Waking Life : Production Notes

ABOUT THE PRODUCTION

The first challenge for Writer/Director Richard Linklater in beginning WAKING LIFE was to address the issue: "How do you make a film about something that most likely happens entirely in the mind?" The first script was more like "an idea, pages and pages of notes and a working method," Linklater says.

The actual shooting of the live action began in the summer of 1999 and took about 25 days. The crew was similar in size to a documentary crew - Linklater and Producer Tommy Pallotta, using consumer-level cameras (Sony TRV900s and one PC1), and one sound person who was also responsible for mixing.

Linklater and Pallotta agree that there was tremendous freedom and mobility in working with such a small crew. "Whenever you have a big crew, the director spends so much time telling so many different people what exactly he wants, but in this case, it was easy for Rick (Linklater) to pick up a camera and get what he wanted," Pallotta said. "It was the dream way to shoot a movie. " Linklater added, "I was back to locations that I'd been at with 100-person crews, and this time there were just four of us. " The difference was never more apparent than when Linklater and the crew went to shoot the jail scene at a location in Lockhart, TX that he had previously used for THE NEWTON BOYS. "The time we were there before, there were a lot of trucks, generators, a huge production. This time, we just zipped up in a car, filmed the whole scene in an hour and a half and left. "

The filmmakers still marvel at one extraordinary feat they achieved while shooting - in one day a total of 22 pages were shot. Typically a production will shoot about two or three pages a day. "It was an intense dialogue day," Linklater remembers, "that included the 'dream room' and two other lengthy sections. They were all well rehearsed. We gave everybody an hour and a half to shoot his or her scene over and over and we just worked through it. We had two cameras, lots of footage, nothing rushed, and pretty soon it's 5 o'clock, we're through and we've shot 22 pages of dialogue. I don't think there are too many films that can do that. It was wild. "

The shooting, was limited to three cities - Austin and the surrounding areas, New York and San Antonio. But in keeping with the surreal feel of the film, there are no geographical references. In some instances, there is a bridge that resembles the Brooklyn Bridge, a subway that resembles a New York subway, or a skyline that has the feel of Austin, but there is never a positive indicator of those locations.

Several of the locations that were used had personal links to the filmmakers. To begin with, lead actor Wiley Wiggins' bedroom, to which we return several times, was Art Director Bob Sabiston's bedroom in the house he and Pallotta shared. The always-wavering digital clock that continued to remind Wiley of his dream state was Sabiston's clock. Similarly, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy's scene was shot at Linklater's apartment in Austin. But, in typical independent film fashion, there were also the less orthodox locales like the one used for the train boxcar scene. For that particular day, the filmmakers actually crawled under a chain link fence to get their shot. "We were so down and dirty," Linklater muses. "It felt like renegade, low-budget film where you could just take locations and steal stuff. "

One particular incident that occurred while shooting truly summed up the everyone-pitch-in nature of the making of WAKING LIFE. Pallotta describes how he and Linklater had spent a day hanging out of a helicopter over the city of Austin in an attempt to get the footage for the flying sections of the movie. When Linklater reviewed the footage, he found that it didn't have the ethereal floating feeling he was seeking. By a stroke of luck, Pallotta and Sabiston's next-door neighbor happened to be a hot air balloonist. They approached him and he agreed to take Linklater up for a day of shooting where he was able to capture the appropriate effect.

Unlike typical films for which editing would not begin until the shooting is complete, Linklater and his editor Sandra Adair did much of the editing as they went. Linklater found that the order of the scenes presented itself as he shot. He described editing as "waking up in the morning and thinking, 'OK, this scene should go before that one, and here's the new flow. ' It was a very intuitive, long process. "

It was necessary for the live action footage to be complete and edited before the animation began so that no wasted animation would be produced. Linklater said the making of WAKING LIFE was really "two films in one. A double creative collaboration" that called for a full live-action feature and then a fully animated feature. Though Linklater is quick to point out, "I don't really divorce the processes. To me, there's this inherent overlap between the content of the film and the look of it. In one phase, you're collaborating with actors, the other with animators. "

