Issue 14.03 - March 2006 Subscribe to WIRED magazine and receive a FREE gift!

Keanu Reeves looks up from a single blue flower and stares into the camera with an expression of pained revelation. As he gazes off into the distance, the camera pulls back to reveal rows of cornstalks surrounding him, spreading across a valley bordered by the hazy mountains of Southern California. The scene is the emotional climax of Richard Linklater's new film, A Scanner Darkly. It's a simple sequence, a cinematic trope that most third-year film students could pull off with a dolly and a decent lighting setup. But Linklater, a veteran director whose successes include School of Rock, Slacker, and Dazed and Confused, has been laboring over these 30 seconds for several months.

You can't really blame him. Link­later's not working with a real flower or real mountains or even the real Keanu Reeves. He's trying to coax a performance out of an animated version of the actor drawn into a landscape that is completely digital - and the system is not cooperating. It can't seem to handle the transition from individual flower petals and cornstalks to a mass of multicolor vegetation. There is a slight but undeniable flicker.

"We really didn't know what we were getting ourselves into with this one," Link­later says, taking a break from production at his studio in Austin and flopping into a worn leather chair. The downbeat vibe in the room is captured by a promotional poster for Sam Peckinpah's 1971 film, Straw Dogs, that hangs outside his office: A young Dustin Hoffman sports a pair of shattered glasses and a weary expression. "I know how to make a movie," Linklater says, "but I don't really know how to handle the animation."

This is a good time to learn. More and more Hollywood movies rely on animation, which is creating opportunities (and problems) for a growing number of directors. Sure, Chicken Little and Curious George are animated. But so are major sequences in live-action blockbusters like King Kong and the upcoming Superman Returns.

For all its popularity, though, animation remains the province of specialists. Only the most tech-savvy filmmakers, like George Lucas and Robert Rodriguez, do animation work in-house. To transform an entire film into animation, as Linklater is doing with Scanner, is a massive tech­nical challenge.

Linklater first entered the geek world of animators five years ago when he made the film Waking Life. For Scanner, he's employing the same animation technique he used then. It's a process known as rotoscoping: Artists digitally trace over some frames of live-action footage by hand with a Wacom pen and tablet. Custom software fills in the rest. But Waking Life, a wispy collection of vignettes defined by its lack of visual uniformity, was a less ambitious production. It was a mild success - it generated $3 million (twice its cost) at the box office and found a loyal audience in the DVD aftermarket - but Linklater was disappointed with the movie's impact. Scanner is a dramatic narrative with a consistent look, starring seasoned actors like Reeves, Winona Ryder, Robert Downey Jr., and Woody Harrelson. And then there's the complicated rotoscoping software, Rotoshop. Originally developed for Waking Life by MIT grad Bob Sabiston, the program was updated for Scanner: It has a few hundred thousand lines of new code and a couple of dozen new commands. It's proprietary and few people know how to use it.

So why would the indie icon choose to work in animation again? Just as the painterly, pop-art look of rotoscoping perfectly depicted the dreamlike world in Waking Life, there was no better way, Linklater felt, to capture the trippy reality described by science fiction author Philip K. Dick in his 1977 novel, A Scanner Darkly. Set in the near future, the tale follows an undercover detective named Fred (Reeves) as he spies on a drug ring. During his investigation, Fred becomes addicted to Substance D and develops a split personality.

Linklater also sees an opportunity with Scanner to bring full-length animated movies to a broader, older audience. Outside of a few proven television properties like Beavis and Butthead and South Park, no successful animation for adults has been released in the US since the 1981 fantasy epic Heavy Metal. "There is kind of an animation ghetto that exists in the industry," he says. "From the beginning, we lived with the Hollywood truism that adults don't see animated movies. But I have always had the response that, yeah, adults don't go see animated movies until they do! All it takes is one movie."

Making that movie is the tricky part. Every film has its troubles: busted ­budgets, schedule snafus, problems with the crew. But Linklater also faced new challenges exclusive to animation - challenges that are becoming familiar to the rest of Hollywood.

The project started smoothly enough. Casting a movie can often be difficult. Where will a star's name be placed on the credits (above the director's or below)? How will his image appear on the promo posters? And, most contentious, at what point will an actor begin to earn royalties? But not this time. Linklater had a powerful selling point. Because Scanner was being rotoscoped, there would be no early morning makeup sessions (no makeup sessions at all, in fact), no tedious costume changes, and no endless retakes. The sets would be digitally created while the film was being animated in postproduction - making the filming environment more like a theater than a movie set. Plus, there was Philip K. Dick, who's always a draw in Hollywood. Reeves, an avid reader of his stories, immediately signed on. Ryder had a connection to Dick - her godfather, Timothy Leary, was an acquaintance of the late writer. Both celebrities agreed to work at the Screen Actors Guild scale rate, which for Scanner came to about $72,000, plus a portion of any backend profits - an extremely unusual arrangement for top-tier actors. Reeves, for example, pulled in more than $15 million and 15 percent of the gross for each of the Matrix sequels.