Visibly based
on Stephen Belber's single-set stage play, Tape translates into an edgy, itchy
jarring film where three personalities clash over their perceptions of past
and present relationships. The film takes place entirely in a hotel room in
Lansing, Michigan where Vince (Ethan Hawke, Hamlet, Training Day) drinks and
smokes as he awaits the arrival of one-time school friend John (Robert Sean
Leonard, Dead Poets Society, Driven). They have not seen each other for ten
years, during which time John has moved away from his roots to become an independent
filmmaker, about to premiere his first movie in Lansing.
Vince, despite stressing his career as a volunteer fire-fighter, is actually
a drug-dealer, bearing a burden of grudges about past and present. One bone
of contention is Amy, a former girlfriend who apparently slept with John after
she split from Vince. Vince prompts and probes memories, before revealing that
Amy (Uma Thurman, The Avengers, Gattaca), now as Assistant District Attorney,
is about to turn up. Vince's game may be the revelation of an unpleasant truth,
but Amy brings her own memories and her own agenda to the contest of nerves.
Director Richard Linklater interviewed by Kaleem Aftab (From THE LIST)
Richard Linklater was the original low/no budget filmmaker. His stunning student
graduation film, Slacker, shot on a budget of $3000 and detailing a day in American
suburbia, found its way into cinemas worldwide and proved to a generation of
young filmmakers, including luminaries such as Kevin Smith, that you do not
need studio backing to make a hit film.
So it's no surprise to see that Linklater, after a gap of over a decade in
which he made four studio films - Dazed and Confused, suburbia, Before Sunrise
and the $27m western The Newton Boys - has returned to his independent roots
with two films shot cheaply using consumer digital cameras: the animated Waking
Life and Tape.
The recently released Waking Life is the first film to use a rotoscoping technique
- drawing computer animation over live digital images - something developed
by a friend of Linklater. Tape is from the guerrilla school of filmmaking, an
ultra low budget feature based on a stage play, featuring three characters and
shot in six days. Linklater says that the stories within his film made him shoot
on digital cameras rather than any budgetary constraints.
"Every story needs to be told the appropriate way," he says in his slacker drawl all the way from Austin, Texas. "All my films are really close to me, and as a visual person I'm always trying to come up with the right visual approach. The way an architect will approach a building is by looking at the function and then establishing its form. Inevitably, the form is your style."
This is made clear in Linklater's use of animation for Waking Life. "I
don't think it would have worked live action," he says. "The film
takes place so much in the abstract, like in a dream, which takes it to a very
analogous level. You think that the action is real and sounds real. Part of
your brain is taking it as a reality with seemingly real gestures and voices
so it could not be a clean animated process like in a Disney film."
The time consuming process of animating Waking Life also gave Linklater an opportunity
to make Tape. "The animation for Waking Life took a year and I was involved
in overseeing character design and approving things that took several hours
a week. I could not have taken on a bigger film, but Tape came up rather spontaneously
when Ethan Hawke approached me with the idea. It was a small production and
I was back in my office editing Tape while we were doing the animation for Waking
Life. The films just came to the finishing line at the same time."
Linklater accepts that these films had to wait for the right technology to come
along before he could make them, but frowns at the belief that digital films
will revolutionise cinema. "I guess as a filmmaker who started off on Super
8 and 16mm I don't think it's a revolution. Plus, audiences don't give a shit.
I don't remember hearing anyone say: 'Let's go and see that movie that was shot
on DV.' Unless you're a film student or an aspiring filmmaker, it doesn't mean
anything. Name one person that's going to see a Lars Von Trier film because
it was shot on DV. Who gives a fuck? It all comes down to ideas. Do you have
anything to say or an original way to say it?"
As for his continued use of Ethan Hawke in his movies, Linklater laughs when he says: "Well, I guess he is my Kurt Raab," a direct reference to one of Linklater's favourite directors, Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
At a period when the influence of film schools and studios looms large in the
career structures of most young directors, Richard Linklater stands as a model
of the independent auteur, whose work can be classified as part of the larger
American independent film renaissance of the 1990s.
Born in Houston, Texas in 1962, Linklater suspended his educational career at Sam Houston State University to work on an offshore oilrig in the Gulf of Mexico. He subsequently relocated to the state's capital of Austin, where he founded a film society and began work on his debut short film It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books. Three years later he released Slacker (1991), an insightful, virtually plotless look at 1990s youth culture that became a favourite on the festival circuit before winning major critical attention at Sundance. Despite being made for under $23,000, Slackers became enough of a mainstream success to lead on to Linklater's next feature, Dazed and Confused (1993). This has been followed by Before Sunrise (1995), Suburbia (1996), The Newton Boys (1998) and Waking Life (2001).
"Shot in high-definition video, in sequence, over six days (with two weeks'
rehearsal), Tape should ride high on the agenda of everyone who loves to see
three Hollywood talents revelling in high-risk roles and proving that talk can
strip people barer than nudity and hook an audience more effectively than violence."
Evening Standard
"This dark, intense and claustrophobic classic is brilliantly directed
by Richard Linklater, and the twists and turns of the original stage play are
reinforced on the big screen by original writer Stephen Belber. The action unfolds
in under 90 minutes, guaranteeing a short, sharp cinematic shock."
News of the World
"Cowering in the hotel room, the action maintains a stagey formality -
Amy keeps hold of her handbag, Johnny never removes his jacket. Reference points
seem as much theatrical as cinematic, the confined room familiar from Harold
Pinter and David Mamet's work. Berber's territory is similarly male friendship
and competition…. Uma Thurman initially seems cast against her borzoi elegance,
perky in a pony-tail, but the planes of her face resolve into something forlorn
as the chit-chat disperses.
What does digital video give Linklater? Less obviously experimental than Waking
Life, this chamber piece tethers his freewheeling approach to structure (Slackers,
Dazed and Confused) and allows a sour critique of his distinctive territory,
even if in narrative terms, Tape seems like the revenge of the smug professionals
against the needling drop-out"
David Jays, SIGHT AND SOUND
"Tense and tautly scripted, Tape is an excellent example of how even the
least cinematic of set-ups can produce interesting and dynamic filmmaking."
Sean Tuomey, EMPIRE
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