Richard Linklater Says the ‘90s Was the “Last Great Era for Studio Movies”

Richard Linklater has released two fantastic films this year: “Blue Moon” and “Nouvelle Vague.” He’s been making the media and festival rounds promoting these two gems, but here’s a particularly interesting interview I came across.

Speaking with The New Yorker’s Justin Chang, Linklater discussed the state of the movie industry — and, spoiler alert, he’s not optimistic:

I mean, even when I started, you know, in the early ‘90s, it was always gloom and doom, and we were actually in a pretty good era. It was, what seems to me, the last great era of studio movies. They had bigger slates of films. They took chances on young filmmakers. Like, come on, they gave me $6M to make a film with no stars, but at some point they were like “no, we’re not doing that.”

Two years ago, Linklater had similar thoughts, while speaking to THR:

It feels like it’s gone with the wind — or gone with the algorithm. Sometimes I’ll talk to some of my contemporaries who I came up with during the 1990s, and we’ll go, “Oh my God, we could never get that done today” […] I was able to participate in what always feels like the last good era for filmmaking.

The ‘90s truly were a remarkable decade for cinema — a golden age for indie auteurs. Think of all the great filmmakers who emerged during that time: Tarantino, P.T. Anderson, Soderbergh, Fincher, Anderson, Payne, Linklater — just to name a few.

The ‘90s indie movie boom was, in many ways, a spiritual echo of the ‘70s American New Wave. Both eras thrived on rebellion — filmmakers breaking free from studio control, armed with modest budgets and a hunger for personal storytelling. For a brief moment, both decades had studio gatekeepers loosening their grip and letting the artists run wild.

The last two and a half decades? A little murkier. Last year, Rotten Tomatoes released its poll of the Best Directors of the Last 25 Years, and the results were underwhelming compared with the rich talent of previous decades. Sure, there was Nolan, Villeneuve, Chazelle, Baker, the Safdies, and Lanthimos at the top — but the list felt thin.

The silver lining? World cinema remains in robust health, with promising filmmakers emerging at festivals across the globe. If anything, we’re currently in an era where international films are edging closer to the mainstream — thanks in no small part to the rousing success of Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite.”

Through it all, Linklater has built an extraordinary body of work: “Dazed and Confused,” “Before Sunrise,” “Before Sunset,” “Boyhood,” “Waking Life,” “School of Rock,” “Everybody Wants Some!!,” “Bernie,” “Apollo 10 1/2,” and now, potentially, “Blue Moon” and “Nouvelle Vague.”