Ryan Guzman Everybody Wants Some

Ryan Guzman Everybody Wants Some

Cast: Ryan Guzman, Zoey Deutch, Glen Powell
Director: Richard Linklater
Genre: Comedy
Rated: MA15+
Running Time: 117 minutes

Synopsis: A 'spiritual sequel" to Dazed and Confused set in the world of 1980 college life, Everybody Wants Some!! is a comedy that follows a group of friends as they navigate their way through the freedoms and responsibilities of unsupervised adulthood. Get ready for the best weekend ever.

Everybody Wants Some
Release Date: June 23rd, 2016

About The Production

In September of 1980, the world was in transition. Actor turned California governor Ronald Reagan was challenging incumbent President Jimmy Carter. In Eastern Europe, workers were beginning to unionize, weakening the oppressive Soviet regime. At Southeast Texas State University, freshman Jake Bradford (Blake Jenner) was making his awkward first steps into manhood.

'It's pretty autobiographical," confesses Academy Award nominated director, writer and producer Richard Linklater. 'Looking back, I realise it was a fun time to be in college, not only personally, but it was an interesting cultural moment. It was still the end of the 70s. What people now think of as the 80s really didn't kick in until '82 or '83.

As soon as he arrives at the baseball houses, the frat like homes of STU's baseball team, Jake receives a less than friendly welcome from senior Glenn McReynolds (Tyler Hoechlin) and his roommate Roper (Ryan Guzman).

'McReynolds' and Roper see it as their responsibility to toughen up the new guys," says Tyler Hoechlin, explaining his character's open hostility to his housemates.

'In high school, Jake was a star athlete," says Jenner. 'He's used to a certain level of respect, but he learns pretty quickly that doesn't mean anything here."

Even worse, Jake is a pitcher, a position McReynolds' views as 'weird" and 'a necessary evil", an opinion likely formed from STU's bullpen, a line-up consisting of Willoughby (Wyatt Russell), a pot-smoking mystic and Cosmos enthusiast, Jay Niles (Juston Street) a delusional powder keg who believes himself the second coming of Nolan Ryan, Nesbit (Austin Amelio) a hopelessly compulsive gambler, and dip chewing good ol' boy Billy Autry (Will Brittain), whose housemates promptly assign him the less flattering, more bumpkinish moniker of 'Beuter Perkins."

Providing the sobering ying to McReynolds and Roper's raging yang is charismatic and fast-talking Finnegan (Glen Powell.) 'They break'em down, but Finn builds them back up," says Powell. 'He plays pranks, but it's never vicious. It's a rite of passage. At one point he says -We all take turns being chumps. You just have to accept your chumpification and pass it on."'

Finn takes the freshmen under his wing, becoming their de facto tour guide to this brave new world without curfews, and enabling his penchant for arm chair philosophizing. 'Finn has two great loves," says Glen Powell, 'Baseball and sex. If he's playing baseball, he's thinking about sex. If he's having sex, he's thinking about baseball."

The tour begins with a trip to the girls' dorms, where Finn's hard sell is immediately rebuffed, but Jake catches the eye of Beverly (Zoey Deutch), a freshman theater major.

'Beverly is everything that Jake isn't," says Zoey Deutch. 'She's a performer who knows nothing of the sports world; Jake knows nothing about the theater. Still, there's an attraction there and they have the weekend to explore it before school starts and everyone settles into their routines."

Looking For Love In All The Wrong Places

With the clock ticking down to the first day of class, the guys throw themselves into the very best that 1980 has to offer. The first night out, the team hits the town in their tightest jeans and polyester shirts to dance the night away at the local disco, then dons Stetsons to line dance to Cotton Eye Joe at the town's best honky-tonk bar. Before the weekend is over, Jake and the gang have rocked out to Van Halen and Cheap Trick and survived their first mosh pit at a punk show. 'In 1980, guys would regularly go places and put up with music they didn't love, as long as they knew there would be women there," Ryan Guzman says. 'I guess that hasn't changed."

The guys' thrill-seeking journey captures the eclectic range of popular music in a time when rock, disco, funk, punk and country vied for supremacy.

'I have a personal connection to every song in the movie," Richard Linklater explains. 'I wanted to share the feeling of what it was like to hear these songs coming out of the radio, dancing to them at discos or country bars, or on your home or car stereo. Disco was still happening (it would be "dead" within a year or so), country was suddenly cool in places where it hadn't been (thanks to the movie Urban Cowboy), metal was huge, punk and new wave were the new and exciting alternatives, and the earliest examples of what we'd eventually know as hip-hop were popping up. It was an interesting moment musically, with so many artists at the top of their game and so many genres equally sharing the stage."

