Filmmaker Richard Linklater is currently riding a wave of ecstatic reviews out of the Venice Film Festival for his darkly comedic assassin thriller film “Hit Man” starring Glenn Powell.
Linklater broke through in the early 1990s with films like “Dazed and Confused” and “Before Sunrise” and has steadily worked ever since on movies including “School of Rock,” “Boyhood,” “Bernie,” “A Scanner Darkly,” “Waking Life,” “Everybody Wants Some” and “Apollo 10 1/2”.
Doing press rounds for his new film, the director also spoke with The Hollywood Reporter and touched upon the current state of the film industry. It doesn’t sound like he’s a fan of where it’s gone.
Asked if a career like his would be possible anymore in this day and age, and the current state of American filmmaking, he says he’s glad he managed to get some films out before computer-driven statistics and algorithms took over:
“It feels like it’s gone with the wind – or gone with the algorithm. Sometimes I’ll talk to some of my contemporaries who I came up with during the 1990s, and we’ll go, ‘Oh my God, we could never get that done today’… I was able to participate in what always feels like the last good era for filmmaking.”
He points to distribution having “fallen off” and wonders if there is a “new generation that really values cinema anymore?” before quickly acknowledging that was a “dark thought”.
But he also acknowledges that it’s “hard to see cinema slipping back into the prominence it once held”… especially indie cinema.
Even so, some filmmakers like Christopher Nolan, Denis Villeneuve and many more have all emerged in recent years and offered exciting takes on the medium.
