Trivia for
Waking Life (2001) More at IMDb Pro »

• During the lecture by the monkey, a clip from "Akira Kurosawa's Dreams" (_Yume (1990)_) is shown of a man running awkwardly down a hill.
  
  
• A man is seen wearing a "Slacker" t-shirt. Slacker (1991) was director Richard Linklater's first film.
  
  
• The story told by Steven Prince at the bar about shooting a tire thief was also told by him in Martin Scorsese's American Boy: A Profile of: Steven Prince (1978).
  
  

• Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke reprise their roles as Celine and Jesse from Before Sunrise (1995) written by Richard Linklater.
  
  
• This film was shot primarily in Austin, Texas. Not Houston, Texas.
  
  
• The man in the car shouting through the loudspeaker is Alex Jones who has a public television and radio talk show in Austin, Texas, as well as a shortwave radio show, where he expresses similar and even sometimes harsher viewpoints.
  
  
• Director Cameo: [Richard Linklater] [Appears as the second passenger in the boat car at the beginning as well as the pinball player, the last person Wiley Wiggins speaks with.]
  
  
• The pinball machine that Richard Linklater plays at the end of the movie is the same one that Kevin Pickford plays at the Emporium in Dazed and Confused (1993), another of Linklater's films.
  
  
• Shot entirely on video cameras, mostly handheld, then rotoscope-animated on Mac G4 computers and later transferred to 35mm film.
  
  
• Several scenes (e.g., the automobile with the loudspeakers on top) are similar to those in Slacker (1991), which was also filmed by Richard Linklater, using some of the same actors. Several of the locations in Austin, TX were also featured in Slacker (1991).
  
  
• The whole film was shot and edited into a complete live-action version before animation began.
  
  
• Some of the names of candy bars in a store toward the film's end were changed in animation. Hershey's bars become "Hercules", Mentos are now "Memos", and Junior Mints were changed to "Junior Pants".
  
  
• The shot of the building immediately before the Julie Delpy/Ethan Hawke scene is actually a portion of the opening shot from the remake of Psycho (1998).
  
  
• The basic plot of the film is based on a physiological phenomenon known as "lucid dreaming". Lucid dreaming means dreaming while knowing that you are dreaming. The term was coined by Frederik van Eeden who used the word "lucid" in the sense of mental clarity. Many of the dream state idiosyncrasies described in the film, such as the inability to read time on a digital watch or the tendency of light switches to malfunction, are described in studies authored by Dr. Stephen LaBerge of Stanford University, the leading American authority on lucid dreaming.
  
  
• Another clip from the Monkey's lecture film shows Kurt Cobain in concert spinning his guitar over his head and throwing it into an amplifier. This was taken from the documentary he conceived in 1993 called "Live, Tonight, Sold Out".
  
  
• The Philip K. Dick essay being discussed is "How to Build a Universe that Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later", the introduction to his short story collection "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon".
  
  
• The pinball machine in the last scene is a Bally Fireball from 1971. In the film, the brand name "Bally" has been changed to "Rally", and while the name "Fireball" appears in some shots, in others it is changed to something else. The game is also shown in the film with 5 digit score displays while the real game has 4 digit displays. The Player 2 and Player 3 scores are both shown with a score of 11111, which means the player is playing a 3 or 4 player game all by himself and has a very unlikely score, or the machine in the dream is broken. Also, any real pinball machine with 5-digit scoring would have the rightmost digit fixed at "0".
  
  

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