In His Twenties, Richard Linklater Was Watching Over 600 Movies a Year

It’s the weekend, so here’s a retro interview [via Reddit].

Its been many years since I stopped counting the number of movies I would watch in any given year. I’d say, between Sundance, Cannes and Toronto it must be around 120 and probably another 150+ or so outside the festival circuit. So, maybe, tops, 300.

Richard Linklater seems to be the movie-watching king though. I unearthed a 2014 profile on Linklater by The New Yorker in which the “Boyhood” director says he used to watch a whopping 600 in his early twenties.

“He never returned to school. Instead, for the next two and half years, whenever he came back to the mainland, in Houston, he would watch movies: first two a day, then three, then four. By his early twenties, he was seeing six hundred films a year. “I just felt I’d discovered something, like this whole world had opened up,” he says. “I was greedy for it.”

600 movies a year is A LOT. That's 1.64 per day!

In my twenties, maybe I was reaching 400-500 a year. I had a lot more time in my hands and it wasn’t just new movies I had to catch up with, but all the classics from the 20th century.

Watching 600 movies a year could be a much better investment for a film career than actually going to film school. You start to notice the camera positions/movements more, the editing, but really just the entire mise-en-scene becomes more apparent.

This Linklater claim reminds me of that scene in “The Aviator” where DiCaprio’s Howard Hughes is peeing in bottles while watching his movies.