He has received several Academy Award nominations and won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin International Film Festival for his work on Before Sunrise.

[6][7] Linklater studied at Sam Houston State University (where he also played baseball),[8] until dropping out to work on an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

He frequently read novels on the rig, and upon returning to land, developed a love of film through repeated visits to a repertory cinema in Houston.

Linklater created Detour Filmproduction (an homage to the 1945 low budget film noir by Edgar G. Ulmer), and subsequently made Slacker for only $23,000.

The film shows an aimless day in the life of the city of Austin, Texas showcasing its more eccentric characters.

With the rotoscope films Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, and his mainstream comedies, School of Rock and the remake of Bad News Bears, he gained wider recognition.

In 2003, he wrote and directed a pilot for HBO with Rodney Rothman called $5.15/hr, about several minimum wage restaurant workers.

The British television network Channel 4 produced a documentary about Linklater, in which the filmmaker discussed the personal and philosophical ideas behind his films.

St Richard of Austin was presented by Ben Lewis and directed by Irshad Ashraf and broadcast on Channel 4 in December 2004 in the UK.

The result is a distinctive "semi-real" quality, praised by such critics as Roger Ebert (in the case of Waking Life) as being original and well-suited to the aims of the film.

For a while Linklater was attached to direct a remake of The Incredible Mr. Limpet for Warner Bros.[15] However, he dropped the project in favor of working on a spiritual successor to Dazed and Confused, titled Everybody Wants Some!

[17][18] In the second half of the 2010s, Linklater wrote and directed the drama film Last Flag Flying, starring Bryan Cranston, Laurence Fishburne, and Steve Carell.

[26]He was also influenced by Robert Bresson, Yasujirō Ozu, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Eric Rohmer, François Truffaut, Josef Von Sternberg, and Carl Theodor Dreyer.

[27][28] Many of Linklater's films, including Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Tape, and all three installments of the Before Trilogy, take place in a single day.