Sixteen years after Dazed and Confused put Matthew McConaughey on the map as the stoner-sage David Wooderson and became the gold standard of high school nostalgia comedies, writer-director Richard Linklater has written a “spiritual sequel.” The story follows a group of lost boys and girls during their first weekend of college in 1980. The untitled project isn’t literally spiritual or a sequel, strictly speaking — sadly, none of the characters from the first movie will be featured in this one. But, like Dazed, it attempts to capture an iconic and infinitely confusing moment in a person’s life by following an ensemble of different characters through a short period of time. Much of the action takes place among the members of a college baseball team.
And EW has learned that Linklater has completed the script and has been spending the past few months trying to drum up funding for the project. It says a lot about the state of indie film and these tough economic times that the auteur behind such hits as School of Rock and critically praised masterpieces like Before Sunset would have trouble finding financiers to back a commercial-sounding comedy about college students. Indeed, Linklater sounded pretty mystified by how much the business has changed when he spoke to EW about the project last September. “It’s tough, man,” said Linklater, whose most recent film, Me and Orson Welles, has yet to find a distributor. “Unless it’s a tentpole, sequel, remake, or over-the-top comedy, that’s all the studios are even doing. They’ve kind of admitted they’re not in the business of doing anything else. The slightest level of irony or intelligence and, boom, you’re out of the league, you’re done.”
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Ah ah..I begin to understand, right now the studios are very cautious, they don’t want to bankroll ambitious movies.. for example the Veronica Mars movie (clever audience like with independant movies)
Very sad period…
The characters are what makes Dazed and Confused such a great film. What is the point of doing a “sequel” if none of the original characters are in it? This is seriously scraping the bottom of the barrel.
How can he have such a hard time making this when Dazed has such a HUGE cult following? It’s too bad. I hope it happens!
Acutally…there’s no reason he couldn’t bring back Wooderson…
shdrew, it’s not supposed to be a sequel. It’s just a similarly-themed film with college students in place of high school students. The two films technically have nothing to do with one another.
I loved Dazed and Confused, and if anyone has seen “Remember the Daze” another HS movie like DandC. Both very good. Cant wait for this one!
Dazed and Confused remains one of the greatest films of the 1990s, and certainly one of the most enjoyable movies of the past 25 years. Linklater himself is one of our most reliable and heartfelt filmmakers working today, and I eagerly await all his new projects, especially Boyhood. I myself have often considered writing a film based on my own unique experiences that first year of college, so I’m glad to see him doing something along similar lines. And I’m thrilled that it will be a period piece, because A) he does them so well, and B) I don’t care for much for the way things are today or this current generation of teenagers.
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This could be a great film if they get the casting right. How about the Apatow crowd? Seth Rogen, James Franco, Jason Segel, etc. – they’d be great.
NO NO NO! Don’t mess with perfection!!! ….Sequels suck.
. I myself have often considered writing a film based on my own unique experiences that first year of college, so I’m glad to see him doing something along similar lines, it seems he wrote some story on alien-ufos.org