Once the picture was locked, Sabiston and team stepped up to begin their animation wizardry. Sabiston had long been perfecting his software for just such a project. He first used it for an MTV-sponsored animation contest that earned him a job creating a series of interstitials. When tackling the production of a road trip film called ROADHEAD, with Pallotta, he added color to the software. During the production of Sabiston and Pallotta's award-winning film SNACK AND DRINK, which is part of the permanent collection at New York's Museum of Modern Art, he added bouncing objects into the software. And, in preparation for WAKING LIFE, Sabiston altered the software for big movie formats, added the option of using transparent shapes, and fine-tuned the line quality to create the most natural drawn line possible.

Sabiston assembled a team of more than 30 artists, many who he had worked with on a PBS project called FIGURES OF SPEECH. His criteria were simple: "good artists and good people. " The graphic team loaded into Linklater's Detour Filmproduction office in Austin - taking over basically every room including the conference room - a host of Mac G4 computers were purchased, and the animation train started rolling.

Each animator was assigned a character that they would work on solely. Linklater likened it to "actors picking what part they wanted to play based on what they were interested in. " The process required the artists to "paint," with the use of Sabiston's software, over the live-action footage. It was simultaneously artistic - because each artist creatively interpreted the scene in his or her own style, and tedious - because of the amount of time that went into this painting process. It is estimated that each minute of footage required 250 hours of animation.

A point of interest during the animation is that Wiley Wiggins also worked as an animator. Wiggins was part of the original animation team that worked on the scene where he rides the subway, just prior to encountering Speed Levitch on the bridge. The scene was eventually altered - "because Wiley interpreted his character to look as though he were about 12 years old" - but the background that he animated still remains. Both Bob Sabiston and his sister, Susan Sabiston, were also animators.

It took approximately nine months to complete the graphics portion of the film, leading to a finish just under the wire for the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. When it premiered at the festival, Pallotta says the filmmakers were seeing the final film for the first time right along with the audience. Just the week prior, Sabiston and Pallotta were hurriedly shipping off disks and physical hard drives to Swiss Effects in Zurich trying to do the transfer. Pallotta remembers, "I was having conversations with Sundance two days before it showed saying, 'We may not be able to show this. ' But somehow I knew that we'd pull it off. " Just hours before the Sundance screening, Linklater, Sabiston and Pallotta were allowed to view a few minutes of the film to check the sound and image on the big screen. The reaction: "It looked phenomenal. We all just looked at each other and said, 'Oh yeah, this is going to be great,'" Pallotta remembers.

ABOUT THE CASTING

Similar to several of his other films, Linklater had unconventional casting requirements that called for a unique approach. "Many of the people in the movie are non-actors. I said I want to meet smart, interesting people who have a lot on their minds. " To find these people, Casting Director Lizzie Martinez and Producer Anne Walker-McBay set about discovering people and asking them to come in for a video interview. A series of questions were asked, including: "What are you passionate about? What are you reading? What do you know or care about more than most people?"

The cast was a mix of actors, characters from previous Linklater-directed films, friends, family and mentors to the filmmakers. One of the first faces seen on screen is that of Linklater's daughter, Lorelei Linklater, and her friend Trevor Jack Brooks. The two are featured in the opening sequence and launch the whole film with their paper game that reveals the idea, "dream is destiny. " Richard Linklater has two pivotal roles in the film: one in the boat car scene where he directs Wiley Wiggins to get out of the car, in essence, sealing Wiley's fate; and one at the end when he suggests that Wiley "wake up!"

In addition to memorializing their house by using it as Wiley's home in the film, Pallotta and Sabiston also found a way to memorialize their landlady, Edith Mannix. She played the older woman artist who draws another elderly woman model in a park. On casting her, Sabiston says, "she has this wild white hair. " Walker-McBay's mother, Professor Mary McBay, played a lady on television discussing the particulars of lucid dreaming.

