Interview: Young, screwed up? His films are made for you

Richard Linklater is a rarity, and a flaming brilliant one. His films are about restless, troubled and troublesome kids - people he respects. After `Slacker' and `Dazed and Confused' he's headed for the yet meaner streets of `SubUrbia'. Ryan Gilbey is glad to go with him.

Disenfranchised youth couldn't hope for a better ambassador than Richard Linklater. It is not just that he has made punch-drunk under-25s the focus of his four films to date; it is that he actively respects his characters, and encourages his audience to do the same. That is a rare thing in American cinema, where your sympathies are more likely be steered toward the well-adjusted, the well-heeled or the well-hung.

The characters in his latest film, SubUrbia, hang around on street corners chomping pizza and trying to out-angst each other. They are defined by their levels of disenchantment. "I'm alienated!" proclaims Jeff, the moral one, when challenged on his morose demeanour. His friend confesses to having committed an act of despicable violence, then explains away his behaviour by shrugging "I'm fucked up, man." One girl premieres a performance art piece about patriarchal oppression; another, fresh out of rehab, finds herself itching for the bottle. I know what you're thinking. A spot of national service would do the trick.

Linklater knows better. "These kids are only 20," he says from his editing room in Austin, Texas, where he has just completed his next film, The Newton Boys, about a gang of crooks in 1920s Texas who became America's most successful bank-robbers. "You shouldn't know what you're going to do with your life at that age. I feel sorry for anyone who does. You have to free yourself from the constraints of your parents and society, then find out what you're passionate about."

SubUrbia might be a return to the milieu of Linklater's first two films, Slacker and Dazed and Confused, after the brave Vienna-based two-hander Before Sunrise, but in its tone it represents a departure for the director. For a start, he didn't write it. More dramatically, the streets which were paved with bonhomie in Slacker have now turned into forbidding industrial wastelands lit by the unforgiving glare from convenience stores, and simmering with violence and tension. It feels like a war zone, unless you were raised in Croydon.

"I find the suburbs really creepy," says Linklater. "My father lived in south Houston, which is 90 miles of suburbs, it goes on for ever. Millions of people and no buildings over two storeys high. All nice and clean and supposedly safe - and yet all the kids are on drugs and there are all these problems.

"Part of it is the mindset you have as a teenager. I'd have loved to have grown up in Austin, yet I speak to kids here and they go, "But this sucks!" Wherever you put a teenager, they'll generally hate it. I didn't want to suggest in the film that suburbia created these people. It's more of a collision between the place and the human condition."

There is something else here which we have rarely encountered in Linklater's work. No, not a plot (it's not that radical a departure), but friction. Opposing cultures. In Dazed and Confused, a group of 1970s teenagers had a few awkward brushes with representatives of the adult world - cops, teachers - but confrontation was scarce. SubUrbia explicitly confronts issues of class and race. A former friend and ex-object of ridicule, now an MTV star, turns up in his limo to shoot the breeze with his old buddies, who air their grievances one by one. Meanwhile, the owner of the all-night store where the kids hang out is an ambitious Pakistani who becomes the focus of the protagonists' frustration. Bigotry begins to surface in characters who we were laughing along with just moments earlier. Viewers comforted by the 24-hour party atmosphere of Dazed and Confused will feel ... well, dazed and confused.

"I wanted to portray that bleakness," Linklater says, "and to bring those issues and emotions into the foreground. Things get so dark at that age. Between 19 and 22 I was living my dark-night-of-the-soul years, with this `everything's fucked' perspective. When I got out of school, I went from being surrounded by hundreds of people to getting a job, and - boom! - I was isolated in a large town. Suddenly I was Travis Bickle."

Some people in this situation turn to music. Others find Eastern European literature, or handguns. Linklater plunged into cinema. Living in Texas and working on oil rigs put him at a double disadvantage over his city- dwelling counterparts, but he squeezed films into every minute he spent on shore: reading about them, watching them, making them.

When he moved to Austin at the age of 25, he set up the Austin Film Society with some friends, gaining exposure for cult classics, experimental work, and great directors who never made it to the local fleapit: Dreyer, Bresson, Tarkovsky. In Texas of all places!

The society is still going strong. It has just finished a Kiarostami season. This week it started a 10-programme series on the history of the avant-garde. Why not pop along next week if you're in the area? You can get in free on Tuesdays.

Linklater still lives in Austin, and has shot all his films there (with the obvious exception of Before Sunrise), for, he says, purely logistical reasons. He is quick to admit to autobiographical tendencies, and puts his changes in style down to the complexities of personality.

"As well as being a film-maker, I'm also a human being," he deadpans, "and there are so many different aspects of me that I want to reflect in my work. I can't get all my experiences and emotions into one film. People can hate it when you try to make a concerted departure - a lot of people reacted like that to Before Sunrise."

If there is one film of Linklater's which is scene-by-scene autobiography, it's Dazed and Confused. "That was basically me recreating a list of memories, whether it's walking into a pool hall where Hurricane by Dylan is playing, or the younger kid getting beaten with a bat by the older boys."

That happened to you? "Yeah! I could never have created that, I'm not some S&M guy. It was a weird east Texan town, the prison looming above us, and the initiation idea was very big there. So although Dazed and Confused is fun, it was torturous to make because I had to revisit all those memories."

Looking back now at Linklater's body of work, there is a case to be made for him as one of American independent cinema's only genuine auteurs, alongside Todd Haynes. You might consider Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith to be contenders, but self-referentiality does not an auteur make. Jim Jarmusch could be close. Spike Lee has lost his footing. And Hal Hartley? In his dreams.

Linklater's movies belong to a more humanist European tradition of film- making that has its roots in Renoir. When Linklater says he "knows people", he is not boasting of friends in high places, but articulating what is refreshingly apparent from every frame of his work. Generosity. Impartiality. And my own personal favourite - humanity.

"People are generally interested in other people," he says. "If you put some interesting people on the screen, then the film moves."