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Q&A with Richard Linklater and Tommy Pallotta

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood.

This film is such a joyous experience for the audience. How long has this idea been kicking around?

Richard Linklater: Like a lot of films that I’ve done, it had a really long gestation. I first had the idea around 2004. I thought 1969 was an interesting time to be a kid. I happened to live near NASA as we were walking on the moon. I wanted to show that whole Apollo program from the kid point of view, from the consumer point of view, sort of from the bottom up. We’ve seen a lot of films from the astronaut’s viewpoint. I wanted to get that in there but also to show how exciting it was to be alive during that time, especially as a kid. About ten years later I had a script, after thinking about it for years. Early on, I had the idea to recreate that time and also recreate this fantasy I had as probably a first-grader… “what if NASA needed me?” They say childhood ends when you stop having fantasies like that and start realizing how the world works! But at that age, you’re filled with stories and purpose and the idea that you can be helpful in the world. I don’t usually have that in my movies, but I thought it was a funny idea. Then I started doing the NASA research and started to see it from the adult perspective. Tommy and I have made two animated films, but it had been a while, so I started talking to him about this. Up until then, it wasn’t conceived as an animated film. It was live-action, but it wasn’t quite working in my head. Once I began talking to Tommy and thinking of it as animated, that’s when I knew how it would play for the viewer, in the mind where fantasy and memory and imagination reside. The literalness of live action wasn’t really helping the story. There’s something about animation that suspends your critical function a little bit and takes you into some completely constructed world. I think that’s the strength of animation—you just buy into the world that’s been created. Once we turned that corner and got going, it got really fun.

your visual memory is a big scrapbook

And Tommy, as a producer and head of animation, what were your initial impressions of the project?

Tommy Pallotta: I had been talking to Rick about it for a year, even before he had thought of it as an animation. I grew up in a suburb also in the shadow of NASA and in fact Rick and I temporarily lived in the same housing division, even though we didn’t know each other back then. He had been interviewing people and their memories of the time, things like that. And in the back of my mind, I couldn’t help thinking, oh man I want to work on this film but it wasn’t until he gave me a call in 2019 and sent over the script that he finally asked me what I thought. And I said, “why did it take you so long to ask me what I thought about it?!” I was really excited about it and the animation to me was really about the subjectivity of Stan’s mind and the idea that he’s older looking back onto it. When we did the animation, it allowed him to have the specificity and the creative flourishes of imagination and childhood.

It’s fascinating to think how this film feels like a descendant of Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, even though it’s completely different. How did you both conceive of it as an evolution of your older work?

RL: I think we felt we had left it all on the field with A Scanner Darkly, which was an evolution in itself from Waking Life. Both of those films were perfect reflections of what we were trying to do at that time. But this really required a different palette to approach it as a period piece, and very specific. We had all this documentary footage and newsreel. We were creating a lot of actual history. I think a lot of that was holdover from the original conception of it as live action. We were having fun visual ideas as we talked about our palette, and saw it as this 1960s scrapbook look and feel, Kodachrome 40 with a lot of textures. It seemed like a great opportunity visually to tell this story.

TP: Every story has different characters and different themes and the animation should fit around that, instead of having a look and then trying to fit the story within that. Those past films were really rotoscoped films, 100%, and this has some rotoscope in it in terms of the performance capture, but everything else is traditional 2D animation. I think we drew on a lot of techniques that really reminded us of our childhood, like old Disney films but also Saturday morning cartoons, pop art from that period. We even animated it on twos, which means you do every other frame and that gives it that sort of Saturday morning feeling. It’s really about trying to get into that type of tone and mindset of that period and those characters.

There are so many different styles in the film. I couldn’t even keep track and it was a beautiful way to build the film around it with different storytelling beats.

RL: It was all in service to the story, like Tommy said. Think about how your memory works over time. You have your own lived memory from your life, but you also have memories from things you watched on TV, documentaries, cartoons. So your visual memory is a big scrapbook. We go through our lives with a lot of different textures and looks. Everything we did was to capture the essence of this story and capture the time and place and idea.

Tommy, how do you coordinate an army of people in the service of this film and keeping the vision consistent?

