Richard Linklater grew up in a company town. But in Huntsville, Texas, that meant something different. “Some towns have a steel mill; some have an Amazon plant. This was a prison town,” the filmmaker says. People knew the wardens of the local penitentiary and their kids by name—not what you’d expect to hear from the Oscar-nominated director of Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, and Boyhood. But for a Huntsville kid, the prison’s existence “wasn’t a big deal.”
That complicated legacy is at the heart of Linklater’s latest movie, God Save Texas: Hometown Prison, part of a Max documentary series inspired by Pulitzer Prize winner Lawrence Wright’s book of the same name and spearheaded by Wright and the documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney. But Linklater’s visits with the people and places of Huntsville bear all the warmth and insights of his fiction films. (Linklater’s feature-length entry leads into two shorter studies, The Price of Oil and La Frontera, directed by Alex Stapleton and Iliana Sosa, respectively.)
Today, Huntsville hosts more prisons than it did in Linklater’s youth, and—after Texas reinstated the death penalty in the 1970s—it’s also a way station for death-row prisoners. The film shows how the carceral industry looms over the town: university students hear the Klaxon of prison-shift changes; burgers at a local restaurant are execution–themed. The prisons’ growth is what struck Linklater most of all. “It’s 10 times the size it was when I lived there,” he says in his soft, friendly lilt. “Crime is down, so … what’s going on here?”
“Some towns have a steel mill; some have an Amazon plant. This was a prison town.”
Linklater visits folks in town, including old friends and classmates. People open up to him—the man radiates a low-key decency—and he brings a storyteller’s eye to every scene, such as the one in which a boy awaits his father’s release from prison. Rather than an “issue documentary,” Linklater has crafted a fond, but conflicted, homecoming. One haunting conversation is with Fred Allen, once tasked with restraining inmates for execution. He’d strap in the left leg, he tells Linklater, his eyes betraying how years of doing this ate away at him. “Why should he have to be a part of this?,” Linklater asks.
Hometown Prison also confronts the damning injustice of executing prisoners who are likely innocent. In 2003, Linklater filmed protests around Delma Banks Jr., who received the death sentence despite coached testimony on the part of the prosecution and a lack of physical evidence, and this footage opens his new documentary, as if to suggest how little has changed. Banks’s sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment, but even as Linklater and I spoke, Texas was about to execute another prisoner whose guilt was in doubt, Ivan Cantu. “It’s one of these classic wrongful convictions. And they’re going to kill him,” Linklater says. (Cantu was executed by lethal injection on February 28.)
The local industry left its mark on even Linklater’s idyllic memories: eight members of his high-school baseball team ended up in prison. “And one guy would die on death row,” he says. But this being the director of Slacker and Waking Life, there’s room for other facets of Huntsville. He’s drawn to “radicals” who blazed their own paths, such as Dan Phillips, a celebrated builder who designed a boot-shaped house, and Bill Habern, a tireless civil-rights attorney.
I reached Linklater in Paris, where he was working on a new movie (dramatizing the making of Breathless and starring a pixie-cut Zoey Deutch as Jean Seberg). The 63-year-old director already has two other films on the way: Hit Man, a festival sensation starring Glen Powell, and Merrily We Roll Along, a musical-comedy adaptation. But his hometown felt as immediate as ever, and when I presumptuously asked him about the country’s fixation on the death penalty, his answer sounded like a musing monologue from one of his films.
“The question to me is: How did it come back in the 70s when it went away in the 60s? I don’t know. You can probably attack it from a lot of levels: Old Testament, Puritanism, ‘We’re all sinners.’ Something about God.... But I don’t know. It never made sense to me.”
God Save Texas: Hometown Prison is available for streaming on Max
Nicolas Rapold is a New York–based writer and the former editor at Film Comment magazine