The resulting tape, Dazed and Confused (1993), discovered a certain Matthew McConaughey (and also served as a platform for very young Ben Affleck, Parker Posey and Milla Jovovich) and is absolutely revered today, but at the time it was a failure at the box office, grossing only $8 million (it was later partially redeemed on VHS).
It was, however, a different time, where talent was treated with respect and Castle Rock, the production company of the great Rob Reiner, gave him $2.5 million to shoot his next filmwhich had a rather vague starting point: following two twenty-somethings – him American, she French – who have just met as they talk and walk (and fall in love) during an afternoon and evening in Vienna.
It was a concept not foreign to European cinema – it draws a lot from Éric Rohmer – but quite Martian for the Americans of that time (the freedom of the 70s was already far away), but Linklater – who we remember later convinced a studio to film Boyhood for more than a decade – he wanted to push it forward no matter what, because there was an important personal motivation behind it, one that the director did not reveal publicly until many years later.
Everything started from my own experience, a “brief encounter” he had with a woman named Amy Lehrhaupt, whom he met while visiting his sister in Philadelphia in 1989, when he was 29 years old and had just finished filming Slacker.
Rick slipped Amy a note after flirting in a toy store: “I’m going to be in town by myself tonight, in case you want to do something later.” They met, shared several hours talking about art, life and existence and at one point Linklater told him “I’m going to make a movie about this.” “What do you mean by this’? “What are you talking about?” she replied. “About this, about this feeling, about what is taking place between us.”
That particular moment finds its reflection in the film when Céline tells Jesse: “I believe that if God exists, he is not inside anyone. Not in you or me, but in this space between us”, but the film does not of course follow the real encounter completely faithfully.
Linklater and Lehrhaupt, who was 20 years old at the time, also spent the night walking together, from midnight to six in the morning, and shared some romantic moments (at least a kiss, although the director prefers to keep it a mystery about whether there was anything else). ), but unlike Jesse and Céline, who left everything up in the air for a meeting in the same place the following year, they did exchange numbers and addresses, and kept in touch for a while (he lived in Austin and she in New York, almost 2,500 kilometers away).
They exchanged letters and calls over the following months, but did not see each other again. and, as often happens, Linklater met someone and the contact faded naturally. What did not disappear was the strength of that encounter and the desire to recreate it, to immortalize it in some way through sound and image, and almost five years later Richard got to work with his friend Kim Krizanwho had acted in Slackers and Dazed and Confused. In just over ten days they had a first script ready.