TP: It’s always one of the biggest challenges in making a film, even non-animated. You’re trying to get a shared vision among a large group of people. This was especially interesting and difficult to navigate because we had the pandemic. We shot some of our prints before the pandemic right before lockdown started. So some of the editing had to be remote. We started to build a team slowly and organically. Luckily, people who worked on this project are people that have worked on projects together for well over a decade. And I think that familiarity and the friendship and the shorthand when you have frequent collaborators really made it possible to make this movie with that cohesive vision all the way through. It started slowly, and Rick can really attest to this. It’s like watching paint dry. You’re doing design and backgrounds first, then you start working on the character animations and designs, and then you start to put it all together. It slowly builds and builds and as people become more familiar with it, pretty soon there’s just an avalanche of animation that comes through at the end as it all gets put together. In a way, you have about eighteen months to fine-tune that vision and go through the entire process.

Can you tell us if there are any autobiographical elements to the story?

RL: I’m one of the few filmmakers who will admit autobiography! Yeah, that was my high school, that was my college, yeah I met a girl once and we walked around all night. I never perfected the thing of “oh no, I just make all this up.” I don’t think autobiographical elements are all that big of an admission. That’s because by the time you’re actually doing it, it’s something else. You can try to make it 100% accurate, but more importantly you’re trying to make an entertaining story and something people can enjoy. You don’t stick to the facts. I’ll always push it to tell a better story so I’m not confined to any rules of autobiography. That said, the whole movie is almost embarrassingly autobiographical. But I was also making a kind of group autobiography of a time and a place. My dad didn’t work at NASA, but I had a lot of friends whose dads did. That helps tell our story better. Growing up, I was more on the cleaning up the table, taking out the trash and doing the dishes side of it. So I called up my sisters and asked “what was the food prep like?” and I’d remember once they rattled the items off… the Jell-o mold, the canned hams.  One of our producers, Mike Blizzard, he actually went to Ed White Elementary, which was the one closest to NASA. Tommy and I went to Westwood Elementary, which was a school farther away from NASA but still in the area. Of course we’re going to put in the one right next to NASA!

Q&A with J. Quinton Johnson, Richard Linklater, Laurence Fishburne, and Bryan Cranston

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Last Flag Flying. 

Can you talk about how found this story and why it’s important to tell now?
Richard Linklater: I read Darryl Ponicsan’s book and just loved the characters twelve years ago. I started working on the script and we didn’t get the film off the ground then.  All those years went by and now I think the movie is about something very different to the war films that they were trying to make in 2005 and 2006.  War was an open wound and there was urgency around everything, but now we’re in a different place. I gave the script to Amazon and they really liked it, so that led to the film being made. I was very blessed to get this great group of actors together.

Laurence Fishburne:  I got a phone call from Rick and had a great conversation during which I discovered that we share a birthday.  I read it I was excited because I hadn’t seen anything like it and it’s an unusual piece, even risky, just in terms of the main event: we’re dealing with the death of a child.

J. Quinton Johnson: For me, it was like a series of emails.  We had just come off of Everybody Wants Some in Texas and Rick asked me if I was interested. I read the script and the night he gave it to me and I was immediately interested in working on it.

“It’s this idea that you surrender to something that is bigger than you.”

What was the preparation process for these characters?
Bryan Cranston: We all know guys like Sal.  He’s a consumer. He wants to eat, drink, do drugs, have sex, and just take up all the air in their room. Sal is that guy that you think you can’t spend more than an hour with. However, there is a salvation to him is that he’s the first to say, “I’m in,” and the first to help out. There’s a nobility at the base of who he is, but he’s so covered with calluses of his history of self-abuse it’s hard to figure out who he is and what he thinks.

Fishburne:  I have a friend who is very close to a minister, who was a veteran. He sent me some scripture and I just started thinking about things on the day and came up with a bunch of ideas.  I started riffing on this idea of what it means to have a “God moment” and what it is to surrender your will because that’s one of the greatest things of all religious life. It’s this idea that you surrender to something that is bigger than you. Going off of that and his love for Ruth, who inspires him to be a better and bigger man fulfilling his purpose, shaped the character of Richard.

