Cate Blanchett's character is the opposite of Frank Lloyd Wright, but no less complicated

Richard Linklater has a secret. When he's not making films, he's an architecture buff. He dabbles (he calls it "designing and building funky little things") but he's also a student of the discipline. A couple of years ago, he dropped by the Frank Lloyd Wright exhibition at MoMA in New York, a rare display of his original plans and concept work. It was a beautiful insight into the mind of one of the 20th century's greatest architectural minds, in all its splendors and, shall we say, idiosyncrasies. "He was brilliant," said Linklater, "but he was projecting, from far outside, his very specific taste. He didn't like closets, he didn't like garages. He didn't like storage space because he didn't like clutter, so he imposed that on you."

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What may connect Linklater most closely to Bernadette's story is what it says about the creative process – or, more specifically, the process derailed1. Even after 20 films, five Oscar nominations, and over $300 million in box office gross, Linklater still has passion projects in development hell, like his long-gestating Bill Hicks biopic, or his planned love letter to Houston and NASA in the 1960s. Even Bernadette sat in the can for over a year, awaiting a release date. It's no surprise that he's gone guerrilla to make subversive projects like Boyhood, shot in snatched days over a decade.

That's where Linklater sees film and architecture as kin. "They rely on clients, other people, money. It's one thing if you're a successful artist, if you're a musician, painter, writer. No one tells you you can't practice your art. In architecture, you can design buildings that don't get built. You can write movies, and they never get off the ground." They're also both arts of grand ambition.  ...

  • 1. Bernadette Fox would likely give such ideas short shrift. The central figure of Linklater's latest film, Where'd You Go, Bernadette, the idling ex-architect (played by Cate Blanchett) seems much more philosophically in tune with Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier: the modern design master whose most famous (and often misinterpreted) statement is that "a house is a machine for living in." If Wright was "the ultimate male architect, Bernadette is the opposite. She's the intuitive, more female, get inside something, don't impose your thing, and I'm closer to that, I think."