 The
first challenge for Richard Linklater in beginning WAKING LIFE was
to address the issue: "How do you make a film about something that
most likely happens entirely in the mind?" The first script was more
like "an idea, pages and pages of notes and a working method," Linklater
says.
The
actual shooting of the live action began in the summer of 1999 and
took about 25 days. The crew was similar in size to a documentary
crew - Linklater and Producer Tommy Pallotta, using consumer-level
cameras (Sony TRV900s and one PC I), and one sound person who was
also responsible for mixing.
Linklater
and Pallotta agree that there was tremendous freedom and mobility
in working with such a small crew. "Whenever you have a big crew,
the director spends so much time telling so many different people
what exactly he wants, but in this case, it was easy for Rick (Linklater)
to pick up a camera and get what he wanted," Pallotta said. "It
was the dream way to shoot a movie." Linklater added, "I was back
to locations that I'd been at with 100person crews, and this time
there were just four of us." The difference was never more apparent
than when Linklater and the crew went to shoot the jail scene at
a location in Lockhart, TX that he had previously used for THE NEWTON
BOYS. "The time we were there before, there were a lot of trucks,
generators, a huge production. This time, we just zipped up in a
car, filmed the whole scene in an hour and a half and left."
The
filmmakers still marvel at one extraordinary feat they achieved
while shooting - in one day a total of 22 pages were shot. Typically
a production will shoot about two or three pages a day. "It was
an intense dialogue day," Linklater remembers "that included the
'dream room' and two other lengthy sections. They were all well
rehearsed. We gave everybody an hour and a half to shoot their scene
over and over and we just worked through it. We had two cameras,
lots of footage, nothing rushed, and pretty soon it's 5 o'clock,
we're through and we've shot 22 pages of dialogue. I don't think
there are too many films that can do that. It was wild."
The
shooting, was limited to three cities - Austin and the surrounding
areas, New York and San Antonio. But in keeping with the surreal
feel of the film, there are no geographical references. In some
instances, there is a bridge that resembles the Brooklyn Bridge,
a subway that resembles a New York subway, or a skyline that has
the feel of Austin, but there is never a positive indicator of those
locations.
Several
of the locations that were used had personal links to the filmmakers.
To begin with, Wiley's bedroom, to which we return several times,
was Sabiston's bedroom in the house he and Tommy Pallotta shared.
The always-wavering digital clock that continued to remind Wiley
of his dream state was Sabiston's clock. Similarly, Ethan Hawke
and Julie Delpy's scene was shot at Linklater's apartment in Austin.
But, in typical independent film fashion, there were also the less
orthodox locales like the one used for the train boxcar scene. For
that particular day, the filmmakers actually crawled under a chain
link fence to get their shot. "We were so down and dirty," Linklater
muses. "It felt like renegade, low-budget film where you could just
take locations and steal stuff."
One
particular incident while shooting truly summed up the everyone-pitch-in
nature of the making of WAKING LIFE. Pallotta describes how he and
Linklater had spent a day hanging out of a helicopter while flying
over the city of Austin in an attempt to get the footage for the
floating sections of the movie. When Linklater reviewed the footage,
he found that it didn't have the ethereal floating feeling he was
seeking. By a stroke of luck, Pallotta and Sabiston's next-door
neighbor happened to be a hot air balloonist. They approached him
and he agreed to take Linklater up for a day of shooting where he
was able to capture the appropriate effect.
Unlike
typical films for which editing would not begin until the shooting
is complete, Linklater and his editor Sandra Adair did much of the
editing as they went. Linklater found that the order of the scenes
presented itself as he shot. He described editing as "waking up
in the morning and thinking, 'OK, this scene should go before that
one, and here's the new flow.' It was a very intuitive, long process."
It
was necessary for the live action footage to be complete and edited
before the animation began so that no wasted animation would be
produced. Linklater said the making of WAKING LIFE was really "two
films in one. A double creative collaboration" that called for a
full live action feature and then a fully animated feature. Though
Linklater is quick to point out "I don't really divorce the processes.
To me, there's this inherent overlap between the content of the
film and the look of it. In one phase, you're collaborating with
actors, the other with animators."
Once
the picture was locked, Bob Sabiston and team stepped up to begin
their animation wizardry. Sabiston had long been perfecting his
software for just such a project. He first used it for an MTV-sponsored
animation contest that earned him a job creating a series of interstitials.
When tackling the production of a road trip film called ROADHEAD,
with Pallotta, he added color to the software. During the production
of Sabiston and Pallotta's award-winning film SNACK AND DRINK, which
is part of the permanent collection at New York's Museum of Modem
Art, he added bouncing objects into the software. And in preparation
for WAKING LIFE, Sabiston altered the software for big movie formats,
added the option of using transparent shapes, and fine-tuned the
line quality to create the most natural drawn line possible.
Sabiston
assembled a team of more than 30 artists, many who he had worked
with on a PBS project called FIGURES OF SPEECH. His criteria were
simple: "good artists and good people." The graphic team loaded
into Linklater's Detour Filmproduction office in Austin, taking
over basically every room including the conference room. A host
of Mac G4 computers were purchased, and the animation train started
rolling.
Each
animator was assigned a character that they would work on solely.
Linklater likened it to "actors picking what part they wanted to
play based on what they were interested in." The process required
the artists to "paint," with the use of Sabiston's software, over
the live action footage. It was simultaneously artistic - because
each artist creatively interpreted the scene in his or her own style,
and tedious - because of the amount of time that went into this
painting process. It is estimated that each minute of footage required
250 hours of animation.
A point
of interest during the animation is that Wiley Wiggins also worked
as an animator. Wiggins was part of the original animation team
that worked on the scene where he rides the subway, just prior to
encountering Speed Levitch on the bridge. The scene was eventually
altered - "because Wiley interpreted his character to look as though
he were about 12 years old" - but the background that he animated
still remains.
It
took approximately nine months to complete the graphics portion
of the film, leading to a finish just under the wire for the 2001
Sundance Film Festival. When it premiered at the festival, Pallotta
says the filmmakers were seeing the final film for the first time
right along with the audience. Just the week prior, Sabiston and
Pallotta were hurriedly shipping off disks and physical hard drives
to Swiss Effects in Zurich trying to do the transfer. Pallotta remembers,
"I was having conversations with Sundance two days before it showed
saying, 'We may not be able to show this.' But somehow I knew that
we'd pull it off." Just hours before the Sundance screening, Linklater,
Sabiston and Pallotta were allowed to view a few minutes of the
film to check the sound and image on the big screen. The reaction:
"It looked phenomenal. We all just looked at each other and said,
'Oh yeah, this is going to be great,"' Pallotta remembers.
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