Richard Linklater's "Boyhood" is a remarkable film in many ways. First, it once again solidifies the iconoclastic filmmaker's reputation as a compelling filmmaker, one who often uses time to frame his narratives. Whether it's the narratives that take place over a single day like "Dazed and Confused," or films that age over decades like the "Before Sunrise"/"Before Sunset"/"Before Moonrise" triptych, Linklater shows a remarkable capacity to use cinema to encourage audiences to look at the passing of time.
No other project more overtly demonstrates this than "Boyhood." Shot over a half-dozen years, we literally see the character grow up before our eyes. Much like Michael Apted's "Up" series of docs that trace a group of kids over many years, Linklater's documentary-like tenacity is reason enough to applaud the film.
Yet "Boyhood" is more than mere than just its filming style -- with wonderful, rich performances and an engaging narrative, it's a film that's sure to be talked about for generations to come. Moviefone Canada spoke with the director on the phone about the challenges and rewards surrounding the making of this film.
Moviefone Canada: How worried you were at any point that the process of shooting over all these years would overcome any sense of narrative or story?
Richard Linklater: The story came first. The whole process [or] methodology came out of a way to tell this particular story. It was really me wanting to express my feelings about growing up and parenting. The only way to do that was to shoot it over this amount of time, so that just became the way to do it.
I'm pretty process-oriented anyway. Even though this movie was epic in its ambition, the time and everything, it was really a pretty humble little film, this collection of intimate moments. Like anything, it's just one little step at a time. It afforded a great luxury of time to have all of that, but it never threatened to overwhelm. It was actually easily comprehensible to everyone.
And the story was consistent throughout, pretty much?
Yeah. In something like this, where you're taking on the unknown future as a co-collaborator, which is antithetical to most film people. We're all control freaks! That's what filmmaking is -- we're bending the reality, whatever's around it, bending to your storytelling will.
In this, you have to give up that absolute control and just admit you'll be dealing with elements in the future you can't totally predict. You can have your hunches, you can have your intentions, but the reality will be something else. I found that very exciting. I knew there were notes I wanted to hit later in the film that I can't actually even pull off right now, but I hope, in eight to 10 years I'll be able to. Maybe ten years before we shot it, I had the last shot in mind, but I didn't have the exact dialogue maybe until 10 hours before. So this was the best of both worlds, highly structured, very specific story, and yet completely open for last-minute inspiration and new ideas all the way through it. I kind of always work that way, this was just an extreme example.
Can you speak a bit about the casting process to find the titular boy at the heart of the story, Ellar Coltrane? What did you see in him at age seven that made you think he had the ability and maturity to pull this off?
Yeah, that was the decision. I talked to Ethan [Hawke] and Patricia [Arquette] first, and they were in. But they're adults. They grasp what 12 years is and all of that. But a kid, that's a whole other area.
[Ellar] was six when I first met him, seven when we started shooting. I remember I met a lot of kids, they were all kid actors. I wanted someone who had a head shot, resume, agent, etc. -- that meant they had family support for this undertaking, which I knew would be crucial to weather it out all of these years.
The problem would be year four or five or even year two if the family approached us and said, "You know, this just isn't in our kids' best interest, we don't think this is healthy for him and we're quitting." There's nothing you can do because you can't really contract anyone, so the goal was to get someone whose family thought it would be a cool thing to do, and would be supportive of that artistic element in their life and as a life project for all of us.
That aside, he was the most interesting, the most ethereal, the most mysterious. I liked the way his mind worked and you could have real conversations. A lot of kid actors in particular, they're kind of people-pleasing, they know how to be cute or whatever it is for adults and put their best foot forward. Ellar really didn't care what you thought of him. He was just this kid who said, "Here's who I am."
Were you editing as you went along?
I was editing every year and I would attach what we just shot to everything that had come before in this ever-growing project, and then watch that and edit that whole thing, so it was just this ongoing project.
Since you'd be looking at the earlier material the most, is that the stuff that got the most attention from an editorial point of view? Did it make you want to shoot some things differently after the fact?
There's nothing in the movie I feel that I would have shot differently, or that I had one story in mind, one tone, one visual palette, and that's just the way I wanted it to look. Post-production, however, was 11 years later, and I'm still feeling this project through as one film. I cut a transition between years one and two, something I had been looking at for 10 years and wasn't happy with. I thought it was a little too logical, too obvious.
I was still making cuts in year one, and yeah, those years get more attention because I did, they were always there. But in a way, they needed the most attention because they were the least conceptualized. I never did the math, but I think the first year ran long and I ended up cutting more out of the first year than any of the others. Like a lot of things in life, [the early years] needed more attention, so I was glad I was able to naturally give it more.
Other than watching Ellan grow up, we can also judge time by the changes in handheld technology. Was that a conscious decision to use tech to show the passage of time?
In this case, it was really the technology, the games and the computers and the phones that really state the passing of time.
In my own life growing up, it would have been things like cars, hairstyles, clothes. [In "Boyhood"], the hair and the clothes and the culture and even the music are specific, but there weren't new styles of music as far as I can tell. There weren't grand changes in the culture, it looked the same to a large degree from beginning to end. I was kind of surprised by that. My take on that is change is becoming so rapid in the technological world, that we don't need it as much in the outer world because it's happening so much in our computers. That's my little 12-year observation.
Any other secret projects we need to know about?
This one wasn't technically a secret. There wasn't anything to be gained from talking about it for all of these years, but no more secrets. And they wouldn't be secrets if I could tell you about them!
"Boyhood" is now playing in select theatres.
Read what Moviefone Canada editor Chris Jancelewicz thought about "Boyhood" in his review.
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