Texan Richard Linklater dishes on his new '80's baseball sex comedy 'Everybody Wants Some!!'

Before he became the godfather of the Austin film scene, before the epic Zen experiment of Boyhood, Richard Linklater was a speedy outfielder for the Sam Houston State Bearkats in Huntsville. He still recalls particular games and at-bats, and he clearly remembers the dizzy spells and diagnosis of an irregular heartbeat that sent him to the showers for good.

More than anything, though, he remembers hanging out: the camaraderie among colorful teammates, the beer-fueled shenanigans and the idyll between games and seasons. Such glorious downtime makes up the core of Everybody Wants Some!!, Linklater's new college baseball movie which, as he's quick to point out, doesn't include a lot of baseball.

"Baseball, because of the pace, really lends itself to contemplation and a lot more looseness," Linklater says by phone. "There's only a coach or two on your team. They're out on the field, you're in the dugout. You can have conversations. The guy who pitched yesterday, no way he's getting in the game today. He can hang out."

Contemplation and looseness are familiar qualities to fans of Linklater's work. As he says, "None of us are living very plot-driven lives." From Slacker, his 1991 slice of everyday Austin eccentricity, to Boyhood, his 2014 drama shot over a period of twelve years, Linklater has sought to depict what a character in his film Waking Life calls "the holy moment." He loves the seemingly mundane actions and thoughts that add up and prove to be profound upon deeper inspection.

Linklater, 55, also played basketball and football in high school. But neither of those sports lend themselves to his filmmaking style.

"What's the tone? What's the feel? What's the texture? What's the vibe?"

"I think it's a tonal thing," he says. "It's a vibe." When he writes a script his thought process works something like this: "What's the tone? What's the feel? What's the texture? What's the vibe? Then, build out from there."

As he was learning his craft Linklater immersed himself in the international masters who helped shape a previous generation of filmmakers that included Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman. The concepts of texture, tone and vibe could apply as easily to, say, the French New Wave pioneer Eric Rohmer as to Linklater.

His approach starts on the page and then moves to the set. The cast of Everybody Wants Some!!, which opens in Dallas April 8, spent three weeks at Linklater's 50-acre ranch in Bastrop, rehearsing and horsing around, before shooting officially commenced.

"It felt like we just invited cameras in," says J. Quinton Johnson, who plays the one black player on the fictional Southeast Texas State squad. "We were throwing a football around in between setups. Some guys were playing catch. There was nothing Hollywood about it."

"By and large, it's just about the way we process the world."

Flash back to Dazed and Confused, Linklater's 1993 last-day-of-school comedy that takes place in 1976. Wiley Wiggins played Mitch Kramer, an easygoing incoming high school freshman pitcher. If Mitch had spent his high school years throwing well enough to earn a scholarship he would have turned into Jake (Blake Jenner), the easygoing incoming college pitcher at the heart of Everybody Wants Some!!, which takes place in 1980. Linklater's films have always had a way of talking to each other.

Jake quickly becomes integrated into a team of flaky, sex-crazed and hypercompetitive jocks, eighteen guys jammed into two bedlam-filled off-campus houses. That's exactly where Linklater found himself when he arrived for school in Huntsville.

"It became our own little fraternity, our own little Animal House kind of thing," Linklater says. "Everything -Nerf ball, flicking knuckles, ping pong - was pathologically competitive. I look back on it humorously, but it was kind of a drag at the time."

Everybody Wants Some!! is no drag, unless you go to the movies for a series of hairpin plot twists. Those aren't Linklater's bag. Never have been. He remains in search of something approximating life as it is lived, with all the joyful exchanges, petty arguments, carnal flings and everyday grind that unfold while we're not paying attention.

Tone. Texture. Vibe.

"Life has a lot of subtle through-lines, but there's usually not a lot of twists and turns," he says. "There are little ones, and there can be a few big ones. But by and large, it's just about the way we process the world."