I walked into the Radisson Blu at the Mall of America and I see Tyler Hoechlin and Blake Jenner watching Happy Days on an iPhone. They’re cracking up. I get seated in the hotel bar, it’s about 2PM and it’s empty. And a few minutes later, Hoechlin and Jenner, now joined by Ryan Guzman, come and sit down, all laughing about some joke I am not privvy to.

The three men are part of the new Richard Linklater hangout ensemble comedy, Everbody Wants Some!! They play college baseball players at a fictional university in Texas in 1980. It’s the kind of movie, having seen it once, where you remember everyone’s character, but not their names. I can recall Hoechlin’s mustache, though, and today it’s gone.

The movie has been called a “spiritual sequel” to both Dazed and Confused and Boyhood. Both of those films take place at the end of high school. This one opens at the start of college. It’s one of Linklater’s meandering films, following a group of young men as they kill time before ball practice and the start of classes. Incoming freshman Jake (Jenner) is the emotional heart of the film, and his status as a bigshot high school pitcher is immediately put in its place by his older teammates.

But this is a Richard Linklater picture, so you can rest assured it’s all done with loving kindness. That’s the Linklater way: even the bros and the assholes come off likable.

If Everybody Wants Some!! is about anything, it’s about bonding with your bros. Sitting in the Radisson Blu that afternoon, it was pretty clear these guys had bonded.

This conversation has been lightly edited.

CZF: This is a guy’s kind of movie. Baseball team, masculine guys chasing girls, competition. One of the early criticisms of the movie is that there’s not really a place for women in this story.

Ryan Guzman: I know some women who like it.

CZF: Well we’ll get to that. The movie is also really gentle and compassionate. And has a real sweetness to it. How did you go about crafting these characters?

Tyler Hoechlin: I felt like there was more room to play with the characters than usual. Usually the plot can kind of overtake the characters and you lose who they are, where are they going with the conflict and what is going to be the end result. With a movie like this, you’re purely driving the story with the dynamics of the relationship. For us, at least for me, the character development was that much more essential. If these characters are not interesting for two hours, you don’t have a movie. We had a lot more room to play with that stuff and we had a lot of fun building the characters.

Ryan Guzman: It’s a day in the life. When you’re watching these guys on screen you’re getting a sense of who these guys are and as the movie progresses you start to fall in love with the dynamic more and more.

CZF: Ryan you said you know some women who liked the film. And one of the early criticisms of the movie is that the movie lacks a space for women.

Ryan Guzman: If a full cast of women made a movie about women I guarantee you it would be a movie for men as well. I would love to watch a bunch of beautiful women on screen too. You can pick and prod as much as you want but when it comes down to it what we made is a pure cinematic film based on the lives of these guys. It’s a day in the life. We’re not trying to please everybody we’re just trying to be ourselves and entertain through that.

Tyler Hoechlin: Look at a movie like Bridesmaids. There’s primarily women, and one or two guys with a name. It’s just based on the story. It’s based on Rick [Linklater]’s life. There weren’t many women who lived in the baseball houses. It’s the way it is. These are the characters and this is what the story focuses on and that happens to be the situation. But at the end of the day, I have heard from a lot of girls who I maybe didn’t expect to like it much and they said ‘we love this. We expected it to be a guys movie.‘ But they’re having as much fun as the guys in the theater. The overall response has been positive.

Ryan Guzman: Dude, I’ve hung out with some girls that are actually way worse than us.

Blake Jenner: If you look at a movie like A League of their Own, where it’s mainly women, you’re getting to see the birth of the sisterhood. You’re seeing the trials and errors of a baseball team working together. That’s what you’re seeing here, you don’t get to see us over the course of a season, but you get to see the birth of a brotherhood and you get to see trust growing between upperclassmen and freshmen and you see the freshmen handle the hazing and you start to see okay, if you could you would stay on the road with these guys and see a whole season but you don’t you just get to see it all at the beginning. Its’ a different perspective on creating a team.

CZF: Tyler, you said that this is based on Linklater’s life. He was 20 in 1980, about the age of the characters in the film. I assume none of you guys were alive in 1980. How did Linklater go about imparting 1980 to you.

Tyler Hoechlin: Most specifically, through the music. He gave us all iPod Nanos when we showed up full of music from the mid 1970s to 1980 that would have been popular, and encouraged us to find music that our characters would have been into. And we had the dance rehearsals, learning the dances. But on top of that, he said, the more things change the more things stay the same. Getting to know each other, learning to be a team together, hanging out and having fun and razzing each, that’s pretty much the same now as it was then, it’s just different hairstyles, clothing. There was not too much pressure to play 1980. Which can come off cheesy.

CZF: Were you guys athletes? Did any of you play baseball in college?

Tyler Hoechlin: Yeah.

Ryan Guzman: Yeah.

Blake Jenner: I did not play baseball in college but I grew up playing sports, and wrestled in High School.

CZF: Did it feel like this?

