We should really stop calling him a slacker.
Richard Linklater, the director has defined independent filmmaking for more than 30 years, is getting his props from the Zurich Film Festival (ZFF), which will honor him this year with a lifetime achievement award.
Linklater will receive the 2026 Golden Eye award for career achievement at this year’s ZFF (Sept. 24 – Oct. 4), Zurich announced Thursday. The Texan director will attend the festival and take part in a masterclass about his work. Zurich will also screen a retrospective of his films.
“Richard Linklater is one of the most visionary and formative directors of American independent cinema,” says Christian Jungen, CEO of the ZFF. “Through naturalistic dialogue and scenes that feel plucked straight from life, he holds up a mirror to our times and regularly brings out the very best in his actors. He is also the director of my absolute favourite film, Before Sunrise, thanks to which I met my wife. I am therefore especially delighted to welcome him to Zurich and to share with our audiences the films that have moved me for so many years.”
Linklater says: “I am truly honored to receive the Career Achievement Award from the Zurich Film Festival. When Christian and I met at the Golden Globes, I mentioned I’ve always wanted to attend one day and now seemed like the right time. I’m delighted that this award is the occasion that brings me there, and I very much look forward to celebrating with the European audience that has meant so much to me throughout my career.”
Linklater was a vanguard of the indie film movement of the 1990s. His sophomore feature Slacker (1990), a no-budget, no-stars comedy shot on 16 mm, was picked up out by Orion out of Sundance and went on to gross $1 million.
He has not stopped since. Over the past three decades, Linklater has moved seamlessly between arthouse and the mainstream movies, as at home with broad-appeal crowd pleasers — Dazed and Confused (1993), School of Rock (2003), Hit Man (2023) — as with experimental drama, from the rotoscope animation of Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006) to the coming-of-age drama Boyhood (2014), shot in segments over 11 years.
Alongside Boyhood, which was nominated for six Oscars, winning best supporting actress for Patricia Arquette, Linklater is arguable best-known for the Before trilogy — Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), Before Midnight (2013) — a trio of talky romantic dramas starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. Each is set over the course of a single day (or night) and follows the same couple through a relationship of two decades. Both Before Sunset and Before Midnight were Oscar nominated for best adapted screenplay.
Last year, Linklater released both Blue Moon — a period chamber piece starring Hawke as musical legend Lorenz Hart — and Nouvelle Vague, a French-language black-and-white drama about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960). As always, he has several projects on the go, including an adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim musical Merrily We Roll Along starring Paul Mescal, which is set to shoot over 20 years, and announced biopics of 20th century con man John Brinkley and Texan stand-up legend Bill Hicks.
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