Director Richard Linklater (“Boyhood”) is known for his versatility; romantic and coming-of-age films, animation, studio films, personal projects, etc., but it looks like he’ll be getting into the business of social documentary filmmaking next. While he’s promoting his upcoming animated Netflix film, “Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood” (read our review), which obviously further evinces his adaptability, Linklater revealed to The Hollywood Reporter podcast, Awards Chatter, a new project titled “Letter From Huntsville” for HBO. Evidently, it’s a three-part Texas documentary that speaks directly to Linklater’s connection to his hometown of Huntsville, and it features documentary king Alex Gibney who has also directed some of it.
“It’s called ‘Letter From Hunstville,’ and it’s part of an HBO series I’m doing with Alex Gibney, [screenwriter] Larry Wright,” he explained. “It’s a three-part piece on contemporary Texas, and I’m doing the criminal justice part, there’s a part on the border, and there’s another on the energy industry. And it’ll prolly come off as the three ills of Texas, three things that could be better.”
Earlier in the podcast, when Linklater first teased the doc, he said it would come to HBO this summer. Although, we’ll likely have to wait for more concrete dates from HBO/WarnerMedia in the coming months.
“I just realized that I had grown up with all these people, guys that I went to high school were [prison] wardens, some were strapping people to the gurneys for executions,” Linklater explained of the milieu he grew up in, how he got involved and why he ended up being perfect for that element of the documentary. “It was the backdrop, [my] step-dads were on both sides of the bars, my mom was an activist, she dated a civil-rights lawyer. It was just the world that I grew up in, but I’d never expressed it on film much.”
It sounds like “Letter From Huntsville,” or at least Linklater’s portion will be in the style of documentarian Michael Moore (“Bowling For Columbine”), even though that wasn’t his original intention.
“So, I just thought it was an opportunity to go there and go back to my hometown,” he said. “It’s one of those, ‘go back to your home town and see what’s going on’… I hope it’s affectionate, but it’s also, ugh, too. In a way, it looks like it’s a very personal film, but it was a begrudging personal film. My first thing was [to make it] more documentary objectivity, but I realized, that wasn’t going to work here. So it’s me on camera, hanging out with people I went to high school with, and all these years later. It was uncomfortable.”
We’ll be greatly anticipating a trailer for “Letter From Huntsville” to better understand what to expect from the HBO project.
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