EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!! written and directed by Richard Linklater, with Blake Jenner, Glen Powell, Tyler Hoechlin and Zoey Deutch. A Paramount Pictures release. 104 minutes. Opens Friday (April 1). See listing.
Richard Linklater's last movie, the decade-spanning character study Boyhood, ended with Ellar Coltrane's Mason arriving at college in Alpine, Texas.
His new movie, Everybody Wants Some!!, opens with its protagonist, a baseball player named Jake (Glee's Blake Jenner), arriving at college in Austin, Texas.
"The films are kind of close together, more than you would think," he tells me when we sit down at the Shangri-La. "For me personally, it's a transitional moment that I'm exploring."
Everybody Wants Some!! is set in the late summer of 1980, which also lines it up with his beloved "party movie" Dazed And Confused, whose action took place on the last day of high school in 1976. But this one's more focused.
"It's really just one guy's perspective," he says. "Dazed didn't have that… but I think this is how college felt. Like, in high school you're all over the map socially: different classes, different people, all on top of each other. College got more specific; all the freedom that comes to you as an adult, the freedom and going away from home, but it felt kinda like here's your new best friends, and you're all going to be around each other. So it was a very specific world."
To make that world feel real, Linklater immersed his ensemble - which also included Scream Queens' Glen Powell and Teen Wolf's Tyler Hoechlin - in an intensive rehearsal period.
"I have some land outside Austin with a bunkhouse, and they all just moved in," he says. "We had three weeks of living together, working together, rehearsing. It was cool. And absolutely necessary, because you're asking the audience to believe these older guys have been roommates for two or three years - they really know each other - and then here's the new guy. They all know each other's rhythms and stuff. I wouldn't know how to do that without immersing ourselves in it. And I need that time to figure out the script and kinda rewrite it. A lot of the humour, the lived-in humour in the script, comes out of that time. They're bringing so much to it."
Linklater writes these movies differently from his other films, starting out with an idea for a given scene, talking through it with his actors and then shaping those conversations into scripted dialogue. The Before sequels were shaped over months of discussion with stars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy; Boyhood was worked out year by year with the cast.
"In this case I had 10 years to think about it before I was actually shooting, so you've kinda got the tone and the pitch of it right [already], but the actual final words can come pretty late in the game," he says. "I'm very open to cast rewriting, or 'Let's find some new ideas.' Even up to shooting. I'm interested in the new ideas I have, too. As long as you're on the right track, it gets nothing but better."
His openness to new ideas nicely reflects the subtext of his talking movies, which are ultimately about how we decide to be the people we become.
"To be young is like, 'Well, maybe I am going to be different,'" he says. "And maybe you can pull it off. Maybe you're changing, maybe you really are that [new] person. But you're not gonna know for a while."