One song in particular completely embodied the spirit Linklater wanted for the film. 'Van Halen's 'Everybody Wants Some" is a song that perfectly captures the humor and raunch of being eighteen. When you're young and passionate, you want to have it all. You assume it's your birthright, because you're too young to know better."

Let The Good Times Roll

In 1993, Richard Linklater created the quintessential snapshot of small town high school life in the seventies in Dazed And Confused. After building a diverse filmography of successful arthouse and studio films, including 2014's critically acclaimed Boyhood, a low-key family drama shot in segments over twelve years, Linklater was excited to shift gears and return to his roots.

'This feels like a film I would have done a long time ago," Richard Linklater say. 'It feels good to be flexing these muscles and using that part of my brain again, but bringing a lot more experience."
As he had previously on Dazed And Confused, Richard Linklater assembled a cast of young and relatively unknown actors to populate the film. 'It's so much fun working with a large ensemble and a new generation of talented actors," Richard Linklater explains. 'On both films, I cast who I felt was the best actor for the part, regardless of experience or how well known they were."

While you might see some familiar faces on the team, Everybody Wants Some!! is the first film outing for a lot of its cast. Temple Baker, who brilliantly plays dim freshman Tyrone Plummer, had not acted since a fifth grade production of -Romeo and Juliet.'

'I heard about auditions through some friends. They thought, -Temple loves movies. Temple used to play baseball. He should try out. It'd be hilarious," Baker recalls. At the time, Baker was enrolled in full time at Vanderbilt University. 'When I got the part, I had to meet with a bunch of deans to see if I could leave school to do the movie without dropping out, since I was about 25 hours away from graduating. The whole experience was so surreal that I'm sure they thought it was a prank."

'Rick says his biggest talent is casting," Powell recounts. 'I remember during auditions, we crossed paths with some pretty big names reading for Plummer, but Temple brought something unique to the table. Rick saw that."

Mirroring their cinematic counterparts heading to school in the fall, the cast gathered in the Austin area for rehearsals in September of 2014, a month before principal photography began. For the next three weeks, the cast would recreate the college experience, bunking together at Linklater's 50 acre ranch in Bastrop, Texas, playing baseball, rehearsing and building a sense of camaraderie that would inform the relationships of their characters.

'To get the best results, I wanted everyone comfortable with each other, developing a short hand and really getting to know each other," Richard Linklater explains. 'I don't see it as just a work environment; they're creative people as well, and I wanted to give them room to play with the material, push boundaries and figure out who their characters are."

'In the first three days of being on a team, you learn everything you need to know about the people you're with," says Wyatt Russell. 'You form these bonds in a very short amount of time because you're working towards a common goal."

'Knowing that everybody's trying to make the best possible production, it never felt like work," says Ryan Guzman. 'We all pushed each other to a new level performance wise and had a lot of fun doing it."

'Rick's investment in every single person is fantastic, regardless of the size of the role," says Forrest Vickery, who plays lethargic housemate Coma.

Linklater's style and demeanor also made an impression on J. Quinton Johnson, who plays Finn's roommate and upperclassman voice of reason Dale Douglas. 'As a writer-director, he's so unique. It takes a lot of humility to take all this great, nuanced dialogue he's crafted and mulled over, then turn it over to twelve guys and say, 'Run with it."

'Real life doesn't always have cataclysmic events," Powell observes. 'Rick's movies are very grounded in real life. This isn't a story about chasing the pennant; it's about capturing the essence of this time and place. It's not loaded down with plot points. It's about these guys living in this house, and what they're concerned with this particular weekend."

The film proved autobiographical for the cast as well. Tanner Kalina, who plays the highly suggestible freshman, Brumley, based the character on a younger version of himself. 'I'm really just playing myself from freshman year. I was kind of this aloof goof, trying to figure out where I fit in."

'The rehearsal process made a huge difference," Hoechlin recalls. We were able to run through the scenes over and over like you would a play, but because we were encouraged to be creative and make it our own, it never felt stale. We'd continue to find new things on the day."

To avoid anachronisms in their improvisations, Linklater gave the young cast homework assignments researching the era. When in doubt, the cast mantra became 'ask Rick."

'His powers of recollection are pretty incredible," marvels Hoechlin. 'We might throw out an idea, and he'd say -I don't think people were saying that yet' or -that came out two years earlier, so it might not be as cool.' It's nice to have somebody there that can remember that stuff, down to the month and year."

'That's why we call him Rickipedia," says Ryan Guzman.

