Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! – the “spiritual sequel” to his 1993 coming of age classic Dazed and Confused – opens in Columbus this weekend. Three of its stars – Blake Jenner, Tyler Hoechlin, and Will Brittain – spent less than 24 hours in CBUS last month in support of the film. They did get to see the Shoe before heading out to the rest of the tour, and they took a minute to sit around with Columbus Underground to talk about submarine pitches, crying on set, and working for Richard Linklater.
Columbus Underground: Linklater is big on baseball movies – he played himself. Did any of you play prior to the shoot?
Tyler: I played.
Will: I played little league until you had to figure out if you were good. I figured out I wasn’t.
Blake: I played catch a couple times with my dad when I was a kid.
CU: Did you have to work on being a pitcher?
Blake: Oh, yeah. 100% We were drilling it for like three weeks. We had to really work with our coaches to get our form down.
Will: Not only that, but form was different in 1980 than it is today.
Blake: But we’re lucky we were both right handed pitchers. Austin Amelio, he’s a left handed pitcher. He really had some work to do.
Will: He actually had to learn to throw a submarine pitch. He learned how to. Austin is like a weirdly talented guy. He was a former pro skateborder.
Tyler: These guys did a good job, I must say. Faking football – not to take anything away from it – you put the pads on, you run at the target, then they put somebody else in the helmet to hit somebody, something like that. Faking baseball is really difficult.
CU: Was it nerve wracking playing in front of Linklater?
Will: He can play well.
Blake: Rick definitely cared about the baseball. I remember, we were practicing. I was throwing to Will, and he came up, and I was really nervous. I was throwing it down and I hit three good ones, and Rick was like, “All right.” And I was like, “Dude!”
Will: I was so happy for him.
CU: Linklater is the master of slice of life cinema. His films feel so fluid and loose when you watch them – is that what it’s like on set?
Will: We workshopped for 3 weeks. There was improv in those workshop sessions to figure out what worked and what didn’t work, and by the time we shot the movie we had a final script.
Tyler: Things would come up. Rick was always very encouraging about keeping it open as well.
CU: Was his process much different than what you’re used to on other shoots?
Blake: Much different. What he does beautifully in this one and all his other films is really getting the audience to live in the now and to kind of lead with that mindset. This took 3 days and you think how 3 days can really change you as a person and really mold you, even if it feels like nothing really happened.
Will: And as an actor, it’s sort of disarming because he gives you such comfort in being who you are and just doing the scene. Just doing the scene and not worrying about whether or not you’re achieving some overarching objective or some big emotional level. You’re just trusting your instincts and going with it.
Blake: He gave us an obscene amount of freedom.
Will: It’s so laid back it’s almost uncomfortable.
Blake: You feel like a little kid running with scissors. You’re like “Dude, stop me! Stop me!”
Tyler: I would say it was the most fulfilling experience. The thing I always want is to just sit in a scene and just be in it, and usually it’s like, ‘well, I really need you to get to this,’ and there was never a sense of that. Even it being a comedy, when we were working on it, it was funny, but I never really mentally made that transition to, oh, this is a comedy. To me, these characters were just who they were and they interacted in such a funny way, but it never felt like a comedy. I kind of tried to play it as a drama the whole time.
Blake: Is that why you kept crying on set?
Tyler: That’s why I cried on set. I’d get it all out. I’d get the sensitivity all out.
Will: Right.
Blake: He cried a lot. You cried so much on set. Like when we were doing sleepovers with Rick and like 3 o’clock in the morning, I’m like ‘what the hell’s that noise?’ It’s Tyler.
CU: I’m sorry – sleepovers with Rick?
Blake: We lived on his farm during the workshop process.
Will: Tyler had his own cry room.
Blake: I know we’ve been saying jokes and being sarcastic, but Tyler did cry a lot. You can quote that.
Will: I don’t want to go on about this. It was just the amount of crying that really got out of control.
Blake: At first you think there’s something wrong. And then you just get used to it.
CU: Was 1980 like an alien planet for you?
Tyler: The last thing he wanted us to do was play into the 1980 thing. The wardrobe, the hair, the styles, the music and everything, I think he wanted just to get a sense of what our characters would get into, but mostly, the more things change the more they stay the same.
Will: I almost felt like we were in 1980. Half the people had already started growing out facial hair. By week 2, you’re looking at the guys the way they look in the movie and we’re reading the script, we’re playing baseball during the day, we’re doing disco dancing in the morning, at night we’re sitting around playing foosball and pool and ping pong and arcade games. We didn’t watch TV, we weren’t on Netflix, weren’t on cell phones. It just felt like we were in 1980.
CU: It looked like a lot of fun. Was it?
Tyler: To say how fun it was, usually on a set, your day is over, you wrap, you go home. That’s it. This was – no one ever went home. Everyone always stayed. Everybody wrapped, even until the last day of shooting.
Will: I was only in a handful of scenes, but I was there every day.
CU: What’s it like moving on to other projects after working on a Richard Linklater film?
Blake: I’m just going to try to take this experience with me.
Will: It was cool going to another movie after this. This movie gave me a lot of confidence. Rick gives you a lot of confidence to just trust yourself, so the next project I went into after this movie, I just kind of went – I just worked with Richard Linklater, guys. I have experience. And everyone respects Rick, so if you’ve done a movie with Rick, people know you must have some kind of common sense and some ability to do something.
Blake: Rick was our Mr. Miyagi. We’ll always have that.
Everybody Wants Some!! opens Friday.
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