“Bernie” tells the true story of Bernie Tiede, a mortician in Carthage, Texas, who murdered the meanest lady in town, Marjorie, and nearly got away with it. Linklater got interested in Bernie’s story way back when his trial for murder was happening. “This was a magazine article I read and kind of pursued and attended the trial. The magazine article ended inconclusively… you think Bernie is going to get off kind of lightly, that’s where I got on the bandwagon, and I went to the trial.”
Linklater co-wrote the film with journalist Skip Hollandsworth who wrote the original magazine article about Bernie’s trial. He explains that “everything really happened. There are really no elements of the movie that are fictitious. It was like a journalistic piece. We really stuck to the public record and we were going off a really thick file from the trial, evidence, and interviews”.
As an East Texas native, Linklater says he “has a lot of affection for these people. I’m a homeboy. These are my people. Southerners are sensitive to being portrayed in the national media as a bunch of backwards thinking rednecks, which they certainly are, but what they always miss is the humanity and the friendliness. There’s a really wonderful side to it that’s often not part of the equation when they’re portrayed. When I was making the film, I was trying to assure people that, you know, I’m from here. I will portray it how I will but I get it. This is a film from the land time forgot. It feels like a period film even though Bernie has an iPhone but it could be the 1970s. It’s one of those regions that’s solidly behind the rest of the world in a lot of ways.”
Although the film is very funny, Linklater insists it’s not a satire: the humour comes from “the irony of it all”. Linklater explains that “It’s a weird contradiction. Here’s a law and order town in Texas and Texas is a pretty tough place, with a huge prison population. It’s like guilty, throw away the key kind of thing. But in this case they didn’t want this guy prosecuted because they liked him. There’s something kind of human about that.”
“Bernie” is a mockumentary, full of interviews with town gossips. “Oh almost all those people in the kind of southern gossip circle chorus, the majority of those are from Carthage or that area, little towns around there. There were a few professional actors but mostly they were non-actors, people I found funny or interesting. I mean the test was here’s all these interesting people and then I gave them lines. Some people were struggling to memorize the lines but others were really internalizing them and so we thought ‘OK you can be maybe effective in the movie.’ ”
Interestingly, none of the lines for the gossip circle were written with any particular character in mind, and that’s generally how Linklater works for ensemble pieces, from “Dazed and Confused” to “Bernie”. He says, “I really just had all those lines written and then I knew it would be personalized to the cast. It was like here you have the text but then lines would be assigned after casting. It’s what I’ve always done with ensembles. I get the same note on every script for an ensemble piece: ‘they [the characters] all kind of sound the same’. But you cast really unique people with really unique characteristics and it will be differentiated on film. You have to cast your ensemble very carefully for different personalities. If two are too similar, maybe that’s not a good idea. It’s like an orchestra. So that’s the fun part really: finding the personality. Because to me, in movie making, that’s the magical moment where this lines, this text, meet the person, the actor. The lines manifest themselves through the actor’s personality, quirks, and characteristics.”
When asked how he came up with the aesthetic for the film, Linklater mused that “you feel your way through the story and the locations show you how to shoot it. You have to keep thinking of the pace and the editing, too. I certainly didn’t want these interviews to be handheld or have that loose documentary feel. It was much more formal. Because I wanted the whole tone for the movie to be about Bernie: you know, his view of the world and the world’s view of him, which is pretty proper, pretty formal. He’s a very mannered southern gentlemen kind of guy and even in the issues of his sexuality, the film is ambiguous the way he is. I wanted the film to feel kind of formal, not too rough around the edges. I often do that on a movie. I remember shooting “Dazed and Confused” in the 1990s and thinking ‘If I had had the filmmaking skills that I have now in my early 30s, as a 17-year-old, what would I think would be cool? How would I shoot the movie? I try to go back into the character’s mind and try to adapt the look to the characters”.
And finally, the doorknob question: will we be seeing Jesse and Celine from “Before Sunrise” and “Before Sunset” again? So from the horse’s mouth: “Who knows!? It has been about the same amount of time as between the previous two films. Julie and Ethan are now in their early 40s: life piles up and things change. It’s in the air a bit but nothing’s set. It certainly would be fun to work with them again. We don’t want to just do it unless we really have something to express, especially as time goes by. But I kind of feel like we’re getting there, actually.”
