Q&A: Richard Linklater on time, nostalgia & 'Apollo 10 1/2'

Bike rides, kickball, Jiffy Pop, Jell-O and other well-remembered details crowd Richard Linklater’s “Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood,” an affectionate ode to his childhood growing up outside Houston in the late 1960s

NEW YORK -- Bike rides, kickball, Jiffy Pop, Jell-O and other well-remembered details crowd Richard Linklater’s “Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood,” an affectionate ode to his own childhood growing up outside Houston in the late 1960s.

NASA and the moon mission are just next door, as are other scientific marvels (Astroturf!). But the sense of wonder that permeates “Apollo 10 ½” is felt just as strongly in the neighborhood streets where kids roam with skinned knees. “A Free-Range Childhood” was Linklater’s original subtitle.

Time flows through Linklater’s films. Its passing paced “Boyhood” and punctuated the “Before” trilogy. He has plunged in the ’70s (“Dazed and Confused”) and the ‘80s (“Everybody Wants Some!”), and made movies long enough to see his films become indelibly associated with the '90s.

“It’s never too late to look back on another era and go, Wow, how did we get from there to here?” Linklater said recently by Zoom from his home outside Austin, Texas. “That is our relation, isn’t it? It’s our present selves and our past selves, and the past worlds we lived in.”