That haze of weed smoke drifting out of a hatchback via a crowd of unruly teens could only mean one thing: Dazed and Confused is back on screens, celebrating its 30th anniversary with a pristine new 4K Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection overseen by filmmaker Richard Linklater. The disc arrives not long after IndieWire crowned the film as the 63rd best of the 1990s, while Variety did it one better by declaring it the 62nd best… of all-time.

The Letterboxd data shows that the film’s rating has never wavered, with nearly 10,000 members including it in their four favorite films at the time of publishing. It featured in the 44th slot on our list of the Highest Rated Obsessively Rewatched films—determined by finding the highest average ratings of films exclusively from members who have logged those titles at least five times.

While Linklater originally intended Dazed and Confused to be an anti-nostalgia picture reflecting on the misery experienced during his late ’70s high school days in Huntsville, Texas, he quickly learned that taking a trip into the past allows you to reminiscence on the true meaning of nostalgia—that inescapable mixture of the good along with the bad, with the knowledge that you never know you’re in the “good ’ol days” until they’re long past. At the time of its 1993 release, the director was looking back on an era only fifteen or so years past, yet his effectiveness in capturing the complicated feelings of teenagedom is exemplified in how three decades after it first played in theaters the film is still giving that same high to viewers new and old alike

“I wish this film never ended and this was actually just my life,” writes Alex Todd on Letterboxd, a fascinating sentiment for a film that features this many scenes of characters being beaten across the bottom with wooden paddles. Thomas Ringdal addresses this dichotomy, noting in his review that “a lot of high school rituals and traditions come off caveman-ish, but kids will be kids no matter where they’re from and it’s right there that Linklater has managed to conjure something timeless and universal.” Or, as Laís Campos so wisely puts it, “this movie makes me wanna call my friends to go smoke and listen to some music.”

I unfortunately didn’t have the opportunity to light one up and drop a needle on some Bowie with Richard Linklater, but I did sit down with him over Zoom for a conversation about why this chaotic ensemble of colorful characters—including Mitch (Wiley Wiggins), Floyd (Jason London), Wooderson (Matthew McConaughey), Slater (Rory Cochrane), Simone (Joey Lauren Adams), O’Bannon (Ben Affleck), Darla (Parker Posey) and more—is still one we’d love to party away the first night of summer with after all these years.

While reading him some of your Letterboxd reviews of Dazed and Confused, we also dug into his unconventional comfort movies, first film crushes, favorite screen villains and ideal 4/20 slices of cinema. But first, I had to give him a shout out for all of my Mitchell siblings out there in the world…

Yeah, there’s really only a few that ever come to mind for me. Tom Cruise in The Firm, Luke Wilson in Old School, John Cena in Blockers.
There’s a nature film from the ’60s called Ring of Bright Water, and there’s a little otter named Mitch that gets killed at the end. So…

[Laughs] We’ve got the dead otter.
I’m trying to think of other Mitchs in film history. We got the little otter. Oh wait, was he an otter? I think he was… I think it was a mongoose. Or a ferret, I think.

I’ll always have Dazed and Confused. I want to read you this Letterboxd review from Sam Van Hallgren, who calls the film “Perfection”, and goes on to say “Linklater doesn’t celebrate, doesn’t condemn, and never condescends. Years on, his most significant gift as a director has become clear: his modesty.” Would you consider yourself a modest filmmaker?
Yeah, maybe. I don’t think I’m the one to answer about modesty and all that stuff. Maybe I’m not that big of a show-off or whatever. But I don’t know, that’s for others to talk about. I don’t have a strong opinion. We’re stuck with ourselves. We’ve got our own personalities, and that’s just who we are.

Tell me about approaching these characters from a judgment-free perspective. That lack of condemnation or condescension.
I think as a director, you can’t help but show how you feel about your characters. If you dislike your characters—and there’s good films where clearly they’re despicable people and you can tell that they kind of don’t like them—it’s going to show up in the movie. You can’t help it. In my whole career, there’s probably some characters I like less, but I have a total affection for every character in Dazed. Even the quote ‘bad ones’ like Parker [Posey] or Ben [Affleck]. I kind of love all them. So, I don’t know. I had an affection, so it was hard to hide that.

I couldn’t do a movie about serial killers and stuff, because I just don’t want to hang out with them. I’ve been offered things over the years—which go on to be great movies, make no mistake—but I’m just like, “I don’t want to hang out with those people. I don’t want to be in their mindset. I don’t like them. They’re ruining the world.” Some political power things. I just, ugh. You can critique things in an indirect way. But even if you think through, you can still have affection for the characters. Cinema’s vulnerable that way. We tend to like people on the screen, you know? You kind of have to go out of your way to say, “This is a bad person.” We like bad guys.

