The “creepy dream” that inspired one of Richard Linklater’s best movies
The movies of Richard Linklater vastly vary in tone, outlook and subject matter. Throughout his career, Linklater has made cinemagoers hysterically laugh in Dazed and Confused and School of Rock, torn at the heartstrings with Before Sunrise and delved into science fiction adaptation with A Scanner Darkly. Quite simply, there’s nothing that the filmmaker can’t turn his talents to.
But one film that has always stood out in Linklater’s filmography is his 2001 animated movie Waking Life. It features an unnamed protagonist going through a series of strange dreams. Throughout, he has several conversations about the meaning of life, free will, the nature of consciousness, and other existential themes.
Despite the far-out nature of Linklater’s seventh movie, like much of the filmmaker’s work, it was actually inspired by his own life. We know, for example, that Dazed and Confused was inspired by Linklater’s childhood, but it still comes as some surprise to find that such a peculiar film filled with philosophical insight could have arisen from the director’s personal experience.
In an interview with PopMatters, Linklater was asked how he came up with the idea for Waking Life and explained that he’d had a lucid dream similar to the one the film’s protagonist does throughout the narrative. “Like everything I do, it came from real life,” he began. “Believe it or not, a movie that’s so unreal takes all its cues from personal experience.”
Linklater continued: “That really happened to me; it was a really formative lucid dream, like in the movie, that series of false awakenings. It seemed to go on for weeks and weeks and got creepy near the end. So the narrative structure is something out of my own experience.”
The director had been thinking about that dream for several years and always wondered how to fit it into one of his films. He was unsure as to whether it would really work as a narrative. Despite the trippy nature of Waking Life, Linklater thinks it still serves a “realistic and necessary” point.
The way the protagonist experiences his dreams in the film is precisely how the brain works in reality. “There’s no exact anything; it’s all a reconstruction, constantly,” the filmmaker noted. “So if the film can be perceived at that level, that’s the right level to take in the story.”
Linklater went one further and suggested that the medium of cinema itself is akin to a dreaming state anyway, but that also means that in his eyes, “films about dreams don’t work”, so he had to develop it into something else. That’s likely where the philosophical and scientific dialogue comes into play and makes Waking Life one of Linklater’s best efforts.
There’s also a sense of the meta within his seventh movie, with him noting: “You have what’s going on in your brain as you watch it, the character becoming aware of the story, and the audience becoming aware of that same narrative at the same time that he is.”
“So the narrative becomes aware of itself,” Linklater added. “And then the film is actually aware of itself as a narrative, a story, a film. And that’s the Soderbergh joke at the end, that the film is aware of itself as an economic entity.”
Check out the trailer for Waking Life below.
