Watch: Richard Linklater on How Megan Ellison Saved ‘Everybody Wants Some!!’

Ellison didn’t understand why it had been hard to raise funds for such a funny script. “The cast of unknowns was largely a deal killer with any entity,” Linklater said. “As a sequel to ‘Dazed and Confused’ they’d want McConaughey to play the coach. No. Wooderson wouldn’t be the coach, it’s corny, cynical. It’d pull you out of the movie.”

Ellison agreed: “You know the film’s so strong conceptually, that one star in the middle of the movie playing one of those parts would  throw it off.”

“You think the way I think,” he told her. “All the people afraid of losing their jobs with a movie with no stars, covering their ass, can’t think what you think.” So Ellison made it possible for Linklater to finally make his long-gestating ode to a college baseball team—on a $10-million budget—a loose “Dazed and Confused” sequel, as if pony league ball player Mitch (Wiley Wiggins) goes to college as a star pitcher, this time named Jake (Blake Jenner).

“Everybody Wants Some!!” is hugely entertaining, shot with the same “Dazed and Confused” aesthetic and cast of young discoveries, including Wyatt Russell (son of Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell), and Zoey Deutch, (daughter of actress Lea Thompson and director Howie Deutch), as well as many of the same crew (including long-time Linklater editor Sandra Adair). So far it’s holding well as the young cast travels around the country and it builds strong word of mouth in theaters before it eventually goes to VOD.

“It’s a total young man testosterone movie,” Linklater admitted. It feels steeped in baseball, although the young ball players sharing a college rooming house only hit the field mid-way through the movie. “It’s the inner workings of being on a team in college, different from high school,” he said. “Suddenly they’re your roommates. In high school you’re living at your parents’ house. In addition to having all that freedom college gives you, you’re used to being the most competitive guy on your team, now you’re surrounded by 20 other guys like that, you’re thrown into a herd, with a different energy.”

While high school is a gang of girls and guys dealing with confinement, college feels more free and gender segregated, Linklater said. Boy’s dorms and girl’s dorms, sororities and fraternities, mixers. He was an entitled college athlete who gravitated toward the theater department and its creative energy. And women are part of college expanding a young man’s horizons, as young Jake meets a young dancer (Deutch) who starts to open him up in unforeseen ways.

And as Linklater discovered a rich mix of musical genres in 1980, at the end of the 70s, before the corporate world took over, his gaggle of guys cruises through a range of music on campus. “A lot of genres were on the table that were commercially viable,” he said. “‘Urban Cowboy’ made country cool, Metal, discos were still around, you’d go dance to it, it was fun, early hip hop, new wave and punk. It was an interesting cultural moment before the 80s kicked in, the last time I felt at all aligned with what was popular in the culture.”

Linklater cast his young ensemble with athletes who could play ball believably as well as act. “It’s a physical swagger,” he told his actors. “Their athletic careers are over but they remember that bubble of entitlement, as society elevates athletes to such a ridiculous level, where you feel like the world is laid out for you perfectly—until the real world slaps you into reality. They got it, strolling through the campus. It’s both an embracing of that moment, and a critique of it too.”

Linklater is excited by renovations at the Austin Film Society theatre and a range of projects at different budget levels in various stages of development. And he’s deep in the weeds with Jack Black trying to help Bernie Tiede, the real-life person his 2012 movie “Bernie” was based on, played by Black. After serving 17 years in prison for killing his abusive woman employer, he’s out on parole, openly gay and gainfully employed in Austin, and because his confession of guilt may have been coerced, he’s facing an expensive new trial and re-sentencing—and the real possibility that he could be clapped back in jail with a life sentence. “So he had to lawyer up,” said Linklater. “The state of Texas is determined to put him in prison for the rest of his life. He’s working two jobs, singing in the choir, he’s the sweetest guy who no one would feel like a threat to society. He’s a tax-paying citizen.”