12 March 14 - 20, 2024 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents Shot in the Dark Can God save Texas? A film god like Richard Linklater might help. BY EVA RAGGIO G od Save Texas, a trilogy of documentaries that debuted Feb. 27 on Max, examines some of the state’s deeply rooted issues. Based on the book God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State by Lawrence Wright, the lim- ited series was made in three parts, each by a different Texas director. The first, “Hometown Prison,” was directed by Richard Linklater; the second, “The Price of Oil,” by Alex Stapleton; and the third, “La Frontera,” by Ilana Sosa. Linklater has produced a widely varied body of work, in- cluding the highly stylized intellectual favorite Waking Life, the coming-of-age comedy and stoner cult classic Dazed and Confused and indie hits such as School of Rock and Bernie. Cinephiles are perhaps most sincerely attached to his naturalist masterpieces on time, such as Boyhood, which fol- lowed its characters through scenes that took place over 12 years and earned Patricia Arquette a Best Supporting Ac- tress Oscar, and the Before trilogy, in which he surprised viewers with out-of-the-blue sequels, completing a love story through near-voyeuristic glimpses of a couple (played by Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke) across cities and decades. We spoke to Linklater via Zoom from Paris, where he’s working on a film that’ll keep him away from his adopted hometown of Austin’s SXSW festival, an event he’s hardly missed in two decades. For the Austin-based director, dealing with real subjects (including his own mother, Diane Margaret Linklater, a former professor and advocate for inmates) in God Save Texas prompted a different form of investment into his film’s characters. “I’m always close to my characters, even if I’ve kind of created them, written them,” Linklater says. “But there’s a real actor there. There’s a real person you’re working with. So in this case, you’re working with real people, you’re get- ting their own personal stories. On one hand, it didn’t feel that different. I want to have an affection and an under- standing for people, but it’s personal: It’s their lives, it’s my life, it’s my mom. It couldn’t help but be personal. And you’re asking others to tell very personal, sometimes painful stories in their own lives. “So yeah, it’s a big ask. But I think in a way, they trusted me because I was local and maybe they knew it was personal for me, but I feel close to every story. You’re just trying to tell in the way you feel. So it felt right.” Intercut with scenes from protests and stories of death row inmates, the film sees Linklater returning to Huntsville, a city 70 miles north of Houston that has the most active death row prison in the U.S. Viewers can practically smell the grease off the small-town diner menus as Linklater reflects with his sub- jects (many of them his old classmates), on how his home- town’s prison industry grew so wildly out of control — at least tenfold, from 10 prisons to 114 — in the past few decades, and uncovers the inhumanity of inmates’ living conditions. The auteur filmmaker is a proud Texan whose roots creep up in his work, and he maintains the love of home while decrying its systemic failures. “You’re catching me on the wrong night,” he says of his feel- ings for Texas. “We’re executing an innocent guy tomorrow in Huntsville, Ivan Cantu, who’s being put to death without … I mean, I can’t believe it. I’m just stunned and really depressed, kind of a little desperate. We’ve been doing all we can. It’s just like, gosh, the new normal. OK, we can kill innocent people. The next administration, maybe we can start … There’s talk of camps. What’s next? What can we put up with? “So on the one hand, I love Texas and I love the people, but I really do feel a disconnect with the cruelty. ’Cause I know Texans aren’t cruel by and large, but I think our gov- ernment policies are extremely cruel, and this executing an innocent person is about the top of the list. So I don’t know. It’s times like this you feel pretty bad.” Cantu, who claimed his conviction more than 20 years ago was based on false testimony and dubious evidence died in Texas’ death chamber on Feb. 28 for fatally shooting two people. Linklater says he didn’t stumble into any major produc- tion roadblocks, but taking on a project that required such a deeply personal investment was a matter of facing his past to expose a haunting present. “Everyone was so giving and open and kind; I think it was just me getting over just wanting to go there myself,” he says. “This film concerns my mom. It’s a lot of my own past. I was asking people to tell their stories. So it was just deciding to do it, I think. And I mean, these issues about criminal justice and the death penalty, these have swum around in my head all these years. “It was kind of cathartic and satisfying to find a home for some of these feelings. And my summation is fairly simple, really. I think after all of it, it’s just like, yeah, the death pen- alty really does hurt a lot of … there’s a lot of collateral dam- age to so many people and these state employees who have to be dragged through it. So to me, it’s just kind of unneces- sary trauma induced on innocent people.” The film focuses on the trauma on both sides of the bars, from convicted inmates to state workers whose duties include strapping the bodies of death row prisoners onto and off the gurney. His opinions on the death penalty haven’t changed, but Linklater is more adamant than ever that the system predato- rily exploits human error. “My conclusion is don’t do it,” he says. “I’m not a full- blown prison abolitionist, but I’m heading that way only in that — I don’t mean let murderers out on the streets. I just think we could ... systematically create more worthwhile treatment. ... [I]t’s mental health and drug addiction. If you treated those things, there goes 90% of the population right there. “And then keep really the psychopaths, the murderers, serial sexual assaulters. I think we all have a vested interest in keeping certain people isolated from the general popula- tion, but people who made a bad mistake or something, I can’t explain a tenfold increase. Crime is down everywhere. That’s just the trend. Violent crime, everything’s down. So why is our prison gone up 10 times in the last 40 years? I don’t know. Things we have to ask ourselves. ... We should be investing in people, not just punishing them.” For God Save Texas, he says, the trio of directors hardly compared pre-production notes beforehand. “We were sort of siloed in our own projects,” Linklater says. “We knew what everybody was doing, but I guess I went first and set a certain tone, maybe with the personal.” Before and After the Before Trilogy With his cinematic oeuvre falling into an array of styles and genres, Linklater doesn’t give much thought to his overarch- ing body of work, preferring to hyper-focus on each film. He says he hasn’t even pondered the uniting thread woven across his projects. “I don’t know. I’m always telling kind of character-based work,” he says. “The concept is never bigger than the char- acters. They’re pretty far away from superhero or anything like that.” Least of all does he consider his legacy, or his writing liv- ing on through the ages. “Boy, I can tell you, I never think I’ll live on for generations,” he says with a laugh. “I’m really focused on what I’m doing like right now, making this movie. So that’s really all you can do.” He concedes that he’s mildly aware the Before movies have prompted a niche form of tourism, made up of fans who visit the first film’s Vienna locations, for example. But he hasn’t been to Vienna in about 15 years and assumes the interest has dwin- dled. (It hasn’t; visit the record shop where Jesse and Celine share a charged exchange of awkward missed glances in a lis- tening booth, and see for yourself.) He laughs at our joke sug- gesting the Austrian capital should’ve given him a key to the city. Nonetheless, as he finds himself in Paris, Linklater has learned that the bookstore featured in the second install- ment, Before Sunset, is still a bit of a treasure for fans follow- ing the Before map. In Huntsville, he’s known as “Rick,” a former football player for the state’s highest-ranking team. As a young adult, he taught himself filmmaking on a Super 8 camera. Before long, Rick went on to receive Academy Award nominations, be named one of Time’s most influential people in the world in 2015 and be- come an advocate for filmmaking, and particularly Texas film- making, as co-founder of the Austin Film Society. He’s a successful independent filmmaker whose movies have made a crater-sized mark on pop culture, so one would assume Linklater finds himself in a privileged spot coveted by any artist looking to make an impact without the fine print double-dealings. ▼ Culture Mat Hayward/Getty Images for IMDb Film director Richard Linklater examines Texas prisons.
