Interview: Richard Linklater

Richard Linklater releases his second film of 2006 with Fast Food Nation, a film adaptation of Eric Schlosser’s bestselling book of the same title. Earlier this year he released A Scanner Darkly, another adaptation, this from a Philip K. Dick novel about a narcotic’s officer in the near future loosing his grip on reality as he’s drawn further and further into an addiction to Substance D, a euphoric drug with the side effect of causing the right and left sides of the brain to act independently and compete with each other. Linklater took and experimental approach – shooting it in digital video and animating it in post-production with a computer-based rotoscoping program – and stayed very true to the source material, something previous adaptations of Dick’s work (Total Recall, Minority Report, Blade Runner) veered away from. With Fast Food Nation, Linklater and Schlosser do the complete opposite – while the book Fast Food Nation is a piece of investigative journalism, Fast Food Nation the movie is a narrative feature.

The problem with writing about Richard Linklater is where the hell does one begin? If judged by versatility, few filmmakers are in the same league as Linklater. He can direct a film that takes place entirely in one room (Tape), or a film with multiple storylines, like Fast Food Nation. He can adapt a previous work (A Scanner Darlky) just as well as he can write original works (Before Sunset — nominated for an Academy Award). My favorite film directed by him is without question Suburbia, his filmic adaptation of Eric Bogosian’s phenomenal play set entirely in back of a convenience store (don’t even think about comparing it to Clerks, Bogosian’s characters helm from a deeper and blacker vein that Randal and Dante would need a summer’s vacation in Guantanamo Bay to tap into – no disrespect to Smith, he’s a genius in his own right, and not to say that Bogosian isn’t funny, he’s fucking hysterical). Though lighter at heart than the stage version, Linklater demonstrated impeccable judgment in where to expand the play (the movie steps beyond the single setting), where to adjust the characters and performances (the entire cast is as close to perfect as anyone has ever come) for the transition from stage to screen, not to mention the camera work, choice in music (great intro sequence cut to “A Town Without Pity”).

Linklater also has a knack for utilizing talented casts. Suburbia featured Giovanni Ribisi, Nicky Katt, Steve Zahn and Parker Posey. Then, of course, there is Dazed and Confused, one of the significant works in the Gen X pop culture cannon, with Mathew McConaughey, Milla Jovovich, Joey Lauren Adams and Ben Affleck. Fast Food Nation is no exception. Ambitious in the scope of story it tells, Fast Food Nation utilizes separate plotlines to examine the role of fast food in society from multiple socio-economic angles (similar to Traffic, Syriana, or even Requiem for a Dream).

Greg Kinnear stars as a company man for the (fictional) Mickey’s Fast Food Restaurant, sent to check on the meat processing plant in Colorado where most of Mickey’s burgers come from when it is discovered the meat has quite a high fecal content. Interwoven with his storyare the stories of a group of illegal immigrant workers who cross the border and find themselves employees in the slaughterhouse/processing plant, played by Wilmer Valderrama (best known for his role as Fes on “That 70’s Show”) and Catalina Sandino Moreno (Maria Full of Grace). Ashley Johnson (Nearing Grace) and Paul Dano (Little Miss Sunshine) play teenage employees of the local Mickey’s.

I had the chance to participate in a roundtable discussion with Linklater while he was in New York promoting the release of Fast Food Nation.

Question: How did you get permission to shoot in an actual slaughterhouse?
Richard Linklater: Oh wow. We… well we knew we couldn’t get access in the United States. Even the ones that were friendly to us wouldn’t let us. So, we were down in Mexico doing the desert scenes and those border-town scenes, so we got access at some facilities down there by kind of emphasizing, I wouldn’t say technically lying, but by over-emphasizing the story – one of our stories, one of our three stories.

Q: Which story?
RL: The Mexicans going north to work, and the fact that those facilities, we weren’t saying it was set in Mexico, we’re saying this is Colorado. And frankly those facilities were a lot newer and nicer and cleaner than anything we saw in the U.S. The lines there, I think they do about 50 cattle an hour. In the U.S. they’re doing like 400. The workers there, they worked a shift, they went home, they felt all kind of clean and nice, they punch out.

Q: In the U.S. the conditions are a bit harsher?
RL: Yeah. Those Mexican facilities were actually exporting that beef you saw in the movie – and everything you saw in the movie is actual work being done – that beef is all going to Japan. Not the burgers, those are to be the ones down there, but… yeah.

