Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard Linklater

Linklater’s flex isn’t that he avoided Los Angeles; it’s that he barely had to acknowledge it. In one clean, offhand sentence, he draws a map of power in American filmmaking and then steps outside it. The line lands with the casual confidence of someone who knows the industry’s gravitational center and still chooses to orbit elsewhere.

Context matters: The Newton Boys (1998) was a relatively expensive studio-backed period film, the kind of project that typically drags a director into the endless meetings, networking rituals, and taste-making circuits of LA. Linklater’s remark quietly punctures the assumption that “serious” filmmaking requires full-time residency in the company town. He’s not ranting about Hollywood; he’s depriving it of oxygen.

The subtext is a philosophy of work: make the movie where the movie wants to live, not where the industry wants to manage it. Linklater’s career has long treated geography as creative infrastructure. Austin isn’t just a hometown brand; it’s a production ethos built on local crews, long-term relationships, and a slower, more author-driven rhythm. Saying he “may have spent a week” suggests LA’s presence was administrative, almost incidental - paperwork, not artistry.

There’s also a sly critique embedded in the understatement. If a director can shepherd a studio film with minimal LA time, then maybe the gatekeepers’ indispensability is overstated. It’s not anti-Hollywood so much as post-Hollywood: the quiet assertion that the work can happen elsewhere, and the culture might be healthier for it.