Can you talk about the actual production and filming in Pittsburgh?
Linklater: It was great to film in Pittsburgh and there was a great film community. I brought most of my department heads from Austin, Texas, where I’m based. It was a great experience since we were able to get the looks we wanted to capture that Eastern Seaboard feel and there was a lot we were able to accomplish in Pittsburgh alone.  Of course, we had to come to New York City, since you can’t fake that anywhere. With this being a road movie at its core, we were able to get a lot of diverse locations in one area.

 

Q&A with Richard Linklater, Wyatt Russell, Blake Jenner, and Tyler Hoechlin

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Everybody Wants Some!!. 

You said that your biggest talent was in the casting of the film. That’s not something we always hear from directors.

Richard Linklater: I think the movie speaks for itself in that way. It’s like the vibe you get from people. It’s sort of like picking a team, to go with sports analogies. Who are the right role players? We meet hundreds of people so it’s important to pick the right vibe about who is going to get along together. If you make a few mistakes, it throws off everything. Even as we started, we had a three-week rehearsal workshop time, and Glen [Powell, who played Finnegan] said “Rick, did you sniff this out? Did everyone get along?” If there had been a jerk in the group, I would’ve been ready to fire him.

“The brotherhood and the camaraderie you see was given birth to before we even set foot on the set.”

What was it like being on Richard Linklater’s ranch for that rehearsal period?

Tyler Hoechlin: It was sort of everything. It was like the ultimate actor/adult/bro summer camp. We had the best time and we had baseball – I was about say baseball rehearsals! – we had baseball practice, script run-throughs, discovering things between the lines together and playing with certain things, like re-distributing lines when they didn’t fit one person to another. And dance rehearsals. The biggest part of the “homework” was just getting to know each other. That was the most important part. The brotherhood and the camaraderie you see in the film, all of that was given birth to before we even set foot on the set.

Wyatt Russell: I would say it felt like we made the movie in those three weeks, and then we just had to show up and put the costumes on and film it.

How did the costumes and time period affect your performances?

Hoechlin: I remember the first time I put on a McReynolds outfit, I walked completely different. We did everything in this movie together. Even if you weren’t working that day, everyone showed up to set everyday. When we finished, we’d all hang out. I remember putting on my McReynolds stuff and walking out with a little wig and going to a table that some of the guys were sitting at, and I felt myself walking differently. I was like, this is so weird, it doesn’t even feel like me anymore. I could not be any hairier or more confident. This looks good on me! I didn’t even have to ask.

Russell: I concur. Peacock city: population, you! Yeah, we had no choice but to really embrace it all. And with all the sets, the wigs, everything was just another layer. The music. It was kind of like an artistic Thanksgiving.

Linklater: For all that, I didn’t want the movie to call any attention to it. When you’re living in a period, you don’t realize it . . . I didn’t want the film to reflect on it ironically or otherwise, other than to just show exactly how it was.

While watching the movie, it feels like you know these guys from your own life, but you also can’t help thinking how different this would be in current times.

Linklater: Back then the drinking age was eighteen so practically every college student could go to a bar. Back then you’d have five guys driving around in a car singing Rapper’s Delight. A lot of the camaraderie comes out of sheer boredom. Group boredom. Ten minutes as we drive from here to there. Driving around and cranking the tunes.

Blake Jenner: As a guy, you had to do a lot of legwork back then. Now, I don’t think a young man would go to a girl’s dorm and leave flowers and a note on her door. I think it would be more like a quick Facebook poke.

Russell: You’d have to step up and like, buy her a cow on Farmville. That’s how I got my girlfriend.

The dancing in the film is almost a bigger part than the baseball in a way. Can you talk about dancing in the particular fashion for this time period?

Linklater: Disco was kind of on its last legs, as a commercial medium I think. It was wild to see these guys. It wasn’t choreography, it was dance lessons. It wasn’t going to be group dancing like you’re in something too elaborate. But it was pretty wild. That’s when I realized so much time had passed since that period. You know, you think in your own life, it wasn’t that long ago. But then I realized none of these guys had even been born back then.

Russell: It’s funny, when I was playing hockey in Europe, it felt like a weird version of going back to the 80s when you go to clubs. I think it would be fun to open up a kind of club like that right now. It really was fun because of the music and there really was more dancing.

Linklater: I would put it in the category of a kind of a mating ritual. Girls would ask the guys to dance. A mix and match kind of thing. And if you would keep dancing with someone, that was a good sign.