Ed’s review speaks to something telling in the continued appreciation for Dazed and Confused, where he asks, “Is it normal to feel nostalgic about a time and place I didn’t even exist in?” You’re drawing from a very specific time and place, but for 30 years people from all over have been relating to these characters and this world.
Oh, it’s totally valid to feel a nostalgia for other times. I feel nostalgia for many times in history, long before I was born. And it depends on how you define nostalgia. Film is a very powerful medium to depict times and places. Unlike any other art form, you really can share that experience, however created. It’s a powerful thing. My vibe on Dazed was I really wanted it to feel like you just dropped a camera down at the end of May in 1976, and this is what was going on. I wanted it to feel like it was of its time.

I think that has a better chance of getting into the pores of the viewer than something that’s too objective, like a war movie. It’s clearly in the past, it’s too objective, maybe. Mine, I wanted to just be so subjective within the character’s viewpoints and their feel. And I guess maybe the story’s character-based, rather than plot-based, which makes it even easier in some way. I don’t know. But I always like the “you are there” approach.

Plenty of reviews call out Dazed as the iconic hangout movie, like Jake who writes that “Linklater never yields to narrative or structure for the entire 102 minutes, and yet the rhythms of the movie are clear as a bell, which is a remarkable feat.” What do you think is the key to making the perfect hangout movie? Because it takes a lot of effort to make something feel so effortless.
Oh, absolutely. Filmmaking is a bit of a magic trick. People think my films are improvised. It’s like, no, you plan everything. You work out every gesture. I don’t know if I agree with, what’d he say? No structure? I’m a big believer in architecture and the construction. You could say it’s the structure of a movie. But narrative—I think plot is the bugaboo for a lot of cinema. I think I’ve largely replaced plot in something like Dazed with time, the construction of this one little time period that we’re in, the eighteen or so hours the movie takes place. You just feel like you’re in that zone. In itself, that’s structural to me.

But yeah, it’s definitely a hangout movie. I didn’t think of it like that, but people started using that term somewhere along the way, and I felt it applied. Some of them call me King of the Hangout. It doesn’t sound that exciting. No one wants to pay to hangout. [Laughs] It’s like, what are you doing? Hanging out. It’s like, well, that’s nothing. So, that’s the poison pill that exists in my movies. “Hey, I saw this really great movie.” “Well, what is it?” And they describe it and they go, “Hmm, sounds like a rental or something,” maybe.

Yeah, I’ve seen plenty of reviews from people like Stephen, who writes, “As a former homeschooler, I found myself reminiscing on memories that I never had.”
If we can fill in something in someone’s consciousness and fill a gap or have some use like that, I think that’s pretty cool. But films I would hang out with and watch over and over and over? God, there’s so many. Films I’ve seen the most? GoodFellas, maybe. I’ve probably seen GoodFellas 30 times.

For sure, that’s one you can just put on whenever and watch the whole thing.
Yeah, you’re going through the stations and it’s on TNT, you just leave it on. It’s one of those. When it came out that year, me and my friends, we’d go once a week when it played in the theaters, for several months. I saw it twelve times in its initial theatrical run. We would just go every Friday, routinely. It just got better and better every damn time. Still does.

Muriel describes Dazed as being “my new emotional support film.” What’s your biggest comfort film?
I think we have different needs at different times and different films can feel that way. Strangely, if I’m feeling totally out of kilter, I go dark. I go, at two in the morning, I put on Videodrome.

Hell yeah.
I watch it alone in my own zone. Or sometimes if I’m feeling bad about my industry, say I’m having trouble getting a film financed—if I’m ever feeling tweaked out about film, I watch, oh, at least the first half, maybe more, of Barton Fink. I mean, maybe all of it if I’m in the mood, but at least three quarters of Barton Fink.

That’s the perfect one when you’re feeling that cynicism about Hollywood and the industry. I mean, it’s the ultimate writer’s block movie.
Yeah. Yeah. If I ever have any. So, those are two perennials I return to for... That’s emotional support in its own way.

Totally. My first viewing of Videodrome was when I was fifteen. I was at a party with some friends the night before, and I woke up at six in the morning, super sick and had to call my sister to come pick me up. I got home, curled up in bed, and watched Videodrome for the first time as the sun was coming up. It totally soothed me. That was twenty years ago, and I still go back to it as a comfort movie.
It’s amazing what can be comforting. Videodrome, I’m old enough to have seen it in the theater when it came out. And I don’t know if I totally appreciated it. I mean, I liked it, but it wasn’t until I watched it on video, you know? You got to watch it on video. You can’t watch it in the theater. Watch it on a video by yourself. Then you’re like, “Oh, here’s how it should be seen.”

It feels like something that you’re watching in secret, right? It’s a little bit like, you’re not supposed to be seeing this.
And you really shouldn’t stream it. I mean, you really should have a VHS tape. [Motions putting a tape into a VCR.] I caught that era of watching it on a VHS tape. Yeah, that’s the pure Videodrome experience.

Yeah, why not, man?
From The Sound of Music. I would stare at the album. My mom had the album and the back cover just had a picture of her looking over her shoulder like that. [Models the look over the shoulder pose.] And this is at five or six. That was quickly, within two years, that was replaced with, aw, the late Raquel Welch. Who just left us two days ago. So yeah, those are crushes.