Q: This is quite a production, what made you want to take on this? It’s quite different than a lot of Hollywood flicks?
RL: Yeah it is [laughs]. I don’t know, I mean it’s an industry, an issue I’ve always been interested in my whole adult life, as far as the industrialization of food, and… it’s a really complex world. I had my own feelings about it, certainly. But, it was a challenge on a filmmaking level, because it’s kind of epic in it’s design, but we were very low-budget in our reality. The scope and ambition of the film was bigger than our budget or schedule. But I felt like this was my own – in a way… I wanted to portray working people, that is my own background. I was an offshore oil worker for two and a half years, early twenties. I kind of… I’m not saying it’s as bad as working in these facilities or crossing a desert and risking your life or all that, but I kind of do know what it’s like to be at the bottom of the – the expendable labor at the bottom of a big vast industry, you know. And my own background, I always worked in… I was the busboy, the dishwasher, I had crappy job, no family connections. I just kind of always see the world through crappy labor perspective. With the irony now, I think I have probably the best occupation in the world, [laughs] like I’m the most lucky guy in the world probably, but I still kind of see the world in those kind of class issues. You can’t totally escape you background, probably, so….

Q: Did you want this to be a political film that initiates change?
RL: I think it can’t help but be analyzed on a political level. So it’s the kind of policies I get behind, I’m not making a movie about policies or specifics, it’s that old notion of the politics of everyday life. You see systems playing out, and you can draw your political conclusions, and I see this as… it is a huge system, and it is a system, no one person can enter it and change it. We kind of depict that in the movie when Don, he chooses kind of not to accept the status quo, it’s how it’s always been, no one person’s gonna do it. It kind of puts it back on all of us. If there’s an activist element in it, I think it’s the unsatisfying nature of it’s hero-story, that it doesn’t end on, ‘Oh, it’s all taken care of.’ You don’t come out of ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ going ‘Okay, Al Gore’s got it taken care of, I don’t have to do anything.’ I didn’t want to… if we showed a guy, ‘He came in an organized a union, and it’s all done, I don’t have to think about it.’ It’s such a big issue, we’re all so connected to it. It’s such a big issue in our time that I think it comes back — and my faith is – at a consumer level. I don’t think the government is going to initiate anything, I don’t think. In fact they’ve kind of gone in the other direction with lack of oversight. I think obviously corporations don’t police themselves very well in our system. So I do think the one thing our system is designed to respond to is consumer demand. So that changes…. If people demand certain standard, or certain treatment… that they can analyze a certain system and say, ‘Okay I want this and not this, not that,’ at a consumer level and things can change. You see these masses we work for, when you find out a product is the product of say… what you can only consider slave labor in some other country, you quit – and you know about it – and you quit buying it and people… it gets publicity and people respond in the marketplace. But I think for us, something that’s domestic, I think it’s more complex than that. But I think when you really know the facts, you can sit back and go, ‘Maybe these industrial models, industrial American model, has overstepped in an area that it’s healthy for everyone involved to pull back just a little bit. We can still feed ourselves and treat the workers better, treat the animals better, treat the environment better. And have a healthier end product, which is most important to most people. But it can be done.

Ethan Hawke makes an appearence as a political-minded uncle who opens the eyes of his teenage neice.

Q: Is that how you decided on using three or four story lines, this being the focus?
RL: Yeah, I mean it was tough. It’s like getting those people that seem like the parts in the fast food chain that can speak to the whole in a way, and who they would interact with. That’s the fun creative part. And for me, by the end I’m sort of autobiographically… I feel like I’m all these people at different times in my life. I was that teenager whose uncle came to visit whose eyes were being opened to the world, you know. I was those workers in a way, not that specific job, but like I said, something similar to it. Now I’m probably like Kinnear’s character, I’m a guy with something to lose, kids. I can hear things that don’t fit in what I think are my values and I move on in life. You know, you see something like that and go, ‘Well, I guess that’s the way it is.’ I do that all day long, like we all do. ‘Oh, my government’s torturing people now?’ That’s dissonant to what I thought my country was, but did I march? Did I even call my representative? You know? No. I’m against it, it sounds bad, but what am I doing…. I don’t know. I think I’m that guy now.

Q: Have you ever worked in a restaurant or a fast food place?
RL: Yeah, yeah, always had that job. I was always the dishwasher…

Q: What was that like?
RL: I worked at places that were actually sit down, but they might as well have been fast food, you know kinda one step above it, everything is frozen [laughs]. Like that kind of place. But I never did the specific fast food. But when I was a teenager – that’s grown a lot since then – they were just coming into my town when I was about that age. Now it’s all that. But back then we got a McDonald’s when I was thirteen or fourteen.

