Richard Linklater is up to his old tricks again. The director has confirmed to The Houston Chronicle that he’s currently at work directing a secret project in Houston, Texas. Linklater isn’t ready to reveal any cast or plot details, but he’s ok with letting everyone know the film will be a coming-of-age story that takes place in 1969 and centers around the moon landing.

“You had so much going on in Houston at once: NASA, the Medical Center, the Astrodome,” Linklater said. “There was a communal atmosphere. You had all these kids with parents working at NASA for a common goal.”

The Chronicle says the new film was partly inspired by Linklater’s time shooting his magnum opus “Boyhood.” The film got the director thinking about his own childhood and growing up in the wake of the moon landing, which is where the script was inspired. The movie will feature “regional hits” from 1969 and be set during the summer. Similar to “Boyhood,” the film will be told from a child’s point of view.

Linklater has already announced he’s tackling an adaptation of the novel “Where’d You Go, Bernadette” with Cate Blanchett, so it seems like the Houston-set secret project is a quick trip back to his indie roots before he takes on a larger project. He was last in theaters in the fall with “Last Flag Flying,” starring Bryan Cranston, Steve Carell, and Laurence Fishburne.

The Houston Film Commission has issued the following statement, which announces Linklater needs your help for any nostalgic Houston memorabilia you may have in your possession.

Director Richard Linklater needs your Houston area photos, videos from the 1960s for a new movie. Have a home movie from Astroworld or the Astrodome, or a recording of your little brother with Kitirik? Did someone you know use a Kinescope to record the moon landing? If so, we want to see it and anything else that documents that era. There is no wrong material, as long as it from Houston in the 1960s we want to see it.

Linklater is aiming to release the film in 2019 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

Netflix nabbed Richard Linklater’s “Apollo 10½,” an animated film set against the backdrop of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon.

The project, announced Thursday, coincides with the 51st anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11.

“Apollo 10 1/2” is inspired by Linklater’s childhood in Houston. Linklater directed from his own script, which attempts to interweave the astronaut and mission control view along with an excited child’s perspective, living near NASA, but mostly watching it on television. The film centers around a kid’s fantasy about being plucked from his average life in suburbia to secretly train for a covert mission to the moon. The cast includes Jack Black, Zachary Levi and Glen Powell.

“It struck me years ago that this was my film to make, from both a chronological and proximity level – I was there, going into 3rd grade,” Linklater said in a statement. “Our unique animation style allows both the conjuring of a world long gone, and the flowing, playful expression of memory and imagination. It’s been a fun, creative journey to incorporate things like 3D graphics into a live action shoot to help bring this story to life. “

The movie combines live-action and computer and hand-drawn animation. Linklater used a similar approach in his 2001 movie “Waking Life,” which was shot using digital video of live actors and then rotoscoped with artists drawing over each frame with computers.

Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood

Director/Screenwriter: Richard Linklater, Producers: Tommy Pallotta, Mike Blizzard, Femke Wolting, Bruno Felix

A coming-of-age story set in the suburbs of Houston, Texas in the summer of 1969, centered around the historic Apollo 11 moon landing. Cast List: Jack Black, Zachary Levi, Glen Powell, Josh Wiggins, Milo Coy, Lee Eddy, Bill Wise, Natalie L’Amoreaux, Jessica Brynn Cohen, Sam Chipman, Danielle Guilbot (World Premiere)

A coming of age story....the way only Richard Linklater could tell it. Inspired by Linklater's own life, Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood takes you to the moon and back in this story about growing up in the 1960s in Houston, TX.

Starring Glen Powell, Zachary Levi and Jack Black. Written and Directed by Richard Linklater. Watch Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood only on Netflix on April 1.

Linklater: Well, this is very different than "A Scanner Darkly" and "Waking Life," my two previous films that are rotoscope movies, which means you design the movies, you shoot it, and then you kind of draw everything. This, we're shooting it on a green screen and we're animating every anything else. It's more of a 2D with 3D elements and rotoscope for the characters, just the outline of the characters because they're colored and shaded and everything is in a more traditional animation process. It's a different process, but for a different film. I didn't want it to look like that entirely, but I wanted the realism of the characters. That's just a technique I'm very familiar with and my head of animation, Tommy Pallotta, we've been working together for years. The animation was so fun. It was just such a challenge to make a period film, try to get that look, those colors, that texture, and then we had all the kind of different mediums, too. You could say documentary. There's footage of TV footage. It's fun to animate. What's really fun is we have a brief section in there of Saturday morning cartoons, Bugs and Daffy, but to be animating and animate something that's already animated, that's pretty fun. To be animating TV, which you kind of process as animated anyway, it was so wild to be reinterpreting "The Wizard of Oz." It's so cool to see the monkeys in animation. To pull these things we all share collectively in our memories, but to put it into our own animated world here, it was kind of meta.