Get drunk, get laid, get in a fight: 25 years of 'Dazed and Confused' | Retrospective Review

“That's what I love about these high school girls, man. I keep getting older, they stay the same age,” says sleazy stoner loser Wooderson (Matthew McCounaghy) while hanging out at a pool hall in director Richard Linklater’s 1993 film, ‘Dazed and Confused’. The line would later be nominated for the American Film Institute's list of the 100 best quotes from 20th century movies.

When asked in an interview what he wanted to do after ‘Slacker’ (1991), Richard Linklater said, "I want to make this teenage rock ’n’ roll spree. I knew I wanted the story to take place on one day in the spring of 1976, but at one point it was much more experimental. The whole movie took place in a car with the characters driving around listening to ZZ Top.” Lee Daniel, the director of photography, described the concept: “It would have been two shots - one of a guy putting in an eight-track of ZZ Top’s 'Fandango!' and one of two guys driving around talking. The film would be the length of the actual album, and you’d hear each track in the background as a source.”

‘Slacker’, an examination of the various lives aimlessly but amusingly lived at the Generation X periphery of Austin, Texas, got Linklater enough of a profile to command the relatively huge budget of $US6.9 million (versus the $US23,000 of ‘Slacker’) to make ‘Dazed and Confused’. Set in an unnamed Texas town on a single day in 1976, the film follows a pack of two dozen teenagers, some of whom were played by young actors who would go on to mega fame, like Matthew McConaughey, Ben Affleck, Renee Zellweger and Milla Jovovich. The teens celebrate the end of the school year by driving around, consuming huge amounts of beer and marijuana, playing pinball and foosball, flirting and making out, engaging in some hazing rites, and, finally, ending up at a woodside keg bash on the edge of town. The characters engage in the classic American teenage pursuit of thrills, sex, rowdy fun. All are desperate to talk, with plenty to say (uh, besides Milla Jovovich’s character).

Linklater took the title from the Led Zepplin song (he approached the surviving members of Led Zeppelin for permission to use their song 'Rock and Roll' in the film - Robert Plant refused). In a July 2013 interview with Dazed magazine, Linklater said: “Yeah, it was a working title I initially threw in – we never thought it’d be the actual title. But I’ve found good titles come early or not at all. It takes a full decade to process your teenage years. With that film I revisited music that had meant so much to me then. The idea I’d drift away to a whole other kind of music would never have occurred to me. It makes you think you’re a completely different person now – but of course you’re not. The most fascinating relationship is that of yourself to your previous self.” Roughly a sixth of the film’s budget was used just to acquire the rights to many of the 70s hits used in the film, which included Bob Dylan’s 'Hurricane', Foghat’s 'Slow Ride', Black Sabbath’s 'Paranoid', Lynyrd Skynyrd’s 'Tuesday’s Gone', Aerosmith’s 'Sweet Emotion', and more.

The film captured American youth culture with such loving authenticity that it became a teenage anthem, similar to George Lucas’ ‘American Graffiti’ (1972) and ‘Fast Times at Ridgemont High’ (1982) before it. ‘Dazed and Confused’ sank into a special place in the history of nostalgia because it arrived right in the middle of Generation X, that most navel-gazing of generations. Director Quentin Tarantino described the film as one of the greatest “hangout” movies ever — movies that you rewatch for the characters rather than the plot — and he's right. The characters seem like real people.

Vince Vaughn was almost cast as the bully O'Bannion before Ben Affleck was chosen. As Linklater put it, “Ben was smart and full of life. You don’t cast the unappealing person; you cast the appealing person.” Casting director Don Phillips said in 2013 interview with Maxim, “We wanted Claire Danes for the girl, but she was too young. She couldn’t leave school.” Renee Zellweger has a nonspeaking role in the film, but was originally considered for the part of Darla, that went to Parker Posey instead. Linklater said in a 2016 interview with Mashable, “Parker was just crazier.”

McConaughey was not originally cast in the film. He approached Phillips in the bar of the Radisson in Austin where the cast was staying. Phillips recalls, “The bartender says to him, 'See that guy down there? That’s Don Phillips. He cast Sean Penn in Fast Times.' And Matthew goes, 'I’m gonna go down and talk to this guy.'” Phillips also recalls that Linklater didn't like McConaughey at first “because he was too handsome." Much of the Wooderson role was improvised or written on the spot, giving McConaughey more screen time - the line “alright, alright, alright” (inspired by Jim Morrison of ‘The Doors’) became his catchphrase. “Of the many great people I met in the process of casting this movie, you were selected because I had a gut impulse about you,” wrote Linklater in the letter that accompanied the 1970s mixtape he sent out to inspire the cast. “Know your character so we can forget about it and build something new, something special, in its likeness. As I've said before, if the final movie is 100% word-for-word what's in the script, it will be a massive underachievement.”

Director Quentin Tarantino described the film as one of the greatest “hangout” movies ever — movies that you rewatch for the characters rather than the plot.

The Kevin Pickford character, played by Shawn Andrews, was meant to be a larger role, but due to his behaviour with other cast members, Pickford's screen time was cut in favour of McConaughey's character, Wooderson. Linklater had to break up a fight between Andrews and London at one point. On screen, the two characters barely speak to each other during the film. Milla Jovovich, who played Michelle, Pickford's girlfriend, had her role reduced because, in Linklater's words, “it didn't really gel.”

While the movie hardly turned blockbuster (it only grossed $US8 million), today it is considered a cult classic that helped solidify Linklater's place among the American auteurs and launched the careers of some of today's biggest movie stars. In 2002, Quentin Tarantino listed it as the 10th best film of all time in a Sight and Sound poll. It ranked third on Entertainment Weekly magazine's list of the 50 Best High School Movies and 10th on their Funniest Movies of the Past 25 Years list.

Linklater’s 2016 film, ‘Everybody Wants Some!!’, was intended as a “spiritual sequel” to ‘Dazed and Confused’. In many senses, it simply picks up where its predecessor left off. ‘Dazed and Confused’ followed the lives of several teenagers on the last day of high school in 1976, whereas ‘Everybody Wants Some!!’ is about a Texas college’s baseball team in 1980, partying through the weekend before class begins. Both films depict thoughtful protagonists at moments of adolescent transition. Both follow a large cast of characters and focus on capturing the essence of a particular zeitgest as opposed to plot. In the foreground, the stories are about friends doing basically nothing, making inappropriate jokes and spending the long days of their youth together. But in the background, Linklater’s characters contemplate larger questions of transition, self-discovery, and openness. While they are not directly linked in content, ‘Everybody Wants Some!!’ is a mature evolution of the plot of ‘Dazed and Confused’ - it's about early adulthood’s next few steps.

GET DRUNK, GET LAID, GET IN A FIGHT

25 YEARS OF 'DAZED AND CONFUSED'

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