Last Flag Flying's Richard Linklater interview: 'I keep getting to make films so something is going right'

The ‘Boyhood’ director's latest film, which stars Steve Carell, Bryan Cranston, and Laurence Fishburne as three Vietnam War veterans who reunite, is based on Darryl Ponicsan’s sequel to his 1970 novel ‘The Last Detail’

Director Richard Linklater on the set of his new film: ‘It took Vietnam many years for people to know it wasn’t going well. People knew Iraq was a mistake before it even started’

I’ve chatted to director Richard Linklater on a number of occasions over his illustrious career but this is the first encounter that starts with a disagreement after I say that he’s becoming the king of nostalgia.

“Am I?” he exclaims, the doubt running through his vocal chords.

The Texan auteur is in London promoting his new film Last Flag Flying, an adaptation of Darryl Ponicsán’s sequel to his novel The Last Detail, which Hal Ashby turned into a classic movie starring Jack Nicholson in 1973. Linklater’s recent credits include Everybody Wants Some!, a 1980-set college comedy based on his own experiences. Preceding that was the Oscar-nominated Boyhood, a rhapsody on adolescence shot over the course of 12 years, and Before Midnight, the third part of his trilogy of films where we live and breathe the enduring relationship of Jesse and Celine.

The 48-year-old asks: “For what is Last Flag Flying nostalgic?”

Linklater and Bryan Cranston on the set of ‘Last Flag Flying’

“It’s a paean to an old movie and it’s got three guys reminiscing over a time when they are young,” I return.

“They are definitely middle-aged guys looking back, but at such shitty times in their lives,” he protests. Linklater has changed the name of the characters from the book, so that these 2003 versions no longer share the name of their counterparts essayed The Last Detail, but it’s soon apparent that Bryan Cranston’s Sal Nealon is an update on Jack Nicholson’s Billy “Badass” Buddusky and Steve Carell’s Larry “Doc” Shepherd is the kid that was being escorted to jail during the Vietnam War.

I put it to Linklater that we can also be nostalgic for events that – to coin a Madness song – at the time seemed so bad. “Everyone has personal nostalgia,” admits Linklater. “But you see, segments of the population, in America at least, the African American population has no nostalgia, they don’t want to go back to a different era the way white people do. There is not black people going back to the Fifties and Sixties, that is only going in one direction.”

Linklater and Cranston during filming of ‘Last Flag Flying’

“Maybe that’s changed right now?” I suggest.

“Yes, that’s what Trump may have achieved, for the first time in history African Americans want to go back to a previous era, ie eight years ago. That’s a funny thought,” he adds. “But, I don’t know, am I nostalgic?”

During the conversation he seems occupied with wondering whether or not he’s actually nostalgic. For example, with discussing his film Dazed and Confused (1993), which follows various groups of Texas teenagers during the last day of school in 1976, he says: “I’m definitely into creating the realities, especially in period films, of just like what it felt to be right there. Cinema is pretty powerful so I guess by depicting something you are drawing attention to it and saying this era was worthy of being represented so I guess it’s nostalgic.”

Linklater’s coming-of-age drama ‘Boyhood’ took 12 years to shoot (Universal)

For a director known as an American indie darling, he has an unusual penchant for sequels and reboots, although he is quick to say, “This isn’t much of a sequel, can we admit?”

And it’s true there is no need to have seen The Last Detail to be beguiled by the charms of Last Flag Flying. Linklater then poses his own question: “Has there ever been a sequel in history that doesn’t have the same actors? Does that count? It’s not really a sequel if you don’t have the same characters.”

There have been some: Home Alone 4, Terminator: Salvation and the upcoming The Girl With the Spider’s Web that has jettisoned Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara. But in general it’s not a good sign when the whole of the cast doesn’t return. “We never thought of this as a sequel, although the book it’s based on is a sequel and we adapted it in such a way knowing that film will never get made, and this gave us a chance to do a lot of things that frankly aren’t in the book, Vietnam background and a lot more substantial past to these guys, but I don’t know. I don’t think this was a great era in their lives. Sal is more mixed, I think he shows the love-hate that develops in anyone who has found themselves caught in an incorrigible hierarchy which is what the military is.”

Matthew McConaughey in Linklater’s ‘Dazed and Confused’

The great New Hollywood director Hal Ashby made The Last Detail, as well as films including Harold and Maude, Shampoo and Being There. Linklater is a fan of his work, but he’s not sure that walking in his shadow had any bearing on his decision to make Last Flag Flying. “The book flouted in my direction and I liked it a lot. I liked those characters, the anger and what was going on with the characters now and their energy and it seemed to say a lot about the post 9/11 era and how messed up the Iraq War was and all that. Ashby certainly had a great decade there in the Seventies and if there is some school of directors I’m in, I wouldn’t mind being in that lineage.”

He argues that the wars in Iraq and Vietnam echo each other, “and yet they are really different. Different times. These three guys, you have to imagine they were drafted into the war, whereas now it’s all volunteer army and so it’s a different vibe. Vietnam happened slowly over the years. It took Vietnam many years for people to know it wasn’t going well. People knew Iraq was a mistake before it even started.”

He marched in New York before the war started. “And that’s why this one is inexcusable because it was called in advance. Even Dick Cheney had written that going to remove Saddam Hussein made no sense, and then he changed his mind.”

As our time together draws to a close I ask if anything has changed for Linklater after the critical and awards success of Boyhood: “It’s hard for me to tell if the industry got better, it was kind of bad there for a while, it was hard to get funding and so I think it got better for me a little bit with Boyhood and the industry got a little better too, but I keep getting to make films so something is going right.”

‘Last Flag Flying’ is out on 26 January