Fast Food Nation

[MacGuffin]

Exclusive: Filmmaker Richard Linklater
Source: ComingSoon

Director Richard Linklater has made five movies in the last three years adding to his eclectic run of films that have run the gamut in both genre and budget. Best known as a pioneer of independent cinema with his early films Slacker and Dazed and Confused, Linklater suddenly found himself with a mainstream Hollywood hit in 2003 when he teamed with Jack Black for School of Rock. Since then, his choices have been equally eclectic from his indie sequel Before Sunset to this year's animated adaptation of Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly.

His latest project is a fiction film based on Eric Schlosser's bestselling non-fiction novel Fast Food Nation, which takes an in-depth look at the world of the fast food chains, how they create unsafe and unhealthy work conditions for exploited Mexican immigrant workers, which ultimately ends up translating into inferior food products. The star-studded cast includes Greg Kinnear, Bobby Cannavale, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Wilmer Valderrama, Patricia Arquette, Paul Dano, Luis Guzman and even Bruce Willis.

This is the fourth time that ComingSoon.net has talked with Linklater in the last few years, and this time, we caught the personable Austin-based director early in the morning before literally dozens of interviews he'd do for the film, but it allowed us to catch him at his most candid, as he even gets a bit introspective.

ComingSoon.net: At this point, when you're reading books like "Fast Food Nation", is the thought somewhere in your mind, "I wonder how I can make this into a movie"?
Richard Linklater: No, I can honestly say I read this book as a filmmaker and it never once crossed my mind that this was a movie. That's why I read a lot of non-fiction 'cause it doesn't clutter up my brain. Just the way I read anything, and I kind of think that maybe somebody can make a good documentary or this seems documentary-ish. If you think about it, the book itself, you could never be as thorough in a film as this book has been, so it wasn't until Eric Schlosser [author of the book "Fast Food Nation"] mentioned it. He came to Austin on a book tour, and that's when we met and started talking about it. He brought up the idea. I would never have been so cavalier with somebody else's material, but he said, "What if we kind of threw out the book and just made it a fictional film about these workers and then the themes of the book maybe can come out of that?" That's when I was like, "Well, that's what I would do" and I've always been interested in the subject matter, and I liked the idea of making a film about industrial workers at different phases. I'd been trying to do that movie for a long time, I just never could get funding. We sort of just rode the coattails of the bestseller status, even though we made a movie that wasn't it.

CS: Many of your previous films do seem to be a fly-on-the-wall of ordinary folks and their lives, much like a documentary.
Linklater: Yeah, that's my take, but it was fun to do that with people that actually worked for a living.

CS: Did you have to do any research or did you just use the book and what Eric had already done?
Linklater: We did a lot of research. A lot of it was through Eric, we'd go to Colorado, I met a lot of ranchers and a lot of workers. But not so much. My idea of the fiction film, you can really just concentrate on these characters, then you cast the person, and they end up maybe meeting a worker who's working next to them on the line. The movie kind of has this documentary realism, but it's very dramatic and structured.

CS: How were you received in Colorado when you went there to make the movie? Did they know that you were doing an expose of sorts on the fast food trade?
Linklater: Yeah, they know what's in the air. A lot of the people I met are the kind of quote-unquote good guys, the ranchers who were doing grass-fed beef. They're being put out of business by the factory feed lots. There's two ways to do it—there's the healthy way for the cows, for the environment, for the user at the end, not to have food that's hormone and antibiotic injected. There's that version, and then there's the factory feed lot model that seems to be winning, and that's where it gets dangerous. It would be great if consumers made the difference. So we were often dealing with the ranchers, who I actually have a lot of respect for. These guys are good stewards of the land, they care about their animals and the quality, but they're being put out of business by this other model that I've always been critical of. We have this myth in our head of "Oh, there's a family farm and crops and cows and pigs and chickens running around" and that's where your food comes from. Once you realize it's factories producing these things in really inhumane, horrible environments, that's when you go, "Okay, I don't want to support that but I'll support maybe those guys."

CS: It's funny you should talk about that, because there's a documentary coming out later this year called "Our Daily Bread" which shows some of those different methods.
Linklater: Oh, I've heard of that!

CS: It has no text or narrative, just images, but what they show isn't nearly as horrifying as some of the images in your movie.
Linklater: Oh, good. Sometimes, fiction can get at the horrifying truth.

