, are you gonna work for it, and how much does it mean to you?
Here in Central Texas, you drive west, you get the desert; you drive east, you get the woods; you've got water, you've got urban environments, you've got country. So you can hit a lot of notes.
To jump from the indie ranks to play with the big dogs, there's a gate you have to pass through.
There are really smart baseball players. It's a thinking person's game.
The arts were like, there's no opponent. It's just yourself. I'm not saying they don't make the arts a competition with awards and all that, but that's outside the work itself.
You don't really grow up until you quit playing sports.
I realized a long time ago that, even as a kid, it's all about the choices you make, the things you pursue. In the end, you're a sum of your choices.
One minute you're starting left fielder, hitting home runs; the next, it's career over. I was 20.
Are any of us self-taught? It just means I didn't go to school for it. But you do have teachers. You have mentors.
The human psyche creates structure. We all go through our lives like, 'Oh! And then I moved here.' We're pattern-seeking, structure-producing machines.
My working method has always been, 'Work really hard and get it right the first time.'
Artists are great. They jump in.
I have an uncomfortable groove, 'cause I have a lot of different kinds of stories to tell.
The '70s kind of sucked.
I just love being on a movie set. I like making movies.
I grew up in Huntsville, which is a main prison town. It's crazy. The conditions are so bad in prison, often, for the inmates.
My dad's chill. He's the guy who, you wreck the car, he says, 'Well, nobody was hurt. It's just some metal.'
I'm interested in people forging their realities.
I like films that just put you in someone's world. It can be very subversive. Hitchcock would put you in the mind of a psychopath, and you'd care about them.
I've made movies where people say it's their favourite, but they don't take it seriously because it just didn't seem to break through commercially.
It was always kind of sad when your favorite punk rockers, like Jello Biafra or someone, would say they hate something you like. It was, 'Oh, I thought we were on the same page.'
The people you live with at college, those first roommates often are people you're still friends with the rest of your life.
Anything that confirms for me the transitory nature of reality isn't bad. It's a good lesson in human hubris.
Everybody just wants to appreciate time as it's passing, to be in the moment. It's the hardest thing to do. You're either in the unknown future that you're working toward, or you're in the past that becomes a little abstract.
A college athlete is going to be competitive. You don't get to that level if you're not.
I want cinema to be a part of my life. It's natural for me.
When you have a film that's acclaimed, there's a tendency to go big or get serious or something, but I had an impulse to do the opposite.
The natural phenomenon of the universe is so mind-blowing, but you have to know about it. You have to be curious. You've got to find it on your own. If you're lucky, you do.
I'm not enough of one of those public personalities who feels as though he's been one-dimensionalized. I don't feel that strongly enough.
I'm kind of an old theater guy, so I'm sort of attuned to it. Like, when I go to New York, I go to plays.
I think people forget how radical the narrative of 'Slacker' is. There's no story, you know? We could go from one character to the next to the next and never return.
No one believes this, but when I'm working, it's the same, whether I'm working on 'Bad News Bears,' 'Before Sunset,' 'A Scanner Darkly,' or 'Fast Food Nation.' I'm the same person, trying to make it work.
Took me a long time to know I was a nobody from nowhere.
I really do remember everything. I see people I haven't seen in 20 years, and I can talk with them about what we talked about outside the high school.
When I did 'Slacker,' I didn't own cowboy hats or boots. I was like, 'That's not me.'
Storytelling is powerful; film particularly. We can know a lot of things intellectually, but humans really live on storytelling. Primarily with ourselves; we're all stories of our own narrative.
I try to avoid bad experiences.
Music and smells are the most memory-recall, nostalgia-inducing things.
Pro athletes, how they go through the world is so elevated. The bubble they're in is one of entitlement. And that starts young. By the time they're in college, they've had it a lot of their life.
Plots are artificial. Does your life have a plot? It has characters. There is a narrative. There's a lot of story, a lot of character. But plot? Eh, no.
I don't see the arts as competitive at all. It was a better angel of my nature. Sports is zero-sum: winner, loser, demonstrable.
