He's Having a Ball

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You're thinking he went soft, or, worse yet, is doing it for the money. Why else would the indie director of Slacker and Before Sunset--a guy whose idea of an action sequence is to have two characters walk while they talk--do a remake of the '70s kids' baseball movie Bad News Bears? It's because, although his office building off the highway in Austin, Texas, is lined with framed posters of French auteur Jean-Luc Godard movies, Richard Linklater is not a film snob. He just likes to make movies. "I would have loved to have been a '40s studio director like Vincente Minnelli. You ended up with a real diverse career," says Linklater. "Now you don't get a call from Darryl Zanuck saying, 'Come do this movie on Monday.' So you have to do it on your own." He has already checked off teen flick (Dazed and Confused), western (The Newton Boys), romance (Before Sunrise), sequel (Before Sunset), animation (Waking Life), sci-fi (A Scanner Darkly, due in 2006), filmed play (Tape) and a kids' movie (School of Rock). If you've got a script for an Elizabethan musical, now might be the time to send it over.

Although he's 44, Linklater looks 28 and has a boyishness that makes his apparent curiosity about everything plausible. He punctuates sentences with a Beavis-like heh-heh of a giggle, or a shoulder shrug combined with a protruded-lip frown, like a 5-year-old's expression when you ask him if he poured Comet on the couch. He directed Bad News Bears, which opens next week, because, as an outfielder at Sam Houston State University who works out with the University of Texas team and built a diamond on his property, he has always wanted to do a baseball movie. And Linklater says he considers himself a comedy director, only usually of less overt comedies than this one.

Plus, Bears is a pretty dark kids' movie, with a script by the guys who wrote the liquored-up Christmas movie, Bad Santa. The new film centers on a drunken, lecherous former pro player (Billy Bob Thornton, taking Walter Matthau's role) who agrees to coach a bunch of talentless Little Leaguers in exchange for cash. "There's a good bit of rebellion and subversiveness in it and all the values I'd want to put out in mainstream culture," Linklater says.

What also makes Bears a Linklater film is the naturalness of most of the actors. "He gets these honest performances out of these kids," says the film's co-writer Glenn Ficarra, "not this Broadway, arms-akimbo stuff." Linklater casts people whose personality already matches the part and lets them be themselves. For the two biggest non-adult roles he used kids who had never acted before, but played ball. "You can't teach a kid to throw in three weeks," he says. "You get a baseball player who can be herself."