18 Directors Who Sneaked In References To Their Own Movies

It seems that director Richard Linklater is quite the pinball enthusiast. Pinball machines feature in many of his movies including his little known 1988 debut It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books, his 1995 romantic drama Before Sunrise and his last movie Everybody Wants Some!.

But he has a special fondness for one pinball machine in particular: the 1971 Bally Fireball. It first appeared in his 1993 coming of age slacker comedy Dazed and Confused in a scene where Matthew McConaughey’s character David Wooderson struts into a pool hall to the tune of Bob Dylan’s Hurricane. The very same machine popped up again in his 2001 existentialist animation Waking Life whilst being played by a character voiced by the director himself.

Look closely at the Fireball scene in Waking Life and you’ll see another nod to Dazed and Confused in the form of a yellow smiley face on the machine’s scoreboard – the same style of smiley face that appeared on the film poster for Dazed and Confused.