To date, the career of genre chameleon Richard Linklater has been completely unpredictable, and either in spite of that or because of it, the filmmaker has been largely critically successful, whether it be with his forays into experimental rotoscoped films like Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, or with feel-good kids’ films like School of Rock (which is currently being developed into a series for Nickelodeon).
Following his most ambitious (and possibly well-received) film in last year’s Boyhood, Linklater’s highly anticipated next project Everybody Wants Some now has a March 11 premiere date and will serve as the honorary kick-off for the 2016 edition of South by Southwest in Austin.
A Houston native, Linklater has strong ties to Texas and to Austin specifically, where he went to college, shot his beloved debut Slacker, and was an early developer and principal member of the Austin Film Society.
Everybody Wants Some, which Linklater has referred to as being a “spiritual sequel” to Dazed and Confused and a “continuation” of Boyhood, is set in 1980, and focuses on a group of college baseball players in the period immediately after their arrival on campus. In staying loyal to the precedent of Dazed, the cast is ensemble and made up of young, largely unknown actors.
In terms of Everybody Wants Some‘s actual, concrete relationship to the two films, “spiritual” is the key word, as Linklater has previously clarified (in an interview with Creative Screenwriting) that “…it has nothing to do with Dazed and Confused other than it would be set four years later, when one of the younger characters went off to college.” And of course, Boyhood‘s ending stretches all the way to the present.
(via Rolling Stone)
