Waking Life (2001)

Similar to several of his other films, Linklater had unconventional casting requirements that called for a unique approach. "Many of the people in the movie are non- actors. I said I want to meet smart, interesting people who have a lot on their minds." To find these people, Casting Director Lizzie Martinez and Producer Anne Walker-McBay set about discovering people and asking them to come in for a video interview. A series of questions were asked, including: "What are you passionate about? What are you reading? What do you know or care about more than most people?"

The cast was a mix of actors, characters from previous Linklater-directed films, friends, family and mentors to the filmmakers. One of the first faces seen on screen is that of Linklater's daughter, Lorelei Linklater, and her friend Trevor Jack Brooks. The two are featured in the opening sequence and launch the whole film with their paper game that reveals the idea, "dream is destiny." Richard Linklater has two pivotal roles in the film: one in the boat car scene where he directs Wiley Wiggins to get out of the car, in essence, sealing Wiley's fate; and one at the end when he suggests that Wiley "wake up!"

In addition to memorializing their house by using it as Wiley's home in the film, Pallotta and Sabiston also found a way to memorialize their landlady, Edith Mannix. She played the older woman artist who draws another elderly woman model in a park. On casting her, Sabiston says, "she has this wild white hair." Walker-McBay's mother, Professor Mary McBay, played a lady on television discussing the particulars of lucid dreaming.

Pallotta, who first met Linklater while he was a philosophy student at the University of Texas, had two former professors in the film - Louis Mackey and Robert C. Solomon. Linklater also had a link to Professor Solomon. While auditing his existentialism class (Linklater was never officially enrolled at the university) many years prior, Solomon had said something that still stuck out in his mind. "I just went in and asked him to repeat what he'd said on camera," Linklater says.

Linklater and Pallotta were both fans of the documentary THE CRUISE, starring Speed Levitch, and had met the writer/performer after an Austin premiere of his movie. They found him to be a natural to play the part of the man on the bridge that goes "salsa dancing" with his confusion. "Before the script was totally written, we knew we wanted Speed in the movie," Pallotta says of that casting decision. Steven Soderbergh's bit - shot with the use of a Hi-8 consumer camera - was captured while he and Linklater were in the small town of Bastrop, TX.

There were also several returning acts from previous Linklater films. Wiley Wiggins was one of the lead characters in 1993's DAZED AND CONFUSED. Adam Goldberg and Nicky Katt (who also starred in Linklater's SUBURBIA) return from fighting in DAZED AND CONFUSED to walk down the street spouting aphorisms about society and freedom. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy revisit roles they played in BEFORE SUNRISE, released in 1995. Charles Gunning, who worked with Linklater in both 1991's SLACKER and 1998's THE NEWTON BOYS, shows up as the man in jail swearing revenge. Mona Lee, who played Wiley's mother in DAZED AND CONFUSED, is having a quiet conversation with him at a restaurant. Similarly, the "Old Anarchist" from SLACKER, Louis Mackey, returns continuing his discourse, this time questioning "the most universal human characteristics - fear or laziness.'' ''He was actually continuing a thought that had been cut out of SLACKER,'' Linklater says.

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