CS: You're a vegetarian yourself, so is that for moral or health reasons?
Linklater: Well, it started with animal rights. Having grown up around it, I still don't have a problem with hunters. If you're going to go hunt a deer, kill it and feed it to your family, okay, there's something to that. But not the kind of hunting where rich people go out and there'll be some lion without claws that they'll release and you can shoot. Dick Cheney and Scalia where they have ducks let out of cages. That's pathetic on a moral level. I don't really have a problem with that.

CS: How did you get access to the meat-packing plant where you shot a lot of the movie? Did you tell them what you were doing?
Linklater: We couldn't in the U.S., we knew that. Even the friendly ones, the guys who are doing it right, the ones Eric knew who were doing the most to keep it clean, they wouldn't even touch this, even though they liked us. They just knew that in their industry, they couldn't do it. So we were in Mexico shooting the desert scenes, and we got access to some facilities down there by saying that these facilities would be portrayed in the movie as though they were in Colorado and that the story was about these Mexican workers, these three people from Mexico who go North and end up in this factory and this is their job. We didn't lie. I think they liked that the story was about Mexican workers who go North and their struggle. That's a story you don't see a whole lot so they came aboard with that. We didn't tell him the whole nature of it. I'm not proud of it.

CS: So you didn't give them copies of the Spanish translation of "Fast Food Nation"?
Linklater: No, they didn't really know that was our title. It's kind of like going undercover a little bit. But we had limited access. The whole abattoir scenes—I like that word—we had like three hours to shoot it all with no lights, extreme limitations, we just throw our actors in there and go. That was the fun.

CS: This movie stars a few actors you've worked with before like Greg Kinnear and Ethan Hawke, but did actors like Bruce Willis jump at the chance to be a part of this movie because of the subject matter?
Linklater: I don't know. I was in that privileged position where I didn't need Bruce Willis to get financing. The film was already financed regardless of who was in it, so I was in that position, which is a much stronger position to approach an actor you don't know who or who hasn't worked with you. I think they liked what the script was getting at. They don't read a lot of scripts like this. There aren't a lot of scripts that are trying to do what we're doing, even though it's a very low budget. So Bruce, Kris Kristofferson, Patricia Arquette, Esau Morales, Luis Guzman, I just thought they'd be perfect.

CS: Actors must know your scripts and what you can bring out of actors by now.
Linklater: I think eventually if you do something long enough, someone goes, "Oh, yeah, I heard he's okay to work with," so maybe that helps, but I dunno.

CS: It's been an eclectic couple of years from you, if you look at the different movies you've done from one to the next. Is it strange to you that people might find the wide variety of movies you've done a bit strange?
Linklater: No, I can see on the surface. I'm in that position, and it's funny to have been there. This decade, people go, "Okay, you've done these two studioish movie and you're all over the place." Well, I can explain in detail why each one is very personal to me, and why I was drawn and wanted to make a movie about any of these things. I think the ones that stand out are probably "School of Rock" and "Bad News Bears." If it had been just the others, maybe it would just have been leaps of subject matter, but I think it's the studio comedies that pop out. In my mind, it's all pretty coherent, but everyone's life is coherent, even the schizophrenic going down the street mumbling to themselves, they're coherent [to themselves]. I'm glad that through sheer longetivity, people say, "Oh, you do different kinds of things." Because early on, ten years ago, it was like, "Wait, what are you doing? You don't qualify to make a film about that. You're the guy who does this kind of movie." It's just a product of... like we all have interests, we all have things we want to do. I think my thing is that I don't feel like a specialist. I want to be able to make a film about anything I'm interested in. Name a subject of any movie I've done and I can explain in detail why, but it's no different than someone reading fiction books, non-fiction books. We're all interested in everything.

CS: I guess the big surprise came when after you made "School of Rock," you decided to revisit characters from a movie you made nine years earlier [i.e. "Before Sunset"].
Linklater: Right, then I made the lowest budget movie, shot in 15 days. That was sort of a crucial moment for me, because I didn't see myself as graduating to anything. It's like there's a lot of movies to make, and each movie has a certain budget and a way it should be made like clearly "Fast Food Nation" wasn't a big studio budget film if you want to get that made. I don't want to cut out the whole world by saying, "Okay, I just make big budget movie, get paid a lot..." No, I want to explore, that's what I do. If I'm lucky I get to keep making movies about something I'm into.

CS: Doing indie movies must have helped you to do the studio movies for less money, but has it gone the other way, where you learned something from doing studio movies that you've brought back to your indie work?
Linklater: In a way. Every movie has its own problems, even if you have a bigger [budget]. Like my studio films, they're low budget studio. It's not like they're $100 million, but $30 million, which believe it or not is low budget studio. They all have their own cross to bear. In my case, they're like working with kids, short hours, there's always something, but my lower budget realistic approach does help in that way. I don't know if those help, because you do have to keep from getting a little bit spoiled, just because you have a 50-day schedule. But dammit, if you use it, you're going to need more. I think whatever you have, you always need 20% more. Like James Cameron needed an extra $20 million to make "Titanic" just perfect. He struggled and got it. It's like that.

