The playlist Richard Linklater created for ‘Dazed and Confused’
The 1993 coming-of-age comedy film Dazed and Confused, directed by Richard Linklater and starring Jason London, Ben Affleck, Matthew McConaughey and Milla Jovovich, among many others, is widely considered one of the greatest films in the genre, detailing that classic 1970s life of adolescence.
Dazed and Confused tells of the last day of school at Lee High School in Austin, Texas, in 1976 and the initiation ritual that the senior students give to the freshmen. It also details the inner working of a few individual students but essentially shows the entire group to just be hanging out, enjoying the summer before moving on to the real world.
While the narrative and acting of Dazed and Confused play a big part in the film, so does its music, which is vital to its entire mood and tone. To get his cast in the air to perform, director Linklater put together a series of tapes for the actors to listen to, featuring several artists he used to love jamming out to when he was a kid in the 1970s.
Linklater also wrote a letter to his cast telling them to check out some specific tapes. Some of the songs are “a little cheezy [sic],” he admitted, but he also believed that they are “straightforward, honest and fun,” which was the entire vibe he was trying to achieve in the moving. Linklater had also said that he would give each cast member their character’s favourite albums upon their arrival on set.
In the letter, Linklater expressed his congratulations to the cast, writing: “Of the many great people I met in the process of casting this movie, you were selected because I had a gut impulse about you (I’ve learned to trust that intuition). I would describe it as a combination of interesting person/creative and inventive/can work within a group/willing to work hard/serious about their craft/won’t be a stifling force but a creative one.”
Evidently, there was a lot of love on the set of Dazed and Confused, and Linklater created an intimate atmosphere dedicated to creating a great movie, and through his letter and his mixtape, he showed that he cared about each and every one of his actors.
Criterion have put together a playlist of the song that Linklater gave to his Dazed and Confused actors. Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of 1970s hard rock, but also a fair few disco hits too and a couple of numbers from the likes of David Bowie, Elton John and Lou Reed.
Check out the playlist below.
