Thursday began the month-long Richard Linklater Cinematheque, featuring some of his works such as “Dazed and Confused” as well as six of his personal favorite movies from the 1950s.Thursday night Linklater and Wexner Center Associate Film Curator Dave Filipi discussed in depth each of the films Linklater has directed thus far in his career, including an upcoming film still in production. Linklater was generous in offering his inspirations for his movies and even explained of some of the technical aspects of his work.Linklater, who grew up in Texas, spent two years in a small east Texas college studying English and drama before dropping out and becoming an off-shore oil worker. Although Linklater loved film, he hadn’t planned on a career in it. He spent a lot of his spare time watching movies and became more interested over time. “I found myself in a lot of movie theaters because I didn’t have a life,” Linklater said.Once he tired of off-shore oil work, Linklater was drawn to Austin, Texas because of its diverse culture and music scene. While in Austin, Linklater began studying film and was soon spending 18 hours a day reading, writing and learning about the technical aspects of film by sneaking into film classes. For two years Linklater said he did nothing but film on his own and “fail in private.” “Your first film is like an artist’s first painting, you don’t want to show it to anybody because it isn’t any good,” he said. After some time on his own Linklater made his first real movie by himself. “It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books,” was Linklater’s first attempt at a real movie. Nearly an hour-and-a-half long, the film features Linklater on a road trip. “I was trying to show time passing, real time,” Linklater said.His first highly recognized film, “Slacker” created a niche into which Linklater fit, and made him a new voice in cinema. At this point he was labeled a Generation-X director, although he’s 38 years old. Linklater said the title for “Slacker” came from the fact that everyone on his crew was calling each other slackers.For Linklater’s next film he wanted to make a teenage rock and roll movie. He began with the concept of “three guys riding around in a GTO with the same ZZ Top song playing the entire movie.” Eventually the movie was transformed into “Dazed and Confused.””Everything that happened in this movie happened to me,” Linklater said. “Everything that happened to Mitch in that one day is pretty much everything cool that happened to me in a whole year.”Linklater said the theaters made “Dazed and Confused” into a “pot movie” and that wasn’t his intention. “The movie wasn’t about pot,” he said. He said it was about the confinement of high school and the stupid things people have to do to be cool, about coming of age. “I didn’t smoke pot in high school to get high, I smoked it to be cool, everything else was an added bonus,” Linklater said. As for the cult following of “Dazed and Confused” Linklater said those people aren’t necessarily the people he made it for. Linklater said his fourth movie, “Before Sunrise,” was loosely based on a romance he had with a girl in Philadelphia. Although it wasn’t a big hit here in the United States, “Before Sunrise” did very well in Europe.Linklater’s next film is the only one of his movies he did not write. It was a screen adaptation of the play “Suburbia” by Eric Bogosian. The suburbs in “Suburbia” was a topic which interested Linklater because of the characters. Linklater began to be heavily labeled as a Generation-X director. He really didn’t like the way people were judging him and his work. “You make a couple films and people think they know your whole life and your whole psyche,” Linklater said. Linklater’s next film “The Newton Boys” seems to take the labeling to heart. The movie is completely different from anything else he’s made. In this movie, Linklater had his biggest budget so far and used explosions and stunt scenes. “I really enjoyed the toys,” Linklater said of the explosives and stunts in “Newton Boys.”Linklater’s current project, “Waking Life” is a new level of artistic interpretation. In this production, Linklater is filming people doing normal everyday activities and then has animators go back over the film and create a completely different vision. The people are still there, but they now have an almost Picasso style of interpretation with their voices remaining the same.