|
"It's a pretty fundamental idea" Linklater said in a recent interview. "You ask yourself these kinds of questions: how do you know what is reality, what's real and what isn't?"
Waking Life follows a nameless main character played by Wiley Wiggins (Dazed and Confused) as he fluidly moves from one chance encounter to the next. He repeatedly wakes up from an experience he had not realized was a dream, only to find himself in yet another dream.
Linklater said the film's untraditionally slow storyline contributes to the audience's experience.
"You have to be kind of aware," Linklater said. "The film sort of begs you to be participating in it as you listen to it and watch it; it pulls you into it. You get to go deeper into it and find other levels of awareness."
Linklater admits it takes a while for audiences to understand the film's development.
"As you see it, it kind of contributes to an awareness of what's going on eventually," he said. "That's the film's own awareness of itself and the audience's awareness of the story that emerges from it.
"It doesn't set itself up right away. It's not a simple narrative, but it does emerge," he said.
Filmed first in live action by Linklater and a three-man production crew, Waking Life was cut, edited and illustrated using computer animation software known as "interpolated rotoscoping." A team of more than 30 artists digitally "painted" each scene at a painstaking rate of 250 hours of animation work for every minute of footage.
Linklater stressed the importance of the animation to the film as a whole.
"I thought about the film for years, but it was only when I saw the animation that my friends were working on that I said, 'Oh that's cool; it would make this film work,' Linklater said.
