"А Scanner Darkly" фильмінің жасалу тарихы мен ерекшеліктері

He began thinking about A Scanner Darkly, another dark novel, while talking to producer Tommy Pallotta during the making of Waking Life. Linklater liked A Scanner Darkly more than Ubik and felt that he could make a film out of it. Linklater was not interested in turning the book into a big budget action thriller as had been done in the past because he felt that A Scanner Darkly was "about these guys and what they're all doing in their alternative world and what's going through their minds is really what keeps the story moving". Dick's daughters were not too keen on "a cartoon version" of A Scanner Darkly. As with Linklater's earlier Waking Life, controversial conspiracy theorist and broadcaster Alex Jones has a small cameo as himself.

Linklater assembled the cast for two weeks of rehearsals in Austin, Texas before principal photography began in order to fine tune the script. The result was a fusion of Linklater's writing, the novel and the actors' input. Extensive on set footage of the filming of A Scanner Darkly was featured in a UK documentary about Richard Linklater directed by Irshad Ashraf and broadcast on Channel 4 in December 2004.

After principal photography was finished, the film was transferred to QuickTime for an 18 month animation process: second order magnified contrast separation. A Scanner Darkly was filmed digitally using the Panasonic AG DVX100 and then animated with Rotoshop, a proprietary graphics editing program created by Bob Sabiston. Rotoshop uses an animation technique called interpolated rotoscope, which was previously used in Linklater's film Waking Life. Linklater discussed the ideas and inspiration behind his use of rotoscoping in Ashraf's documentary, linking it to his personal experiences of lucid dreaming. Rotoscoping in traditional cel animation originally involved tracing over film frame by frame. This is similar in some respects to the rotoscope style of filmmaker Ralph Bakshi. Rotoshop animation makes use of vector keyframes and interpolates the in between frames automatically. Linklater and Reynolds had worked previously on Live from Shiva's Dance Floor, a 20 minute short featuring Timothy "Speed" Levitch.

A Scanner Darkly was met with generally positive reviews. 68% of 189 reviews compiled by Rotten Tomatoes are positive. The critics' consensus on the website reads, "A faithful adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel, A Scanner Darkly takes the viewer on a visual and mind blowing journey into the author's conception of a drug addled and politically unstable world." Its weighted score on Metacritic is 73 out of 100, based on 33 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Manohla Dargis of The New York Times wrote that the film "has a kind of hypnotic visual appeal". Carina Chocano of the Los Angeles Times found the film "engrossing" and wrote that "the brilliance of [the film] is how it suggests, without bombast or fanfare, the ways in which the real world has come to resemble the dark world of comic books". In his review for The Village Voice, J. Hoberman wrote, "What's extraordinary about Linklater's animation, computer rotoscoped in the fashion of his 2001 Waking Life, is just how tangible the Dickian labyrinth becomes", and praised Robert Downey Jr.'s performance: "Midway through 2006, this supporting turn is the performance to beat in what seems the year's American movie to beat". Andrew Sarris, in his review for The New York Observer, wrote, "Mr. Linklater emerges once again as the Austin auteur par excellence". Empire magazine's Kim Newman gave the film four stars out of five and wrote, "its intelligence makes it near essential viewing". In his review for The Washington Post, Desson Thompson wrote, "Linklater's rotoscoping process underscores this grave new world with pop arty creepiness. Its dramatically muting effect, which shaves the highs off the more histrionic performances yet doesn't undercut the more subtle elements squeezes everything into a unified nightmare". Amy Biancolli from the Houston Chronicle heralded the movie as "[t]he first film to capture the author's transience and his art." In his review for The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw wrote, "The movie is often startling and engrossing, but the question of what the heck is going on, and why, is never entirely absent from your mind". Jack Mathews, in his review for The New York Daily News, called it "a murky, dialogue heavy tale of intrigue". Roger Moore from the Orlando Sentinel states: "Linklater's willingness to experiment is laudable. But I'm not sure he's reinventing animation here, or even adequately serving that older than children animation audience."