Richard Linklater and Fast Food Nation

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Outside Magazine, November 2006

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Interview
Food Fighter
In his brazen adaptation of the bestseller Fast Food Nation, Richard Linklater looks to jolt America out of its quickie-burger habit with a tale of tainted meat

By Steven Kotler


	Linklater in Austin, August 2006 (Brent Humphreys)

FORGET "WHERE'S THE BEEF?"—it's what's behind the beef that matters to Richard Linklater. The Austin, Texas–based director, who's spent his career alternating between edgy cult favorites (Dazed and Confused, A Scanner Darkly) and big-budget popcorn flicks (School of Rock, Bad News Bears), takes a bold leap into nutrition politics this month with Fast Food Nation, a fictional interpretation of Eric Schlosser's 2001 muckraking assault on pit-stop dining franchises. Linklater and Schlosser's collaborative screenplay used the research-rich book to conjure multiple narratives—a burger-chain executive (Greg Kinnear) sent to investigate rumors of feces in the meat supply, a Mexican illegal immigrant who's braved a border crossing for sweatshop shifts at a meat-processing plant, a fast-food clerk desperate to escape her greasy gig—interwoven to create an almost hopelessly grim and gruesome fable. The film boasts star power, with cameos by the likes of Ethan Hawke, Bruce Willis, and Patricia Arquette, and promises a shocking yuck quotient, thanks to a scene shot on the killing floor of a real slaughterhouse in northern Mexico. Steven Kotler grills the auteur about his last meal and America's coming diet war.

Our Two Cents

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OUTSIDE: Your film focuses on everything you think is wrong with the fast-food industry. What's the one essential fix that needs to be made right now?
LINKLATER: God, there are so many. If the film awakens anything in anyone, I hope it's a general awareness of where fast food comes from and the true costs behind its production. Once you peek inside that world, it's fairly obvious—in terms of the animals, the environment, the sustainability, and the health of the individual consumer—that the system is broken. Sure, the end result is cheap and fast, but the production of it is anything but. There is no one fix. It's way too big for that.

So should we just scrap the whole industry and start over?
Fast food is a really efficient model, but the companies need to offer more healthy choices. Healthier drinks, healthier food, whole-wheat bread—just up the quality. I'll say this for the record: If McDonald's put a really healthy, decent-tasting veggie burger on their menu, I would drive through and buy one every now and then. And if five million other people agreed to do the same, we might actually see some change.

I take it you don't currently eat fast food.
Actually, I just had lunch at a place I consider fast food here in Austin called Mr. Natural. It's vegetarian Mexican food, cafeteria style. You go in and four minutes later you're eating.



	Scenes from FAST FOOD NATION: Greg Kinnear at the fictional Mickeys burger franchise (Eric Lee/FOX Searchlight)

What about poor working families? Don't the fast-food franchises offer them affordable and easy meals?
That is a problem when you're working two jobs at minimum wage, and I guess it's a triumph that the system can feed so many people: You can buy that cheeseburger for a buck—not that it's healthy. But there are other options. I've been a vegetarian since 1983, and now is actually a great time to be one. For $1.29 at most grocery stores, you can buy Health Valley couscous and lentils, which is like a healthy version of ramen noodles. Stuff doesn't have to come from Whole Foods and cost a lot to be good for you. It's not nearly as complex as people think.

By converting a densely reported book into a fictional film, you've left yourself vulnerable to claims that you've vastly exaggerated the situation.
We left out most of what was in the book, but what I hope we captured is its spirit and its atmosphere. The film is a dramatization, but through this fiction we're getting at a lot of truth. It's not based on one particular incident. What we're saying is that it's so pervasive. I can assure you it all goes on all the time.

Do you wish you'd made a documentary instead?
No, this is the film Eric and I wanted to make, and I wouldn't change a thing. But it's just a beginning, not some A-to-Z primer. We resisted doing a traditional narrative where some Shane-style hero comes in to right every wrong, because if there was ever a system that couldn't be fixed by one individual or film, it's this one. It would have been morally bankrupt for us to say, OK, this system is broken, so here's how you fix it. This film is just a first shot in what I hope is a much bigger war.

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STEVEN KOTLER is the author of West of Jesus: Surfing, Science, and the Origins of Belief (Bloomsbury USA).

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