'Everybody Wants Some!!': How playing Ping-Pong created a movie
Preparing for Everybody Wants Some!!, Richard Linklater's new movie, sounds like going to a really sweet summer camp that doesn't culminate in, say, a talent show. Instead, the end game is a movie about what it's like to form a community - in this case a college baseball team - when you leave your family behind.
Preparing for Everybody Wants Some!!, Richard Linklater's new movie, sounds like going to a really sweet summer camp that doesn't culminate in, say, a talent show. Instead, the end game is a movie about what it's like to form a community - in this case a college baseball team - when you leave your family behind.
The movie's 12-member core cast spent three weeks bonding at Linklater's Texas ranch before filming began.
"We would sit in this library in a circle, tear the script apart, build it back up, go swimming, go play Ping-Pong, go to batting practice, work more on the script," said Wyatt Russell, who plays the hippie-dippie pitcher Willoughby.
"You live in a room with 12 dudes - all in the same room - with people going to bed in waves. You just become family," said castmate Juston Street, a former minor-league pitcher who plays the deeply insecure, intensely driven pitcher Jay Niles. ("He's just a little kid trying to fit in," Street said.)
The guys in the cast - including Street, Russell, and J. Quinton Johnson, who stopped by Philadelphia on a press tour - were all competitive by nature, they said, making the movie team feel more cohesive.
Creating a team - and a community - out of a group of disparate guys is really what Everybody Wants Some!! is about. There's no big game at the end of the movie, we never meet the big rival. It's just a few days in the lives of these players who will spend the next year working together to win.
"There was one moment where we were at [Linklater's] house where we devised a system where we could throw a football around the pool to get it into an inner tube across the pool," Johnson said. "That was the mentality of 12 guys being competitive to get one thing done. The only reason it was important was we made it important. That's the mentality of a team."
That single-mindedness reminded Russell of his own time as a college hockey player. When he stopped, it was the first time that a life outside hockey had even occurred to him. "You have horse blinders on. If you don't, you're dead in the water," Russell said. "A lot of guys I played with still hold on to that."
Everybody Wants Some!! takes place during a time of great transition, from high school to college, and college to reality, marked by uncertainty and change. While Everybody Wants Some!! was marketed as a spiritual sequel to Linklater's classic Dazed and Confused, Russell said, it's more of a sequel to 2014's Boyhood.
"It's when you're running out in the world and grabbing every rock," said Street, "and turning it over to figure out who you are."
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