'I didn't want them even referring to anything in the future in a way that would come off as knowing or ironic," says Linklater. 'I wanted to feel like we'd just dropped down a camera in 1980 and filmed what was going on in these guy's lives."
To recreate this specific window in time, Richard Linklater enlisted frequent collaborator, Production Designer Bruce Curtis.

'When you're doing a period piece, you're striving to get everything exactly how it was. The little things become important," says Curtis. 'After five films with Rick, he's trained me to pay attention to banality: the furniture, the flooring and the paneling on the wall all comes into play to elicit the feeling of the time. He's got an excellent memory, and we work together to flesh out exactly what he's got in his mind."

Prop Master Leilal Dallal was tasked with tracking down everything from era-appropriate stereo equipment to baseball gloves. '1980 is a weird year. There's a lot of things you'd think were around that didn't come out until '81 or '82, especially technology. It's best to think late 70s, because realistically, not everybody is going to have the very latest thing."

Though second hand stores are often lined with relics from the period, Dallal's challenge was finding props that looked new or only lightly used. 'We ended up using actual gloves that had been restored and were fortunate to find Pioneer tuners, receivers and speakers in mint shape."

Given the lively nature of some the film's scenes, every vintage prop used on camera required at least one back-up copy. 'Things break," Dallal explains, 'and we've got to be prepared for anything."

Shake Your Groove Thing

Before heading to baseball practice and script work, each rehearsal day began with a few hours of dance. The task of teaching the young cast to dance like the pre-Reagan 80s fell to choreographer Andrea Ariel.

'1980 is super specific, so my job was primarily staying true to the period. The whole cast worked incredibly hard on learning the moves, but when they'd relax and improvise, naturally, some moves crept in that people weren't doing yet. The key was helping them find movement that felt organic to them, but wouldn't look out of place."

Ariel used Soul Train as a reference point to help the cast learn some of the dances. 'When you watch videos from that era, you see that people were much freer moving their pelvis and getting into the groove in a way you don't see today. It was a sexual and cultural revolution, and the dancing feels very celebratory."

In the weeks leading up to filming, Ariel worked intensely with the cast getting them comfortable enough to feel that the moves were their own. 'Rick was great about giving them the time to learn the steps, and at the same time, they're bonding through the experience."

'I'm an awful dancer," says Baker. 'I'm enthusiastic, but I just don't have much talent." He credits Ariel for helping him develop his skills. 'Andrea has to be one of the nicest, most energetic people I've ever met. This so much harder than I thought it would be, but think I got this disco stuff down. She made it fun."

While the choreography provided an opportunity for some of the cast to expand their skill set, others were already in their comfort zone.

'I'm a musical theater major, so this came a little easier to me," says Johnson. 'But I'd never really played baseball on the level of some of these guys. I could consult with them on the baseball side of things; they could consult with me on the dance side of things. There was a nice give and take."

After weeks of rehearsal with just the guys, it was time to introduce ladies to the mix. 'It got pretty serious," says Jenner. 'We were showing off a little. After a few hours of getting into the vibe of the era, it got pretty crazy. We were all sweaty, and I think our musk lent the scenario some authenticity."

'They were all so committed," Ariel recalls, 'and it really came together when we actually had women in the room. By the end of the day, it looked like a real disco club in 1980."

The absence of women had had a noticeable effect on the men in the cast.

'We didn't notice until we were around the girls, but all that time with just dudes and all that testosterone swirling around, we all started to get on the same dude wavelength," Powell explains. 'We'd lost all concept of right or wrong, or what's appropriate to say in front of people. The gentleman my mother raised me to be…completely out the window on this production."

Some days, Zoey Deutch was the only actress on set. 'I had to acclimate," she recalls. 'I had to conjure up as many dirty jokes as I could and drink a lot of Lone Star beer. It's stereotypical, but accurate. After that, I was one of the guys."

Off set, the group raised eyebrows.

'We all went out to eat together, and while were waiting for a table, the hostess noticed all of us with our Burt Reynolds moustaches," relates Powell. 'She asked us if we were in some kind of club. I told her she wasn't far off."

'There's definitely a feeling of fraternity," says Jenner. 'It's not a literal fraternity in the film, but we there's definitely a bond formed, on and off camera."

'At this point, we're a family," says Vickery. 'You put this many twenty year old guys together, there should have been egos and butting heads, but the whole experience was remarkably smooth."

Richard Linklater sums up, 'The sports analogies would probably never end with this movie, so I'll just say we had a great team and I think they hit it out of the park. Can't wait for Opening Day."

Everybody Wants Some
Release Date: June 23rd, 2016