‘Before’ Director Richard Linklater
Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso
Higher Ground
4.8 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 29 October 2025
⏱️ 80 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Director Richard Linklater has made a career out of telling personal stories with universal appeal. Dazed and Confused, Waking Life, the Before trilogy, Boyhood. No matter the genre or form, Linklater’s human touch remains.
To mark the arrival of his latest films, Blue Moon and Nouvelle Vague, we return to our talk last summer with Linklater. We begin with Hit Man (6:36), his action-packed neo-noir (8:15) that also explores the malleability of identity (11:00). Then, Linklater reflects on his athletic career in college (17:20), the health scare that ushered in a period of creative exploration (18:48), and the renegade spirit that drove his first two feature films, It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books and Slacker (28:12).
On the back-half, Linklater describes a formative Sundance memory with director Robert Altman (34:00), his first experience at the helm of a major motion picture (37:48), and the lived serendipity that inspired his Before films (52:22). To close: a Hollywood state of the union (1:00:54), why Richard continues to create art from the fabric of his life (1:08:00), and whether Sam should return to directing himself (1:17:36).
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Original air date: June 9, 2024.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Lemonada |
| 0:02.0 | Lemonada |
| 0:04.0 | This is Talk Easy. I'm Stamforgo, so. Welcome to the show. |
| 0:43.0 | Today, my conversation with writer-director, Richard Linklater. |
| 0:49.5 | Linklater belongs to a class of independent filmmakers that you can identify by just saying their last names. |
| 0:58.1 | Soderberg, Lee, Tarantino, Fincher, Bigelow, the Coens, all of whom shaped the indie film boom of the 1990s. |
| 1:10.1 | But for many young wayward aspiring filmmakers, it was Linklater who offered the clearest roadmap, a way of making movies on a budget outside the system far away from Hollywood. |
| 1:13.4 | Instead, he told stories in and about Texas, |
| 1:18.2 | where he came of age in the 70s and 80s. From there, he built one of the most distinctive filmographies in American cinema, slacker, dazed and confused, boyhood, Bernie, everybody wants |
| 1:24.5 | some, the before trilogy, school of rock, films often grounded in the rhythms of everyday life. |
| 1:30.9 | We sat last year around the release of Hitman, his neo-noir-screwball comedy, starring Glenn Powell as a fake hitman for the New Orleans Police Department. |
| 1:40.9 | Now, only a year later, Linklater has returned with not one but two new films |
| 1:46.2 | in theaters this month. The first, Blue Moon, starring Ethan Hawk and Margaret Qualley, tells the |
| 1:51.9 | story of a songwriter struggling with alcoholism and mental health during the opening of Oklahoma. |
| 1:57.7 | The second film, Nouvelle Vogue, is a playful homage to French cinema, part essay, |
| 2:02.8 | part narrative experiment, that revisits John Luke Goddard's early years, from writing film criticism |
| 2:08.5 | to creating alongside Francois Truffaut, the treatment that became his first feature. |
| 2:14.3 | Taken together, the films reflect the duality of his work, the inward personal stories, |
| 2:19.4 | and the outward, more ambitious gestures towards cinema and culture itself. It's a rare moment |
| 2:24.8 | two films released at once from a writer-director who has always resisted easy categorization. |
| 2:31.0 | In this talk, we traced the flashpoints of his career, from an ambitious and broke 20-something in Austin to running a big budget set on days to confused, to today where he continues to create stories from the fabric of his life. |
| 2:45.2 | We also wanted to re-release this episode because it's now fully available on YouTube. |
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