Richard Linklater

Director Richard Linklater has been on the independent movie track for over twenty years now, and he’s built an oeuvre that’s as interesting as it is eclectic. He recently abandoned the romantic comedies and plotless, stream-of-consciousness work he’s been known for, turning out instead a pair of cynical flicks—A Scanner Darkly and now Fast Food Nation—that would’ve fit right in during the 1970s. A self-taught filmmaker who, in a former life, worked on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, Linklater has a special feeling for people who labor on the lower rungs—something that’s especially evident in his latest movie.

What attracted you to adapt Fast Food Nation, a nonfiction book, as a fictional film?

I had a real desire to do a piece about industrial workers—auto assembly and the like. I know what it’s like to work at the absolute bottom, and I wanted to make a film from that viewpoint. It was Eric [Schlosser]’s [the author of both the book and the screenplay] idea to base the film around these fictional characters … When I heard that idea, I got on board immediately. Documentary’s not my thing, and, besides, you’ve got the documentary in the book itself. It would be redundant.

No one seems able to really change the system in Fast Food Nation.
It’s cynical in a way that’s almost hopeless.

Eric and I tried to be honest. Take Greg Kinnear’s character—he’s not a hero or a bad guy. One of the messages in the film is that none of us are heroes or villains, we’re just people trying to do our best, and we can make choices. But if you try to sum everything up too simply in a film like this one, you end up weakening the message. If I made someone embody everything that’s wrong with the story, I’m giving that one guy a lot of power he doesn’t really have.

The gore involved in meat production is pretty diminished in this film. Did you want to avoid desensitizing your audience?

Oh, yes—that stuff is pretty powerful. But I felt that if I stuck my camera in the blood and guts, it would be exploitative. I wanted to be somewhat abstract but still get to the reality of the situation. Billions are spent to get you to ignore the reality of your food. You look at fast food … it’s John Wayne and Montgomery Clift on a cattle drive, bringing you the beef. But it’s never fifty thousand cattle crammed into a small space, gorging on hormones and standing in their own feces.

Which processing plants were crazy enough to let you in?

We had to go to Mexico. Amazingly, those facilities are cleaner and safer than those in the United States, and they treat their employees better. The economics are much different, of course: They handle forty to fifty head of cattle in an hour, while in the U.S., they’re doing ten times that. The people who owned that slaughterhouse liked the fact that we focused on the migration north. That’s a very mythical story to them, leaving Mexico to find better work in the United States. Granted, we didn’t tell them everything we were doing, but we didn’t lie, either. It was the same with the fast-food joint—“Mickey’s” is a real place, this little chain from Texas. I’d shot film there before, and the owner allowed me to shoot Fast Food Nation there as well.

And Bruce Willis? I heard that you and he were of similar minds when it comes to things like September 11th conspiracies.

Well, I don’t know about that. He’s a freethinking, wild guy—analytical. He’s crucial in the movie, playing a guy who’s on the inside and doesn’t really care about what’s going on. Working with Kris Kristofferson, too, was an experience. I’ve been a huge fan of his from way back. This was just another small part for him, of course, but when I came away from meeting him, he exceeded my wildest impressions. How often can you say that about meeting one of your heroes?