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The two filmmakers discovered that they were both looking for a place to live, so they decided to pool their resources and move in together at late rock legend Janis Joplin's old house in Austin. "That's where I really started to learn about filmmaking," Daniel says. "Rick taught me a lot about narrative, which I had never really been that interested in. My interests had been in documentary and experimental filmmaking."
Daniel and Linklater were roommates for five years, during which time their residence became known as the "Film House." "We talked incessantly about filmmaking," the cameraman says. "It was pretty much the only topic. We founded the Austin Film Society in 1986 for the explicit purpose of getting ahold of classic and obscure films from around the world, so we could watch them."
While Daniel worked steadily in the commercial world as a camera assistant, Linklater made his first full-length Super 8 film, It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books, in 1989. Spurred on by the money Daniel was earning on his commercial shoots, the two began work on the experimental narrative of Slacker. The highly original film followed over 100 intermingling characters (almost none of them played by professional actors) through the streets of Austin in the span of 24 hours.
"I was making pretty good money at the time, so we had the resources," recalls Daniel. "I bought an old Arri SR that we shot the film with, and a Steenbeck. Meanwhile, we were paying $130 a month in rent, so we had really low overhead. Our house served as our production center. We had all of our story meetings and rehearsals there, as well as our syncing sessions for the dailies. Rick, through means I'm still not clear on, somehow got 60 or 70 rolls of 16mm Kodak film from some dubious source. I came home after work one day hoping to find a beer in the refrigerator, and there was all this film inside. I said to myself, 'Where the hell did this come from?'"
Orion Classics eventually acquired the $23,000 Slacker for release. The resultant critical acclaim put Linklater on the map, and made the film's title a zeitgeist-defining buzzword for a young and labor-wary generation. "Most of my movies are about hanging out," the director admits with a laugh. "There's a certain atmosphere of boredom. How do you make a film about boredom and not be boring? That's always been the challenge. In Slacker, there's really no story and no main character. Yet it's watchable because there's a consistency that carries through it. Audiences adapt to the rules you set up, as long as you don't throw them any curveballs."
Linklater's next film, Dazed and Confused, presented a hilarious and hallucinatory look at drug-fueled Texas teenagers on the last day of school in 1976. The film was made for Universal with a substantially bigger budget of over six million dollars, which put Linklater and the production under the sometimes uncomfortable magnifying glass of the Hollywood studio system.
"We felt that a lot of people from Hollywood were going to come out and tell us how to do it, even though we already knew how to do it ourselves while still appeasing the money people," cinematographer Daniel reflects. "It was really tough, but ultimately we came in on time and under budget, and succeeded in making a somewhat subversive work. In effect, it's a Hollywood B-movie, but there's nothing wrong with that."
The key to Linklater's sly visual strategy for Dazed and Confused was resisting the temptation to exploit the gimmick value inherent in the oft-lampooned 1970s era. "The idea was not to underscore the Seventies too much," he comments. "There were no close-ups of platform shoes. I told every department head on the movie, 'It's May 28, 1976, we've dropped the camera down on this night and we're just going to shoot what we see.' We didn't use a Steadicam because people weren't using a Steadicam back then. I really wanted to make it look as if it had been shot in 1976. If we could have found the Eastman stock that was most popular in 1976, I would have used it!"
Daniel further honed his skills in night photography on Linklater's next film, Before Sunrise, which followed a young couple (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy) around the streets of Vienna over an evening as they met, fell in love and said goodbye.
"Before Sunrise was really down and dirty [photographically]," Daniel notes. "Often we just used existing light at night - something I was scared to do at first. We used Eastman Kodak's 500 ASA 98 film, which was fairly new at that point. A lot of times I shot in areas that had only two footcandles of light. For a park scene in which Ethan and Julie were rolling around on the grass at night, the only light I used was a 6K way off in the distance through some trees. It was the kind of scene that was really intimate for the characters, so it was nice not to have a lot of light pounding in their eyes.
"With the high-speed stocks and super-fast lenses that are available nowadays, you can shoot in two footcandles of light," he stresses. "It's ingrained as a habit in Hollywood to use more and more lights [for night scenes], and I think it goes back to the whole infrastructure of how those kinds of movies are made, with big crews and unions, and a lot of equipment that you have to justify spending money on. We've come out of the independent world, and I think studios are saying, 'Hey, these guys work cheap. Let's see what they can do.'"
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