Richard Linklater Says His Next Movie Is Now a Trilogy, and Funding Has Been a “Challenge”

Richard Linklater released two films in 2025, "Nouvelle Vague" and "Blue Moon," both terrific. After releasing four films in four years, he has nothing out this year and probably nothing next year, an odd break for such a prolific filmmaker.

For some time, Linklater has been planning a film about the transcendentalists, the "first hippies," a literary movement that included Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau.

It's a fascinating chapter of history that Linklater wants to turn into (what else?) a hangout movie. Last we heard, Natalie Portman, Oscar Isaac, and (who else?) Ethan Hawke were attached to star. And not just that, things were looking quite rosy that this would be Linklater’s next film.

Last year, Hawke said production would begin in 2026, and he claimed that he and Linklater were already working on their 10th movie together, one he predicted would be bound for the time capsule. But Linklater is now telling The Atlantic that getting the film funded has been a "challenge." What's more, he says it isn't one film but a trilogy, which may explain why financing has been a struggle.

In a more recent interview with Filmmaker Magazine, Linklater described the project, about the "hippies of the 1830s and '40s, the beginnings of feminism, environmentalism, abolitionism, all that," as a kind of 19th-century hangout movie that has been in the works for around 20 years. Hawke is set to play Emerson, Portman Margaret Fuller, and Isaac Henry David Thoreau.

Although the project isn't the most, shall we say, alluring pitch for prospective buyers, Linklater was more hopeful in 2025, saying it was finally "coming together" because "people feel a certain urgency to help it in a way that I'm grateful for." Things have clearly changed since then.

Through it all, with more than 35 years of filmmaking under his belt, Linklater has built an extraordinary body of work, including "Dazed and Confused," "Before Sunrise," "Before Sunset," "Before Midnight," "Boyhood," "Waking Life," "School of Rock," "Everybody Wants Some!!," "Me and Orson Welles," "Bernie," and "Apollo 10½."