Richard Linklater has been thinking a lot about his hometown of Houston lately.

Though the director of such Texas-centric films as "Boyhood" and "Dazed and Confused" has called Austin home for many years, H-town is still close to heart. It's the city where he learned to love film, catching showings at the River Oaks Theatre, Rice Media Center and the long-gone Greenway Plaza.

Linklater, 57, is so fond of the city that he is in the early stages of making a movie set in the Houston of his youth.

"I'm actually working on a script that's a very Houston movie, couldn't be more Houston, the ultimate Houston movie," he said with a laugh during a recent visit to Houston. "It's about being a kid during the Space Age, during the moon landing."

He's even put out a call for average Houstonians to send him their photos and film footage from the late '60s so his production team can get the look precisely right. Some of what's sent to him might be digitized and actually used in the movie. (You can send them to spaceagemovie@gmail.com.)

"Houston deserves a good TV series and a couple of more movies," he said, conceding that Dallas has gotten a lot more Hollywood love over the years. "(Houston) is the largest city to be nonrepresented."

His film will see Houston through the lens of a wide-eyed kid growing up in a time when everyone was dancing to the siren song of technology. From the Astrodome to "Houston, we have a problem," Space City seemed to have one foot in tomorrow.

"Houston was so on the cutting edge," Linklater said. "It just felt like you were living in science fiction. … That domed stadium, Astro Turf. … Even though the country was kind of going through hell and there was so much strife but, as a kid, it's all so positive."

It will be the opposite of his upcoming "Where'd You Go, Bernadette?" starring Cate Blanchett and Kristen Wiig, out in May. That film, based on the Maria Semple best-seller, is set in a different city where technology is king (Seattle) and revolves around a teenage girl searching for her mother who has disappeared.

But he wants to have the Houston film ready for release in time for the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 2019.

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"It's just a love letter to Houston," he said.

As for other future projects, he's not sure about revisiting Jesse and Celine, the couple played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, who are the heart of his lauded "Before Sunrise," "Before Sunset" and "Before Midnight" trilogy. Audiences have gotten used to seeing where their relationship stands every few years.

"The last one was more grueling than the others," he said about "Before Midnight" from 2013. "It was just a tougher thing to depict, a longer-term relationship. … That's less fun than the romance of the meeting or reuniting, so it was just more of a grind to actually try and make a compelling movie about what it was. We were compelled to do it, but it was tough. … They'd be 50-ish for the next one, I guess. Does the trilogy become a quadrilogy? We don't know yet."