CS: Is your next movie going to be another independent and do you have a few scripts done that you might want to start shooting next?
Linklater: Yeah, for every film you get made, believe it or not, two more kind of sprout up, so I have quite a backlog. I have four projects that are in really good shape, two I've written and two I've sort of developed with writers over the years. That's how I tend to work these days. Or like a book I've optioned and have been developing. I don't know which one will be next exactly. I have a long-term project I shoot every year that I shot this summer. I'm kind of working on a documentary. It always feels like I have little things going on.

CS: You've done two animated movies now. They obviously take a lot longer than your normal productions, so how do you feel about continuing in that field?
Linklater: Yeah, total pain. The animators are doing all the work, but you're kind of overseeing. It's just this constant little thorn. I don't have a story in my head that would work that way, not really. We had a good team. We finally got it down, though it took a while. I don't really know. There's no plans there. All my future projects currently aren't animated. I don't want to sound like Al Gore here [does an Al Gore impression], "At this moment, I have no plans..." But no, I really don't. You kind of could do anything.

CS: Will you be including some of the live action footage from "A Scanner Darkly" on the DVD?
Linklater: Actually, "Scanner" would work as live action a lot better than "Waking Life" did because we shot it, we lit it, but there's no "live action version." It would be a mess and not that interesting.

CS: You've included politics and political talk in many of your movies, but have you ever thought of doing a straight political movie?
Linklater: Electoral politics is so ugly. I love political movies like "All the President's Men." "Network" is political in that way. This movie is political, maybe not in its specifics, but it's the politics I like, the politics of everyday life. To show the representations of politics, politicians actually running for office, that's apt for parody. We're living it. What new could we do there?

CS: I would think that being from Austin, Texas would lend itself to an interesting movie, that being a very liberal city in the middle of a conservative state.
Linklater: Yeah, Texas politics itself is very fascinating. I'd love to do a film about LBJ's early days. There's some cases when he was Senator where he was extremely political, just to show a really crafty politician who really cares about the people. You can take a moment in time politically. I'd like to make a film about the Haymarket Riot, a political action moment in our country's history. You just basically execute a bunch of people because you don't like what they believe even if they didn't do anything wrong.

CS: Do you mind directing things from other people's scripts like you did with "School of Rock" and "Bad News Bears"?
Linklater: I don't know. I don't even distinguish really, 'cause even if it's from somebody else, even for me to do it. I get offered stuff all the time, and usually I don't do it, not because it's not good. I read a script or get into a project and go, "Oh, yeah, that could be good," and often, they do go onto be successful big movies, but I just think, "What can I bring to it?" The times I've come aboard something, it's been that this was mine to do. I guess it's a combination of self-confidence and delusions to be able to go, "I'm the only guy who can do this just right." You have to think that way. You have some personal connection that goes deep enough that somebody else probably won't have. Not in a competitive way. Like "Bad News Bears." Baseball player, I knew that, kids, I just felt like that was me. Same with "School of Rock." My knowledge of music and how I wanted to portray the music and Jack Black's character. There's always different versions of a film before it gets made. There's like a cheesy bad version and then there's the cool version. My job is to make the cool version, and that's what you strive to do. Whether you get it or not, but you have to feel like you're chosen. And the same with adapting "A Scanner Darkly." Even though I did the adaptation and that's my script, that material is Philip K. Dick's, I was pretty faithful, so is there a difference between doing that vs. "School of Rock." It's somebody else's material, but why am I attracted to it? Of all the books that have ever been published, why am I doing that one?

Fast Food Nation opens on Friday, November 17.

[Redlum]

I  saw it as part of the LFF and liked it.

I was really sore to miss this and my yearly fix of the LFF. I even managed to get tickets without queuing for standbys for the first time but unfortunately I was sick. As a consolation my dad went without me and took along Slacker for it to be signed (which RL informed my dad was the last film he was with at the festival).

Do you goto the festival a lot? I live about an hour from London so its not that convenient. I have managed to get standbys for the last two closing night galas which were pretty special.