Q: Why the decision to make it a narrative story and not a documentary?
RL: I don’t really do documentaries, or I don’t think in those terms. I wouldn’t really know how, maybe. Or maybe I would, but I think someone else could possibly do it better. It was Eric’s idea to toss out the book and concentrate… that’s what pulled me in, I think that’s why he wanted to meet with me about it. What he described was ‘Let’s throw out the book and make it about a town, make it about a geographic place and about an industry, and whatever the book’s about will come out in these characters.’ That seemed to make sense to me, that’s kind of what I do. As a filmmaker I try to make stories about people and it’s all pretty character-based work, and like I said it was an industry that interested me. So we just sort of started from there. I never would have come up with that on my own, that was his idea, to throw that out. It would have been pretty cavalier of me to say, ‘Hey, let’s keep the title of your book, but throw it out.’ [laughs]

Q: Was it difficult adapting a nonfiction book into a narrative film?
RL: Not once you throw it away [laughs]. It was really just… I never went back and read the book. I mean, I’d read it, I’d taken it in. But just having Eric there, and he sort of gave it to me, he said ‘I can be involved as much as you want,’ and I was like, ‘I want you involved the whole way.’ Because he was kind of my conduit for a lot of… I met a lot of ranchers, I met a lot of people portrayed in the book. Eric I give a lot of credit to for the general story, I mean he’s a natural dramatist, he wrote plays and things, so he’s not just a nonfiction – he’s a brilliant investigative journalist, what he does is amazing I think – but my respect for him couldn’t have… I come out of this project, I mean my respect for him was here at the start, but here and now I see what he does in this world, and those are the most important people in our culture as a healthy mechanism for… the people who are looking behind the corporate veil or the government veil are so important to all of us who don’t have our eye on it, to get the facts. So, I think that’s the bravest person in our culture, whatever medium they’re working in, whether they’re making a documentary about it, or writing, or question the policies, or products… that’s so important. But… did I answer your question? [laughs]

Q: What kind of camera was the film shot on? In your prior films you’ve used digital video, you’ve gotten away from just the standard 35mm?
RL: This was kind of going back to old school, shooting on Super 16, 16mm kind of documentary format. I knew the limitations going in, we would be in those facilities and we couldn’t use lights, and I had to think of it in a kind of documentary style. And I didn’t want the styles to be different for different stories, I wanted it to feel of the same. And I thought that was the right – for the realism I was going for – that it was right for.

Q: How do you feel about digital filmmaking and HD and things like that, a lot of people are very against it?
RL: Well, on some movies I would be very for it, and for others I would be very against it. It just depends on what you’re – I mean, to me I love technology for that reason because I think it’s all about communication, it’s there to help us communicate. But it’s just a palette, it’s just another color on your palette. As a director, how to communicate your story, it’s fun to have options. What will best communicate? But it’s always been like that… do you shoot in black and white, do you shoot in cinemascope, do you shoot in… what technologies do you use? It’s fun to have all those things available, but it’s still… they’re just tools to assist you in communicating to a viewer. I think there’s no absolutes, that’s what I’m getting at. I’m not one of these, ‘Film is dead! Everything is HD!’ No, another kind of film, I think that works.

Luis Guzman helps aid Mexican citizens with safe passage across the U.S. border.

Q: How do you think the fast food industry will react to this movie?
RL: I don’t know, they’re pretty good at… they know, they know their food’s unhealthy and that’s not what they’re selling, they’re selling convenience and a certain brainwashing thing. They’re basically… they know it’s not healthy. I think they respond in a defensive way, and this is just a little… we’re a mosquito around them for a couple weeks here. When you can spend ten billion a year in advertising, and you’re pretty much self-regulated, you pretty much don’t have to do much, it’s a PR issue for them. They have these fun organizations they fund to get out there and talk about choice and freedom and that kind of stuff [laughs].

