Meet everybody's all-European director

He's surprisingly close to home: Austin's Richard Linklater

He's a true-blue Texas boy, born in Houston, played high-school sports, worked on an oil rig. But Richard Linklater, even in his customary jeans, T-shirt and sandals (so very slacker), is our best European filmmaker.

From the loopy, idea-crammed "Slacker" and "Waking Life" to twin chat-fests "Before Sunrise" and "Before Sunset" — sinuous colloquies about love and life worthy of Eric Rohmer — Linklater flaunts a deep debt to European cinema. Like those of Rohmer and Robert Bresson, Linklater's personal films are more literary than visual, more philosophical than plot-driven.

Austin American-Statesman Read reviews of "A Scanner Darkly."

Story makes way for great gales of ruminative jabber from characters whose acute awareness of being alive makes their heads spin with almost childlike wonderment. They are smart and curious people, often outsiders, relentlessly probing their predicaments, be it a romantic misstep or the hangover from a dream, trying, with the finite power of language, to unriddle the dazzling mess we're in.

Fitting the Euro-flick model, Linklater's brainier work is tailored to the art house, aimed at discerning viewers who invite mulling at the movies. The writer-director works quickly and constantly, mostly in Austin, keeping a safe distance from the Hollywood labyrinth of meetings, rewrites and focus groups. He follows his busy muse, creating films as varied as "Dazed and Confused," a deceptively middlebrow picture that could have been made by François Truffaut, to the superb sci-fi cautionary tale "A Scanner Darkly," which isn't so far from Jean-Luc Godard's "Alphaville." ("A Scanner Darkly" opens July 7.)

In America's indie-filmscape, Linklater is among a rarefied huddle of like-minded moviemakers who find narrative thrust in the amorphous energy of spoken ideas: Hal Hartley ("Henry Fool"), Whit Stillman ("Metropolitan"), Kevin Smith ("Dogma") and, earlier in his career, Steven Soderbergh ("sex, lies and videotape"). With the exception of Smith, who has boasted his ignorance of the European masters, these auteurs of cultured conversation find inspiration not in the kinetic displays of Ridley Scott or Steven Spielberg, but the formal experiments and drawing-room confabs of Godard, Rohmer, Luis Buñuel, Ingmar Bergman, Jean Eustache, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Andrei Tarkovsky. Cascading ideas, articulate and illuminating, supplant the bang of the car chase.

Linklater and his peers were likewise influenced by great American directors, such as Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Paul Schrader, Monte Hellman and Richard Lester, who themselves revered their European forebears. (As a young critic, "Taxi Driver" screenwriter Schrader published a seminal study on foreign cinema, "Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer." I recall seeing Linklater get his hardcover edition signed by Schrader in 1998 when the writer was in town.)

The elements of the European style are many, and Linklater's films distill them within a distinctly American idiom. Dialogue is paramount. It's what we say and feel that makes us who we are, and tells us we are alive. Time and how we use it is a primary theme. Linklater likes the day-in-the-life structure, used in "Slacker," "Dazed and Confused," "Waking Life," "Tape," "Before Sunrise" and its sequel "Before Sunset." These films underscore the importance of the moment, and it's significant that Linklater tends to capture his talky scenes in extreme long takes, the way life unfolds.

If one wants to play spot-the-influence, there is, for starters, "Slacker's" roundelay form, resembling Bresson's "L'Argent" and Buñuel's "Phantom of the Liberty." A gruesome slaughterhouse scene in Linklater's upcoming docudrama "Fast Food Nation" sounds an awful lot like a similar scene in the German drama "In a Year of 13 Moons," which Linklater has publicly called his favorite Fassbinder film.

There are certainly bits of Linklater in his two big Hollywood concessions, the hilariously spirited "School of Rock" and the superfluous "Bad News Bears." And his outlaw-cowboy picture "The Newton Boys," despite its glitzy trappings, was more personal to Linklater than you'd think.

In their steadfast idiosyncracies, "A Scanner Darkly," a Big Idea movie using rotoscope animation, and "Fast Food Nation," a multicharacter polemic, Linklater advances the case for his creative courage, his roiling originality and undeniable Europeanness.

How strange, and cool. A major European filmmaker who's not European. Right here in Texas.