Pallotta, who first met Linklater while he was a philosophy student at the University of Texas, had two former professors in the film - Louis Mackey and Robert C. Solomon. Linklater also had a link to Professor Solomon. While auditing his existentialism class (Linklater was never officially enrolled at the university) many years prior, Solomon had said something that still stuck out in his mind. "I just went in and asked him to repeat what he'd said on camera," Linklater says.

Linklater and Pallotta were both fans of the documentary THE CRUISE, starring Speed Levitch, and had met the writer/performer after an Austin premiere of his movie. They found him to be a natural to play the part of the man on the bridge that goes "salsa dancing" with his confusion. "Before the script was totally written, we knew we wanted Speed in the movie," Pallotta says of that casting decision. Steven Soderbergh's bit - shot with the use of a Hi-8 consumer camera - was captured while he and Linklater were in the small town of Bastrop, TX.

There were also several returning acts from previous Linklater films. Wiley Wiggins was one of the lead characters in 1993's DAZED AND CONFUSED. Adam Goldberg and Nicky Katt (who also starred in Linklater's SUBURBIA) return from fighting in DAZED AND CONFUSED to walk down the street spouting aphorisms about society and freedom. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy revisit roles they played in BEFORE SUNRISE, released in 1995. Charles Gunning, who worked with Linklater in both 1991's SLACKER and 1998's THE NEWTON BOYS, shows up as the man in jail swearing revenge. Mona Lee, who played Wiley's mother in DAZED AND CONFUSED, is having a quiet conversation with him at a restaurant. Similarly, the "Old Anarchist" from SLACKER, Louis Mackey, returns continuing his discourse, this time questioning "the most universal human characteristics - fear or laziness. " "He was actually continuing a thought that had been cut out of SLACKER," Linklater says.

ABOUT THE CAST

WILEY WIGGINS

Wiley Wiggins' career as an actor began when he was cast as Mitch Kramer in Richard Linklater's DAZED AND CONFUSED. Subsequently he has been featured in a wide variety of films including: LOVE AND A . 45, BOYS, THE FACULTY, and PLASTIC UTOPIA.

ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS

RICHARD LINKLATER: WRITER / DIRECTOR

Writer/Director Richard Linklater is known for his independent-spirited filmmaking and for discovering some of today's most talented actors.

Before SLACKER, an experimental narrative revolving around 24 hours in the lives of 100 characters, garnered acclaim in 1991, Linklater had made many shorts and completed a Super 8 feature, IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO LEARN TO PLOW BY READING BOOKS (1988). All of his films have been produced under the banner of his company, Detour Filmproduction.

Linklater's additional credits include the 1970s cult hit DAZED AND CONFUSED (1993), BEFORE SUNRISE (1995), for which Linklater won the Berlin Film Festival Silver Bear Award for Best Director; SUBURBIA (1997); and most recently, THE NEWTON BOYS (1998), a western/gangster film set in the 1920s. In addition to WAKING LIFE, the fall of 2001 will see the release of his "low-budget, real time" movie TAPE.

Linklater also serves as the Artistic Director for the Austin Film Society, which he founded in 1985 to showcase films from around the world that were not typically shown in Austin. The Film Society shows more than 100 films a year and, in the last five years, has given out $230,000 in grants to Texas filmmakers. In 1999, the Austin Film Society received the first National Honoree Award from the Directors Guild of America in recognition of its support of the arts.

ABOUT THE CASTING

ABOUT THE CAST

WILEY WIGGINS

ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS

RICHARD LINKLATER: WRITER / DIRECTOR

Writer/Director Richard Linklater is known for his independent-spirited filmmaking and for discovering some of today's most talented actors.

BOB SABISTON: ART DIRECTOR

WAKING LIFE is the first feature-length film for Art Director Bob Sabiston, who has previously won multiple awards for animation direction. This alumnus of both the undergraduate and graduate programs of MIT has developed his own signature software that was used to create WAKING LIFE's feeling of a painting come to life.

