Three characters. One setting. No limits.

Nobody asked me, you understand, but that’s the tagline I would have suggested had I been asked to help with the ad campaign for Tape, the claustrophobically intense 2001 drama starring Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman and Robert Sean Leonard, and directed by H-Town native Richard Linklater.

Unfortunately, this small-budget, high-impact indie didn’t draw masses to megaplexes – or even hundreds to art-houses — back in the day. But it continues to be regarded as a career highlight for all parties involved.

So it’s altogether fitting that Cinema Arts Festival Houston chose to program it – and not at all surprising that Linklater and Hawke agreed to introduce it – as part of CAFH’s weekend celebration of Hawke as recipient of the festival’s Levantine Cinema Arts Award. Showtime is 1 p.m Sunday at the Edwards Greenway Palace Stadium 24.

Tape is based on a stage play by Stephen Belber, who also wrote the screenplay adaptation, but Linklater obviously doesn’t care that we know that. Indeed, rather than waste his energies on seeking some way to make this three-character chamber drama seem somehow more “cinematic,” Linklater brazenly underscores the theatricality of the piece.

Everything happens within the confines of a dingy motel room in Lansing, Michigan, and the characters reveal themselves almost entirely through the parry and thrust of ferocious, full-contact dialogue.

Occasionally, two characters engage in an especially heated close encounter, and Linklater whips his digital video camera back and forth, like an ESPN correspondent at a high-stakes tennis match, to keep pace with the rapid-fire escalation of accusation and denial, angry threat and false bravado.

More often, though, he is content to maintain a calm, steady gaze on his characters, even as they tear away at their conflicting memories of a shared past, like animals who instinctively gnaw at wounds to kill their pain.

Hawke plays Vince, a high-voltage livewire given to low cunning and vertiginous mood swings. At first, he seems genuinely pleased to meet and greet Johnny (Leonard), a long-lost buddy and first-time filmmaker who’s back in town to premiere his debut feature at a local festival. But Vince has tricks up his sleeve —and a tape recorder in his pocket.

He contrives to coax Johnny into admitting that he date raped Amy, a classmate Johnny loved – or at the very least lusted for – years ago.

Unfortunately, Johnny is reluctantly willing to admit that, maybe, something like that might have happened.

Even more unfortunately, Amy (Thurman, Hawke’s real-life spouse at the time Tape was produced) now is an assistant district attorney – and she’s on her way over to join her former classmates.

Earlier this week, Richard Linklater agreed to be recorded while answering some questions about Tape.

CultureMap: What’s your fondest memory of making Tape?

Richard Linklater: My fondest memory? Wow. Just the intensity, really. You know we shot it in six days. So it was such a unique production. We rehearsed it for, like, two weeks, but we shot it in a week. It was sort of a hybrid between theater and film. On most films, the cameras are rolling for maybe 45 minutes during a 12-hour day, because you’re waiting around for lighting and setting up shots before you roll. But because we shot this digitally, and because of the way we shot it, the cameras were rolling something like eight hours of every 10-hour day. We would do 15-minute takes. It was really amazing.

CM: Was it a difficult film to get financed?

RL: Actually, no. We did it for like 100 grand. See, there was a series of low-budget, digital films being made under this banner – InDigEnt. And they invited me to make one. At first, I told them, “Well, gee, I don’t think I have any projects that really fit into that mold.” And besides, I had other things I was working on. But then Ethan sent me this play, and we started talking about it. And it was like, “Hey, maybe we could do it as one of those films.”

So we always viewed it as this little offbeat project, super down and dirty. And, you know, the subject matter ultimately warranted that look and feel. I wouldn’t have shot a regular movie digitally at that time. But this one fit, because it was this kind of grungy little drama.

CM: Of course, the work process must have been easier because, at that point, you’d already made three movies with Ethan – right?

RL: Definitely. By that point, we had such a shorthand as friends and all that. So when Ethan read this play – it hadn’t even been produced yet – and he brought it to me, we started talking about it right away as a potential movie. And because I’d already worked with him, I could tell right away that he’d be totally great as Vince. See, I knew his energy, and his leadership ability. And I knew that it would be fun. I mean, that’s kind of my idea of heaven, to be rehearsing and shooting with Ethan.

CM: OK, let me just throw a great big flopping prejudice right out on the table: I think Tape may be the best movie you’ve ever done, and it definitely showcases Ethan Hawke’s best performance to date. In fact, when I reviewed Tape for the San Francisco Examiner back in 2001, I wrote: “If there’s ever been another movie in which any of the three leads has given a better performance, I haven’t seen it.”

RL: [Laughs] You wrote that? Wow. Well, that’s flattering. But, yeah, this movie is so actor-intensive. And that’s what I really liked the most about it. Like I said, it was sort of like theater. We really rehearsed it to the beat. And then we just shot it. Once we got started, we just kept going. It was very intimate – and very dramatic. I guess the word that keeps popping back to me about is “intensity.” You know, that kind of gonzo acting. Really balls to the wall performances.

And I was kind of in the mood for that. Waking Life – the movie I’d just done with Ethan -- was such a conceptual piece. It really wasn’t about acting at all. It was more about ideas. So it was fun to dive full-on into these characters [in Tape], to make this piece work dramatically the way it needed to. And, yeah, I think Uma, Bob and Ethan are just excellent in it.

CM: What was there about the script that drew you to it as a director?

RL: For me, this offered a chance to really dig into the material. And to deal with the whole notion of apology and what that means. And also the notion of memory. How, for these guys, there’s this event that happened 10 years before. And you think about, in your own life, how you think about things from your past, and how you put that in your present thinking of who you are. How it feeds whatever resentments or bitterness you might have. And how it affects how you might see yourself now in this world.

CM: I know this is kinda-sorta like asking a parent to pick which child he or she loves best – but would you say Ethan’s performance in Tape is the best he’s given in any of your movies?

RL: Well, that’s subjective thing. I mean, it’s so different from what he did in Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, because such a different thing is required. But I do think this is Ethan’s most fun performance as far as his playing this crazed character.

I think that up until then, people would think that he couldn’t have done this. I know Ethan personally, and we’ve had our own wild times. And while I knew he’s not this drug-addled, crazy guy, I knew he could certainly go there, performance-wise. I knew he could pull it off. But I don’t think it was anyone else’s view of Ethan at the time.

I don’t know what their view of him is now.

(Tape will be presented by Cinema Arts Festival Houston at 1 p.m. Sunday at the Edwards Greenway Palace Stadium 24. Ethan Hawke and director Richard Linklater are scheduled to introduce the screening.)