What I’m saying here is, they didn’t have a lot of kids movies then. I wasn’t crushing on anyone who looked like they could be in my class. That was more from TV. From movies, it was all older women. So, I was fixating on the adult world of like, “Ah, I can’t wait to get there.” But it was a long way away.

I’m sure you’ve heard this before, but a lot of reviews reference Dazed and Confused as being the perfect 4/20 movie. Like, really. A lot. What would you say is the ideal film to watch under the influence of a little green?
That’s a good one. There’s really so many. Science-fiction. 2001: A Space Odyssey, maybe? I go there more. Depends on what kind of mood you’re in. If you’re in party mood, then Dazed is perfect. If you’re in a more contemplative, heady space, I would go toward one of those films. I would go toward 2001, yeah. But it really, again, depends on what you want out of it at that period. Are you in a social mood? Are you in a go to another place kind of mood? Fortunately, there’s a lot of room here for a lot of experiences.

I’ve always been happy when people go to Dazed for that. Dazed played for a year when it came out. And so much of that was at—they had midnighters more back then. So it became a midnighter immediately. It was a midnight movie, which was cool. It’s like, “Wow, we love midnight movies,” because you know what that meant. [Laughs] You get high in the parking lot and go see the movie. Or increasingly, people were getting high in the theaters, which I was always pleased to hear. Late night, no cops, people were smoking in the theaters. So, I took that as a huge compliment, standing ovation, whatever.

I think that’s the ultimate tribute, right? People getting high and watching Dazed and Confused.
But if you want to be accurate to Dazed and Confused, you’d have to find the worst weed. Like a $10 bag, and you’d have to smoke six joints just to feel anything. Now, the weed’s so potent, it’s almost not fair. There’s so much weed in the movie, because people forget how much you had to smoke to get high. I had high school friends who were like, “There wasn’t that much pot around.” I was like, “Well, there kind of had to be.” It was the last day of school, but yeah. I kind of miss those days, because it was all the socialness of smoking, the camaraderie, and it wasn’t so much... The high came secondary. That was my attitude toward it.

Yeah, just hanging out with a group of friends and having a reason to hang out.
It was more like the social ritual more than it was about actually getting stoned.

She writes in her review about how Dazed will always be really significant to her because of that connection her family has to it. Is there a film that you specifically connect to a loved one in a way that makes it extra special for you?
Strangely, this is a family story and it’s so weird. But you know The Wild One? With Marlon Brando?

For sure.
That was based on a true incident in California. My grandfather was the police chief, kind of a volunteer police chief, in a small town, in Monterey, California when all these cyclists came through and terrorized the town. And my mom remembers these motorcycles coming through, and she told the story of a woman who lifted her shirt and didn’t have a bra on. This crazed youth that terrorized this Northern California town.

There’s an article, and my grandfather’s quoted as saying, “These hooligans, if they ever come back here, they’re going to be dealt with.” Because I think they pretty much got away with it. But it was an example of crazed youth. And then that’s what The Wild One is based on, this new thing, these crazy youths and motorcycle gangs. So, I don’t know, when I see that movie, I always think, “Shit, my mom was there. She experienced that as a kid.” And my grandfather was the one being accused of not doing something, so, I don’t know. That’s pretty fun.

And then The Getaway. I mean, I just had my own personal relations with movies, because I grew up as far away from Hollywood as you could possibly be. But Sam Peckinpah, before I knew who he was. It was Ali MacGraw and Steve McQueen and they came through my town of Huntsville. They were shooting the beginning of The Getaway at the prison there. So, I have a personal... I mean, when you have that little bit of personal connection to something like that, it’s a little special.

Something that’s been on my mind since my last watch of Dazed: there’s this great little monologue Adam Goldberg has in the back of a car about “wanting to be honest about being a misanthrope.”
[Laughs] Yes.

So, I think I have a general predisposition to give everyone a break. I lean that way. But yeah, no, I acknowledge the darkest recesses as very, very real. In my own life, I’ve been around it plenty. Plenty. So, yeah. I don’t know. Plus it’s also what do you want to put out in the world? We all have our own demons and issues and problems, but it’s like, if I’m going to spend years working on something… and every now and then, yeah, I go the other way.

I remember Scanner and Fast Food Nation came out in the same year. I did them in different years, but they came out at the same time. And I went, “Yeah, those are two really dark reflections on our culture.” And I go, “Well, that was the Bush-Cheney era for me. Those two.” I was feeling dark, but you’re the same person. Just every now and then you bite off a dark subject, because you just have to. I have a movie coming out next, Hitman. It contemplates murder. It’s an examination of it.

I look forward to seeing that, seeing you get into those dark recesses again. Thanks so much for having this conversation with me today.
Thanks, Mitch. I’ll keep thinking of other Mitchs in cinema. They’re going to come to me.

You’ve got to add some more in your films. I’m relying on you to just keep putting them in there.
[Laughs] Yeah, I’ll get more Mitchs in there.