Background

subUrbia is director Richard Linklater's latest in a series of films exploring the dramatic elements of ordinary lives. As in his wildly acclaimed previous works - Slacker, Dazed And Confused and Before Sunrise - Linklater examines characters at a crossroads, and as a night passes and a new day dawns, the audience observes their tenuous evolution and halting few steps towards a new level of enlightenment, a new way of thinking and being.

Linklater first began thinking of making the film after seeing the Lincoln Center Theatre's initial production of Eric Bogosian's play in the summer of 1994. Ironically, Linklater also happened to be Bogosian's first choice of directors, but the 1994 release of Before Sunrise and Linklater's involvement with another project put the idea of a film version of "subUrbia" on hold.

It was not until a year later, when Linklater urged Bogosian to perform in Austin, that the "subUrbia" project came up again. A project Linklater was working on got pushed back and suddenly the timing was right. In early 1996 Linklater and producer John Sloss brought the project to Castle Rock Entertainment (which had produced Before Sunrise) and the production was greenlighted. Photography commenced nine weeks later, shot on location in Austin.

This was the first time that Linklater directed a story that didn't originate with him, but these characters were far from strangers to him. "Jeff is me at that age - that is exactly what I was doing," he says. While Bogosian sees a bit of himself in all of the characters, he also strongly relates to Jeff, saying "When I wrote this story about Jeff, it never occurred to me that I was writing my own story."

While East Texas, where Linklater grew up, seems cultural light years away from Bogosian's home in Woburn, Massachusetts, Linklater explains that they share a common experience of being raised in the suburbs. "I spent time in towns like Burnfield. Parents want to raise families there because they wanted the best for them - clean schools, nice neighborhoods, a lot of room to ride around on bikes; a supposed tranquil, non-threatening place to grow up."

Bogosian adds, "Most people think of the suburbs as a very clean-cut place, but that's not the suburbs I grew up in and I think that's the case for most people. The middle class is not as shiny as everybody wants to believe - the real middle class isn't like a TV sitcom; it's full of issues that are serious. When you grow up there, you feel it... This was our parents' dream, but we ended up hanging out at the mall, the fast-food joints, drinking and driving with nothing to do... If it's the American Dream, why does it feel so fucked-up?"

Bogosian and Linklater agree that the story is about good people who find themselves in a bad place. "This story is populated by people I grew up with," Bogosian says. "People as brilliant and as great and as wonderful as anyone I ever met. But there was a tragic side. Some lives just came to a dead end. Some people died. It happened in car accidents, drinking and driving, alcoholism, smoking stuff and even suicides. The question is, Why?"

"Suburbia is our culture," Linklater explains. "There is a part of me that hates it. I hate the architecture; it's deadly, it kills the soul. That's what the opening sequence is all about. But on the other hand, it is inhabited by individuals, decent people just trying to get through the day. I feel for the characters in the film trying to make their way in the world. It's about overcoming fear and whatever circumstances you find yourself in to become the best person you could be, to realize your potential - wherever you're starting from. These people just happen to be starting from Burnfield."

Bogosian adds, "Jeff and Tim and Sooze and Bee-Bee are struggling with that bridge you cross from youth to adulthood, where a lot of harsh realities start to come into play, and life is not simple anymore. This is about people who want to go places and don't know how."

Both writer and director know something about that. Bogosian dropped out of the University of Chicago, went home and got a job at the mall selling jeans. Linklater spent two years in college before dropping out to work on offshore oil rigs, biding his time reading and seeing as many films as possible when he was on shore. Both have come a long way since their suburban roots and indeed share similar concerns in their work, constantly returning to, according to Bogosian, "What it means to be an American, in the best sense of the word, an idealist." Linklater jokingly reflects on the similarities between himself and Bogosian, stating that "We decided somewhere along the way that we were separated at birth."

Linklater has a straightforward approach to filmmaking. "I think people are generally interested in other people," he says. "If you put some interesting people on the screen, then the film moves, there's no down time. There's a whirlwind of activity going on inside each character. I like to show that in a plain way - I'm not interested in telling people what to think... My goal is always to imagine how a scene would be in real life. Taking my cues from the real world, not movies. So I'll say, 'okay, this is a real story, these are real people - this guy has a gun for these reasons and this guy for his reasons and they wouldn't really point them at each other from the get-go like every Hong Kong movie. It's about human scale."

Linklater's distinctive style is employed to a new end with subUrbia. "The biggest challenges for me were these dramatic aspects of the piece," he explains. "It had to work dramatically. Where the narratives in my previous films were looser and sort of diffused themselves, this reaches a boiling point; the ante is up. It's more concise, more aggressive. My other films are more about time passing, where this is about grasping time, people shaping it and fighting for their place in time. I'm pushing the actors instead of pulling them back."

Bogosian found working with the director a most rewarding experience. "Rick has been incredibly good about the script, and we worked together to solve problems that existed in it and to adapt it for the screen and understand how it could work," he says. "I had been writing the screenplay since the play went up, and had been slowly adjusting it. I wanted to make sure that the film would be true to the intent of the play. Rick guaranteed that."

Introduction € The Story € Background € The Players € The Concept