Why The Late '70s And 1980 Were "A Pretty Cool Time, A Pretty Raunchy Time"

You've seen a movie written and/or directed by Richard Linklater. The highlights reel: independent classic Slacker, described by Kevin Smith as an inspiration for Clerks; cult '70s high school film Dazed & Confused; the gorgeous Before… trilogy, starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy; the Keanu Reeves rotoscope sci-fi, A Scanner Darkly; the 12 year coming of age project, Boyhood, for which Patricia Arquette won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress; and now "companion piece" to Dazed & Confused, 1980 college baseball film Everybody Wants Some!!

Linklater's latest sees Jake, played by Blake Jenner, arrive on campus at the house he now shares with the Southeast Texas Cherokees baseball team in the days prior to his first semester in college. The film follows the team over the course of three days, as the young adult men practice baseball, banter, bicker, chase women and quickly foster an easy camaraderie. It's a movie that depicts a particular kind of male friendship, one we rarely see drawn out so vividly on screen.

"They can throw all that aside and just focus on having fun, focus on drinking, focus on winning the game, and it's kind of fun to put all that other stuff aside."

"On this movie I think [male friendship] was something I was definitely exploring," says Linklater. "You know in college you all live together — girls' dorm, boys' dorm — I had basically 17 roommates in these two houses, there were 18 of us. And I was like 'Wow, that was the last time I was such in a male [environment].' So I was examining the ease of it. Something about men can come together in a fun way, it's very kind of cooperative often.

"In fact that's how it was making the film — the guys came together really quick and there wasn't anybody on the out. Everybody was cool and they really got along well. It's fun. I think everybody was there for a good time, kind of appreciative… Guys are good at that — come together with a common goal: 'Let's win the game, let's win the election, let's win.' Guys have a way of zoning out other things that are maybe more meaningful: feelings and connections and personal pasts and emotions, and they can throw all that aside and just focus on having fun, focus on drinking, focus on winning the game, and it's kind of fun to put all that other stuff aside. Guys do that better than anyone, that's why they tend to dominate for better and mostly for worse in this world. If we had an all-women government that would alright by me."

In Dazed & Confused, Linklater was offered the opportunity to grapple with his teenage years, growing up in Texas in the 1970s. In Everybody Wants Some!!, the 55-year-old, who studied at Sam Houston State University in Texas, where he too played baseball, "was trying to deal with my college years, y'know, what it was like to be young at that very point in time". He admits that "there's a bit of me in all of the characters".

"Pre-Reagan/Bush era, pre-AIDS, pre-, you know a lot of pre-s."

"The more farther away I got from it the more interesting it started to be. You look at your own past — it's very autobiographical, I was in college at that moment, blah, blah, blah — I was starting to think it was a pretty fun time to have been in college. Culture's really changed a lot.

"Culturally I look back [at the late '70s/1980] and I go — I think a lot of other people do too — when you think about it, in the US, it was kind of the end of a certain generation, there was a lot of optimism in the '70s, compared to today. College was very inexpensive, weed was going to be legal any second, it was progressive, it was a pretty cool time, a pretty raunchy time. Pre-Reagan/Bush era, pre-AIDS, pre-, you know a lot of pre-s."

But no way would Linklater want to go back to being 18 years old, particularly not back to first young adult love, the blossoming of which we see for Jake in the film. "Too much anxiety, too much, y'know, stuff to be a young person ever. What [Everybody Wants Some!!] meant to me, is the first time I sort of acknowledged myself as far as like: 'Ok, these were my decisions, I was an adult.' That's what the film's about: your adult meter starts ticking for the first time at this phase of life… I was less conflicted about this phase of my life. I started accepting my life. 'That's who I am, those are the decisions I'm making,' you live with it. But I wouldn't want to go back to it.

"You're kind of becoming who you are at that stage. You're not experienced but you're certainly who you're going to be to some degree. I don't have much nostalgia for it — it's a messy time. I associate more heartache, pain, y'know all that stuff, [it] feels more real as the love part. The love part is fleeting and wonderful, the pain and the aftermath kind of hangs around a long time. One more reason not go back to that time."