[Sunrise]

CS: I guess the big surprise came when after you made "School of Rock," you decided to revisit characters from a movie you made nine years earlier [i.e. "Before Sunset"].
Linklater: Right, then I made the lowest budget movie, shot in 15 days. That was sort of a crucial moment for me, because I didn't see myself as graduating to anything. It's like there's a lot of movies to make, and each movie has a certain budget and a way it should be made like clearly "Fast Food Nation" wasn't a big studio budget film if you want to get that made. I don't want to cut out the whole world by saying, "Okay, I just make big budget movie, get paid a lot..." No, I want to explore, that's what I do. If I'm lucky I get to keep making movies about something I'm into.

I love that a great film like Before Sunset only took 15 days to shoot. Can't wait to see Fast Food Nation.

[gob]

I  saw it as part of the LFF and liked it.

I was really sore to miss this and my yearly fix of the LFF. I even managed to get tickets without queuing for standbys for the first time but unfortunately I was sick. As a consolation my dad went without me and took along Slacker for it to be signed (which RL informed my dad was the last film he was with at the festival).

Do you goto the festival a lot? I live about an hour from London so its not that convenient. I have managed to get standbys for the last two closing night galas which were pretty special.

Ah that sucks that you missed it, kind of consolation with the signed dvd though. I was on the aisle and I must confessed having seen Borat earlier on in the day that kidnapping Linklater by putting a sack over him did flash through my mind.

I've gone to a handful of films each year since 2004 when I joined BFI. I live just under an hour outside London too but I'm not bothered about taking the train trip cos it's always worthwhile.

This year saw: Fast Food Nation, A Screen Talk with Linklater, For Your Consideration, Borat and Sleeping Dogs Lie. To be honest I'd see near enough every film in the programme if I could.

[MacGuffin]

Mystery Meat
Uncovering 'Fast Food' Secrets
Source: MTV

BEVERLY HILLS, California — They tell us that the meat is good. They tell us that McNuggets, Big Macs and Whoppers are all part of a balanced diet, and that the age of the 49-cent hamburger and the minimum-wage drive-thru employee is nothing to be concerned about. They tell us to enjoy the meal, don't look behind the curtain — and then ask if we want fries with that.

"They weren't very happy about the book," author Eric Schlosser said of "Fast Food Nation," his humorously horrifying 2001 exploration into the dark side of the all-American meal. "[The fast-food giants] were very critical of me personally, but they were never able to point out mistakes in the book or challenge central arguments of the book — so they really tried to personalize the issue."

Among other revelations, "Nation" depicted the New Jersey Turnpike lab where the phony flavors we associate with strawberry shakes and Taco Bell hot sauce are manufactured in test tubes; processing plants where Frankenstein burger patties are assembled from dozens or even hundreds of cattle; and the homeless and illegals recruited to work in slaughterhouses for meager wages.

"When I was on a book tour last year, The Wall Street Journal had an article that said McDonald's had said in a memo that they were going to discredit me as a person and by discrediting me, discredit my arguments and my work — and on this book tour, there were clearly people planted in the audience," the author recalled. "There were protesters passing out pamphlets; there were attempts to prevent me from speaking at schools, saying I was un-American and an improper person to be speaking to schoolchildren. It was clearly organized through this Washington, D.C., lobbying firm that McDonald's uses.

"It's been a very personal kind of criticism, but I never criticize McDonald's executives," he continued. "I don't say they are deliberately trying to harm anyone with their food. I think these are important issues, and we should be able to debate them and discuss them."

But there's only so far that a book — or its author — can go. Recognizing this, versatile filmmaker Richard Linklater ("Dazed and Confused," "School of Rock," "Before Sunrise") contacted Schlosser and said he wanted to pick up the "Nation" baton and run with it. But in order to get the issues out to as many people as possible, both men agreed that two things must be done: Financing and crew must be obtained without any chance of corporate sabotage, and the nonfiction book would have to be dramatized to get across the human elements.

"We're very realistic, and we're very truthful. There is nothing in the movie that isn't real to this world," Linklater insisted. "But it takes a little heat off of Eric's investigative journalist giving facts. We are telling a human story. ... The movie is just asking you to care about the people who are behind this system."

Linklater and his crew set out to film the movie in secret, staying ahead of the same multibillion-dollar industry that had sought to discredit Schlosser. Shooting under various aliases, their attempts to film in real fast-food restaurants and slaughterhouses were mysteriously undermined, and at other times, they had to make their shots and get out before anyone caught on. Somehow, even though his actors had to risk future advertising opportunities, keep tight-lipped about their involvement and often run around in the night like secret agents, Linklater recruited an impressive cast.
 