Ryan Guzman: the first week I remember calling out Juston Street [who plays Jay in the film] because he reminded me so much of a pitcher that I played with, I even sent my old teammate a picture of Justin and told him, dude, I swear I’m playing with you. The comparison is kinda odd. It was so on point. It kinda freaked me out at times. And everybody was so different from the next. You just kept on rolling. You keep pushing yourself to go a little further than you might on your own.

Tyler Hoechlin: It was the closest thing to a locker room dynamic that I have felt since playing baseball for sure.

CZF: This is a hangout movie, a Richard Linklater hangout movie at that. Was that locker room dynamic of guys hanging out also present on set?

Ryan Guzman: Oh Yeah. You showed up on days you weren’t working just to be on set. I don’t think there was ever a day when you didn’t just show up.

Tyler Hoechlin: A lot of times you didn’t have anything to do you would just show up and hang out with the team.

Blake Jenner: We lived together for two and a half weeks, and went through baseball practice, dance rehearsals and were always going through the script, so we figured out how to be a team on screen through the script and rehearsals, but we also figured out how to be a team through ourselves. Nobody was thinking about, oh, this joke would be great on me, or how do I get ahead. No one was just thinking about themselves.

CZF: There is also the spiritual sequel to “Dazed and Confused” thing that I Linklater said in one piece one time and has been in every article about the film since. But did that mean anything on campus. On set. Sorry. I just said on campus.

Ryan Guzman: You’re part of the team too now. It never played though, it never mattered. We were always making our own film and we were focused on what we were doing at the time, and nothing else really mattered. But if you look at it, this is also a spiritual sequel to Boyhood, it takes on the kid going into college. I like how, for Rick, his movies tie in to each other, but they stand on their own too.

CZF: I think that Richard LInklater is one of the best directors working right now. What was it like working with him?

Tyler Hoechlin: It was a great experience, just in the fact that you can look at a director like him and easily be intimidated and think he might be a dictator and say do this this and this. It was the complete opposite. It was the ultimate experience in collaboration, discovery and trying things. And the amount of trust to have someone so creatively encouraging was an unbelievable experience.

Blake Jenner: It was like a masterclass for those of us who have aspirations of writing and directing. Watching someone like Rick, at his caliber, and seeing how chill of an approach he has with collaboration and being open to ideas and drilling the script and not hoarding. A lot of writers will write something and treat it like a playbook and ensure that everything is done down to the T. But he gave us permission to tear the script apart and put some of our own into it.

CZF: Was there a lot of improv happening?

Blake Jenner: In rehearsals.

Ryan Guzman: In rehearsals, yea. We workshopped the script a lot. We had two and a half weeks with Rick and we’d go to his library with him and workshop with him and just see which things worked which things did not and which things sucked. And from then on it’s the words you wrote, you know.

CZF: So, you got rid of the stuff that sucked, what are you favorite bits in the movie? Blake you got taped to the wall…

Ryan Guzman: I don’t think that was his favorite part.

Blake Jenner: No. But that was actually in the script.

Tyler Hoechlin: It’s a copout answer to say everything but there’s not one thing that we don’t feel a part of. We were a part of the whole process. We saw every line created and given birth to.

Blake Jenner: I loved getting my face shoved up someone’s ass .

CZF: Presumably a unique experience for you. What about the music. Did you find great music you hadn’t really known before?

Tyler Hoechlin: I loved the the disco. I love the disco stuff. You know, you’ve heard it all before but to see it all on set and to see everybody dancing and to feel it in real life. It definitely gave disco a new flavor.

Blake Jenner: I loved the disco stuff too because, well you got the prime example right here (pats Ryan on the back). Once we got to know the limits of the time period, that type of feel, you can kind of turn it into an interpretive dance. That’s why you see this guy right here doing his little raptor dance. He’s just going where he feels and he was feeling prehistoric that day.

Ryan Guzman: No, actually I was feeling a little kitty like.

Blake Jenner: Oh, alright, alright. Well you wear it like a sexy dinosaur. And that’s a compliment in my mind.

Ryan Guzman: Thank you man.

Blake Jenner: I did not read kitty cat. That was tyrannosaurus rex.

CZF: We’ll do a poll. But you all took dance lessons?

Ryan Guzman: Yea. When we did the country club we did Cotton Eye Joe lesson.

CZF: You actually do a lot more dancing than you do playing baseball in the movie.

Ryan Guzman: You’ll do about anything for women.

Tyler Hoechlin:: These guys do, for sure.

CZF: This movie in the end is kind of a melancholic story about the start of college, something I think a lot of people can relate to. Can you talk a bit about the feeling of having made this movie, and its opening now. Is there a sense that the team is breaking up?

Tyler Hoechlin: Not at all.

Ryan Guzman: No. We all still talk to each other all the time.

Tyler Hoechlin: It’s a team thing. We all refer to each other as the Cherokees. We still talk to each other. We have a group text that goes off everyday if not multiple times a day. And all of us are looking to collaborate with each other now. You have a group of people who are creatively like-minded and who want to be a part of making good films. We’re looking to work together on new projects. Its like the end of the movie, yeah it’s the end of the movie but it’s the beginning of the story.

Ryan Guzman: That’s beautiful man.

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