Sabiston began his career as an animator in 1988 with the short BEAT DEDICATION, which was featured in Siggraph and the theatrical Animation Celebration. His second short, GRINNING EVIL DEATH, was on the first episode of MTV's Liquid Television in 1990. For the animated short GOD'S LITTLE MONKEY (1994), Sabiston received his first of two ARS Electronica Awards. He received the second for SNACK AND DRINK - a three-minute short about an autistic child in a 7-Eleven store - that is now part of the permanent collection of the New York Museum of Modern Art.

In 1997, Sabiston won an MTV-sponsored animation contest with his newly created software that was slightly similar to rotoscoping. He took a job with MTV, where he went on to complete a series of about 30 interstitials with friend Tommy Pallotta. On an exodus from NYC to Austin shortly thereafter, Sabiston and Pallotta shot a series of interviews that Sabiston then animated with this ever-evolving software; and ultimately turned into the film ROADHEAD. The film screened at a multitude of festivals across the country and received the Best Animation award at the Aspen Film Festival. He is also the animation director of FIGURES OF SPEECH, a PBS television series.

ANNE WALKER-MCBAY: PRODUCER

Longtime Linklater collaborator Anne Walker-McBay has produced Richard Linklater's last six films, including DAZED AND CONFUSED, BEFORE SUNRISE, SUBURBIA and THE NEWTON BOYS. She first worked with Linklater on SLACKER, for which she was production manager and casting director.

TOMMY PALLOTTA: PRODUCER

Producer Tommy Pallotta's first taste of the film industry came while working as a Production Assistant and an actor - he played "Looking for Missing Friend" - on the set of Richard Linklater's SLACKER. After working on multiple films and commercials and traveling to festivals with the feature length film he wrote, directed and produced, THE HIGH ROAD, Pallotta joined forces with Bob Sabiston, an animator with whom he worked on a series of interstitials for MTV in New York. The two kicked off their professional relationship as filmmakers with a road trip from New York City to Austin, TX, along the way shooting footage of interviews that Sabiston later animated - thus resulting in the film ROADHEAD. The film screened at a multitude of festivals across the country and received the Best Animation award at the Aspen Film Festival. Pallotta then went on to produce several additional projects animated by Sabiston including: SNACK AND DRINK - a three-minute short about an autistic child in a 7-Eleven store - that is now part of the permanent collection of the New York Museum of Modern Art; and FIGURES OF SPEECH, a PBS television series.

PALMER WEST: PRODUCER

Palmer West's interest in the performing arts started at an early age. He began his career as an actor while still in high school, and earned an Emmy® nomination for his performance in the PBS film LOOKING FOR LAKE FAIRIES, which he co-wrote.

After graduating Summa Cum Laude from the University of Montana, West moved to New York City and founded Thousand Words. It was on his first project, SATURN, directed by Rob Schmidt, that West met Jonah Smith. Following the film's completion, the two producers partnered up to run Thousand Words.

Thousand Words next venture was REQUIEM FOR A DREAM, the award-winning second feature from director Darren Aronofsky. The film was co-financed and distributed by Artisan Entertainment.

JONAH SMITH: PRODUCER

After attending New York University Film School, Jonah Smith co-executive produced the independent feature, PI directed by Darren Aronofsky. Debuting at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival, PI was an instant success and garnered Aronofsky the coveted Best Director, as well as a distribution deal with Artisan Entertainment. That same year Smith executive-produced SATURN, directed by Rob Schmidt and produced by future partner Palmer West.

Subsequently, Smith joined West in the film production and financing company, Thousand Words. As partners, their next production - Darren Aronofsky's second feature, REQUIEM FOR A DREAM - was an immediate critical success. Receiving co-financing and distribution from Artisan Entertainment, REQUIEM FOR A DREAM debuted at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival, and has gone on to win numerous awards.

FILMMAKERS

Written and Directed by RICHARD LINKLATER

Art Director BOB SABISTON

Produced by ANNE WALKER-MCBAY

TOMMY PALLOTTA

Produced by PALMER WEST

JONAH SMITH

Executive Producer JONATHAN SEHRING

CAROLINE KAPLAN

JOHN SLOSS

Editor SANDRA ADAIR

Music by TOSCA TANGO ORCHESTRA

Original Score by GLOVER GILL