"It felt very underground, very guerilla espionage, James Bond-ish," grinned Greg Kinnear, who stars as a "Mickey's" executive alongside Wilmer Valderrama, Bruce Willis, Avril Lavigne, Ethan Hawke and others. "We had to shoot with code names and stuff like that."

Residents of the local area were told that a movie called "Coyote" (among other names) was shooting in their town, and most production lists omitted the names of the major stars involved.

"The restaurant industry put out the word to not let Rich shoot in the locations if they found out it was 'Fast Food Nation,' " Schlosser said of the need for secrecy. "This film had to be done low to the ground, or it could've never been made."

"Every location had a different name for the movie. ... We were being investigated, we were being chased," remembered Valderrama, who, while trying to film his scenes as a Mexican slaughterhouse employee, often saw corporate "spies" lurking about. "There were many, many attempts to see how they could shut down this movie."

"Our movie was financed through Europe," the actor added, referring to an unorthodox budget that was largely assembled by rebellious English entrepreneur and Sex Pistols founder Malcolm McLaren. "It was a very independent movie."

"It felt like being an investigative journalist," Linklater grinned, remembering an experience he'll never forget. "You go underground to do what you have to do. It felt like I was making my first film again — stealing locations — but with A-list actors."

Just because the "Nation" book and movie have something to say, however, doesn't mean they want to be preachy. The message here isn't necessarily to become a vegetarian but to become better-educated about the penny-pinching business model that gets that 99-cent burrito into your mouth — and all the ill-advised shortcuts that must be made to maintain it.

"I eat red meat, and I still do," Kinnear said of the health choices he makes. "[Schlosser] still does as well. There are different issues about meat; it's not just one size fits all. There is a difference between steak and going and getting a piece of wax paper that is holding a little beef patty that cost you 69 cents and smells really good. ... The issue of the book, and part of the issue of the movie, is just to consider the source."

Sure, they're telling you that the meat is good — but with films like "Nation" and "Super Size Me" opening people's eyes, that statement is becoming harder to digest.

[Ghostboy]

Here's my own <a href="http://www.road-dog-productions.com/cgi-bin/2006/11/a_conversation_1.html>interview</a> with Linklater.

[Ultrahip]

SOME SPOILERS

Anyone else think the music in this film just did not fit? Even detracted from scenes it was so grating? Great performances by individuals...not much of a film as a whole. Luis Guzman, Bruce Willis, Kris Kristofferson were all wonderful...but Kinnear disappearing and the focus shifting to those annoying high school liberals killed the film...everything went loose and tangental, not in the cool Linklater way, but in a wait a minute...this movie just became about nothing sort of way...the kill room was obviously affecting...but a 3 year old with a camera couldnt mess that up...i adore Linklater and was severely disappointed by this effort...

[matt35mm]

I got about what I was expecting based on what I've been hearing about the film.  I liked the film okay, but it was pretty inconsistent (some of the stories are interesting and some aren't), and in the end didn't fully come together.  If I hadn't thought that the Amber character (who I just discovered was Crissie Seaver on Growing Pains...) was pretty, I wouldn't have cared for that whole part of the movie.  I like the ideas... I like the idea of connecting high school fast food workers into everything, since it's all part of the "fast food nation," but these particular characters just weren't very interesting.  I felt like they got lazy in the script stage with the character development, which was the main disappointment, since this was initially described by Linklater as a character study version of Fast Food Nation.  But it's not really.

I guess the disconnect was in showing typical teenagers, a typical immigrant story, and Kinnear's character was pretty typical as well.  These are the most common stories, very common cases, and I guess that direction was chosen to suggest the larger scale of the story--it's these stories times a lot that make up the fast food nation.  However, in showing so much typicalness, it wasn't really that interesting.

I don't feel like the movie's goal was to educate, so I won't call it a criticism that I didn't learn anything.

But I will always remember the kill floor scene.  I had never really seen that before.  A friend of mine was crying, and I was very affected as well.  But even past the whole killing thing, the scene makes clear just how dangerous it is for the workers.  These are untrained people wielding equipment designed to cut flesh at high speeds for 8 or possibly more hours a day (for $10 or so an hour).  It does suggest, whether the meat industry likes it or not, that these workers' safety and maybe even lives are expendable, or at least secondary to increasing the speed of meat production.  People having to eat shit due to the high speeds of the production line is a relatively minor concern compared to the physical danger to the workers.  If there's one cry for change that needs to be made, it's that.

[hedwig]

Catalina Sandino Moreno 

the only reason i might eventually see this movie.

[Pubrick]

the segments     

the only reason i might never see the whole movie.