Background:

Born July 30, 1960, in Houston, Texas, Richard Linklater is an Academy Award-nominated American film director and writer. He is most famous for defining a generation with his cult film Slacker and also achieved mainstream success with the hit comedy School of Rock.

A Little Trivia:

Richard Linklater worked on an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico before moving to Austin where he founded a film society and started making movies.

The Director's Filmography:

Fast Food Nation (2006)
A Scanner Darkly (2006)
The Bad News Bears (2005)
Before Sunset (2004)
Live From Shiva's Dance Floor (2003)
School of Rock (2003)
Tape (2001)
Waking Life(2001)
The Newton Boys (1998)
Suburbia (1997)
Before Sunrise (1995)
Dazed and Confused (1993)
Slacker (1990)
It's Impossible to Learn to Plow By Reading Books (1987)

Defining A Slacker Generation:

Is it too much to say that Richard Linklater gave a generation a voice with the 1990 film Slacker? There they were on the big screen for the first time: smart, rootless, young adults, lacking in ambition, sitting on the couch, getting stoned, listening to music, making music, working bad jobs, walking down the street.

The low budget movie, filmed in Austin, Texas, opened to enormous critical acclaim; ever since, Richard Linklater has stayed true to his original vision. He charmed audiences with the independent romance Before Sunrise, the story of Jesse and Celine (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy), young lovers who meet on a train and spend one romantic night together in Vienna.

Almost a decade later, these same characters would reunite in the breathtakingly lovely Before Sunset.

Throughout his career, Linklater has continued to document the young and restless with such films as Dazed and Confused and the innovative animated film Waking Life.

Linklater used the same rotoscoping animation technique for A Scanner Darkly. Based on the novel by Philip K. Dick, this sci-fi story stays true to Linklater tradition: the voices of Woody Harrelson, Winona Ryder, Robert Downey Jr, and Keanu Reeves carry forth in diners and couches, driving through traffic or wandering, paranoid, through fields of psychoactive plants.

Linklater has also made successful forays into Hollywood, with the ridiculously charming Jack Black comedy School of Rock and the ensemble expose Fast Food Nation.