Richard Linklater, Slacker Can you say a little about your upbringing? I was born in Houston and lived there my first ten years. My parents divorced when I was seven, and eventually my mother got a teaching job in Huntsville, Texas, which is about seventy miles northeast of Houston. So I moved there when I'd just turned ten. And that was quite different from Houston. When you live in a big city there's a lot going on, art museums, the zoo, pro sports teams, and so on. And then we moved to this pretty small town, eighteen thousand people, and there was a university and the state prison there. We were always moving around. Even in that town we moved every year. My mom was struggling, I guess. So I think I had a semirural Texas upbringing—because this was a small town with a lot of ranchers and a church on every corner, a really small, conservative town. But on the weekends I'd go and visit my father in Houston and go to movies and art museums. So I had this small town/big town upbringing. I'm thankful for this because I would see a movie in Houston and I would go back and tell my friends about it in Hu ... read full excerpt from My First Movie: Take Two: Ten Celebrated Directors Talk About Their First Film ebook
