Filmography: Waking Life (2001); Tape (2001); School of Rock (2003); Before Sunset (2004); Bad News Bears (2005); Fast Food Nation (2006); A Scanner Darkly (2006); Me and Orson Wells (2008); Bernie (2011); Before Midnight (2013); Boyhood (2014) Richard Linklater is a bit of a directorial chameleon. The majority of his films have a preoccupation with very philosophical issues and consist mostly of conversations between two or more people. This is certainly the case with Linklater's "Before trilogy", of which the second and third films in the series, Before Sunset and Before Midnight, premiered in the 21st century. His highly unorthodox Waking Life, using rotoscope-animation to recreate the feeling of lucid dreaming, consists of nothing other than a man having a myriad of conversations with a wide range of people about a number of different, and highly abstract, topics. Linklater has also dipped his foot into mainstream territory from time to time, most successfully so with the Jack Black ode-to-rock film, School of Rock. His Bad News Bears remake starring Billy Bob Thornton seemed to be in the same vein, but its oddly sterile feel failed to win the approval of both audiences and critics. The next few years (and three films) saw Linklater in a relative funk, but the auteur got his groove back with the documentary/narrative hybrid Bernie in 2011, earning some strong notices and staunch supporters. After receiving another writing nomination from the Academy Awards last year for scribing Before Midnight, Linklater is back at it again this year with the intriguing Boyhood, a movie that was filmed every summer over 12 years in order to track the real-time growth of its young male adolescent star. Linklater may not be the most consistent director, but he's one of the most fascinating, unafraid to try anything and curious about almost everything. There are few directors who have as much on their minds as Linklater does, and when he communicates it well, cinema doesn't get much better.
A film fanatic at a very young age, starting with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies and gradually moving up to more sophisticated fare, at around the age of ten he became inexplicably obsessed with all things Oscar. With the incredibly trivial power of being able to chronologically name every Best Picture winner from memory, his lifelong goal is to see every Oscar nominated film, in every major category, in the history of the Academy Awards.