Q: The Bruce Willis and Kris Kristofferson characters, were they based on real people?
RL: Actually both of them were more amalgamations of real people, particularly the ranchers. What Kris was saying we heard out of the mouths of ranchers. They’re sort of under assault in the same way the family farm is under assault. It’s hard economically in this culture to compete with that factory model. Once the total focus is profits… and when we say ‘Fast Food Nation,’ I think that’s what we’re getting at, is this efficient profit model that wins in the free market, but is unhealthy on every other level. But that wins, and it’s a winner take all kind of thing. So you see all these ranchers going out of business, selling their ranches. They’re really just driven to unprofitability because this other model won in the marketplace, but it’s so unhealthy it shouldn’t be seen on an equal level. I have a lot of respect for these people, and I know what they’re… I mean having seen now firsthand what they’re going through, it’s tough and it’s sad. It’s like the family farm. And I don’t know if people really realize that, that the battle’s being waged on not a level playing field, and one side’s not playing by the same rules, that they actually care about the health of the product, they care about their workers, they care about their animals, they’re better stewards of they land, they’re not polluting the environment. Once you throw all that out and just go for profits, you’re going to win. But it’s up to culture, it’s up to society to stand back and say, ‘You can do that and be very profitable, but at what cost? And maybe we’ve overstepped and can pull back just a little bit.’ But until you know that as a consumer, you can’t really make a choice.

Q: Are you surprised a large corporation agreed to back this film?
RL: Well, they didn’t finance it initially, they agreed to distribute it. Not really, I mean that’s kind of the wonderfulness of our system, I mean as much as we can be critical of it, it is a pretty open, fluid system. I mean that Fox is distributing it, some people see irony there, but I never see them as a moral or a political arm, I see them as a financial… I think Rupert himself is about money, it’s about what’s good for Rupert. So…

Q: I read somewhere you’re a vegetarian.
RL: I certainly didn’t start out that way. But yeah, in my adult… at age 23 I decided to not…

Q: What made you want to become a vegetarian?
RL: Well, I think that once I decided I didn’t like that factory model I just described, you know it just seemed so unhealthy. I guess from an animal perspective, having grown up around animals, it just seemed so unfair. It’s just a bummer not have a free range life… if you’re a pig, which is a really intelligent little animal – having had pigs – and to know that they never see daylight and they’re in cages and they can’t breathe normally. It just seems kind of tragic on that level. So I didn’t want to support it with my consumer dollars, I wasn’t a big activist about it, a lot of people who know me don’t even know about it, that I don’t eat meat, but I quit supporting that a long time ago. But my interest in it, the information I’ve taken in over the years has only deepened a lot of my feelings about it…. That was just my own life decision, you don’t…. But I grew up kind of being taught that, well first a burger, fries and a shake was a well-balance meal, you know, all the food groups being represented [laughs]. And also, I remember a biology teacher, in the one class you have on nutrition or whatever, saying people that don’t eat meat are fools because they’re not getting some protein or something. So I thought that if I didn’t eat meat every day I would die… until I got older and met some older people, ‘Oh I’m a vegetarian,’ usually some cute girl you meet or something, and you’re like, ‘Really, she seems pretty healthy to me!’ It’s like when you kind of find out, ‘Oh they’re lying to you’ and you’re like ‘Really, to what degree am I being lied to?’ and then you do some research and you’re like, ‘Oh?’ Or you think, ‘Ghandi was a vegetarian!’ and you don’t associate his fast with how skinny he was [laughs]. And I was an athlete too, and you’re really taught steak and potatoes and you got to do that. And I never put it all together, I had such an unhealthy diet and could barely feed myself… like hamburger helper was better than vegetable soup or something, I just never… my eyes were opened to it and I just realized. For me it was animal rights and the environment and all those things, and health just seemed like a nice offshoot of that. And I realized, ‘Wow.’ I remember having headaches and my energy was way up and down, and I never related that to my diet, but now I’m like, ‘God, I haven’t had a headache in 20 years.’ My energy is pretty constant. That fast food meal tastes great, it’s all sugar and salt and squishy and it’s great as you eat it. But why do you feel like shit 10, 15 minutes later, why do you…. I never put all that together, so…. But I think Supersize Me, and there’s more people out there thinking like that now. But from where I came from it was my own little revelation. And I’m thankful for it.

Q: How did you own pigs?
RL: My grandparents owned pigs. I had a bull, a bull named Bo. You raise Bo and then you eat Bo. That’s how it goes. You hunt, all that. That’s why I’m not against hunters, if they can… if you can kill your food, go ahead. But it’s the people who are squeamish about it, that’s like someone doing your killing for you. And if you can’t do it, if you can’t ring that chicken’s neck and do it yourself, maybe you should be… I don’t know, again that’s kind of a rural, a rural perspective maybe [laughs].

Fox Searchlight releases Fast Food Nation on November 17th in limited theatres.