Director/writer/producer Richard Linklater said that reality has exceeded his wildest dreams relative to the plaudits that Boyhood has received, including six Oscar nominations, a DGA Award nod, Producers Guild, Writers Guild and Screen Actors Guild nominations, five Independent Spirit Awards noms, Golden Globe Award wins for Best Drama, Best Director and Best Supporting Actress (Patricia Arquette), Critics’ Choice Movie Awards for Best Picture, Director, Supporting Actress and Best Young Actor (Ellar Coltrane), and New York Film Critics Circle Award honors for Best Picture, Director and Supporting Actress.
While Boyhood has come of age on the awards show circuit, the film’s premise too is tied to coming of age, presenting successive episodes in the life of a boy from Austin, Texas, named Mason, starting at age 6 and tracking his growth and development until he enters college at 18. Coltrane portrays Mason in this fictional story which carries a heavy dose of chronological reality in that Boyhood was shot over a 12-year span, maintaining the same cast throughout and reuniting them every year or so to shoot scenes. Thus we see Mason, his sister (Lorelei Linklater) and their parents (Arquette, Ethan Hawke) evolve and mature before our eyes.
The passage of time is a theme that Linklater has handled with great aplomb as reflected in such films released prior to Boyhood as his Before trilogy–Before Sunrise in 1995, Before Sunset in 2004, and Before Midnight in 2013–which captures a couple’s romance shaped by place, memory, time, potential as to what might have been, dashed and realized expectations, and feelings of love, loss, regret and rebirth. Hawke and Julie Delpy portray the couple. Linklater earned Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar nominations (shared with Delpy and Hawke) for Before Sunset in 2005 and Before Midnight in 2014.
At a SHOOT Q&A session earlier this month just prior to a Guild screening of Boyhood at the Music Hall theater in Beverly Hills, Calif., Linklater acknowledged that he’s fascinated with how people and relationships evolve over time but ultimately his filmmaking choices are simply dictated by the desire to tell a good story.
The last two installments in the Before series–Before Sunset and Before Midnight–were made during the stretch in which Linklater was also involved in Boyhood. He observed that his work on Boyhood informed and helped to spur on those two Before sequels. Linklater noted that the first Before film came prior to Boyhood and at that juncture there was no plan to make a sequel, much less two. But as Hawke and Linklater knew they’d be together for a dozen years on Boyhood, it seemed less daunting to revisit the Before couple played by Hawke and Delpy. In a sense the Before trilogy was fostered and nurtured by Boyhood.
While initially it would have seemed a long shot for a Before trilogy to come to fruition, even far less likely was a film like Boyhood being made in that a return on financial investment could not be realized until 12 or 13 years down the road. Plus too many elements could have gone wrong–what if Coltrane as a minor decided to back out once he hit adolescence? What if Coltrane’s parents had second thoughts about their son’s involvement? What about the inherent unpredictability of what could happen at any point over a dozen years to undermine the project?
But Linklater, his cast and crew, and financial backers at IFC Films took the leap of faith and decided to embrace time and unpredictability as allies. Linklater observed that normally directors are trying to bend the elements to their will of storytelling. By contrast for Boyhood, he had to relinquish that control and accept whatever unknowns the future had to offer. The element of time became a collaborator.
Linklater said that the cast assembled for Boyhood may have been the best he has ever worked with. He noted that his long-time collaborator Hawke and his first-time collaborator Arquette both were immediately on board when he pitched the idea of making a film over 12 years, delving deeply into their characters and how they handled parenthood. We see Hawke evolve from a sports car-driving free spirit to a remarried new dad behind the wheel of a minivan. And Arquette endures and overcomes adversity as a single mom. Clearly the casting of Coltrane was pivotal. In terms of what he saw in a six-year-old boy, Linklater simply explained that he viewed Coltrane as a thoughtful, cool kid who would grow up to be an interesting young man. Also, appealing to Linklater was the fact that Coltrane’s parents were both artists and saw the value of his involvement in this ambitious film. Having parental support of Coltrane throughout the process was a vital element, according to Linklater.
A prime collaborator of choice for Linklater was editor Sandra Adair, ACE. Their working relationship is some 22 years old and counting, all the way back to one of the director’s breakthrough indie films, Dazed and Confused (a 1993 release). Linklater related that the editing of Boyhood was happening while it was still being written, directed and shot, with Adair providing crucial input as to what was needed from one year to the next; her voice being so important–and in a much different way than their prior collaborations–that she additionally earned a co-producer credit on Boyhood.
Linklater and Adair’s shared filmography also includes Before Sunrise (1995), SubUrbia (1996), The Newton Boys (1998), Waking Life (2001), Tape (2001), Schoolhouse Rock (2003), Before Sunset (2004), Bad News Bears (2005), Fastfood Nation (2006), A Scanner Darkly (2006), Me and Orson Welles (2008), Bernie (2011) and Before Midnight (2013).
