Richard
Linklater’s BOYHOOD -- a fictional drama made with the same group of actors
over a 12-year period -- takes a one-of-a-kind trip, at once epic and intimate,
through the exhilaration of childhood, the seismic shifts of a modern family
and the very passage of time.
The
film tracks 6 year-old Mason (Ellar Coltrane) over life’s most radically
fluctuating decade, through a familiar whirl of family moves, family
controversies, faltering marriages, re-marriages, new schools, first loves,
lost loves, good times, scary times and a constantly unfolding mix of
heartbreak and wonder. But the results
are unpredictable, as one moment braids into the next, entwining into a deeply
personal experience of the incidents that shape us as we grow up and the
ever-changing nature of our lives.
As
the story begins, dreamy-eyed grade-schooler Mason faces upheaval: his devoted,
struggling single mom Olivia (Patricia Arquette) has decided to move him and
older sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater) to Houston – just as their
long-absent father Mason Sr. (Ethan Hawke) returns from Alaska to re-enter
their world. Thus begins life’s non-stop
flux. Yet through a tide of parents and
stepparents, girls, teachers and bosses, dangers, yearnings and creative
passions, Mason emerges to head down his own road.
PLAYING WITH TIME
Movies
have always been about playing with time -- about trying to snatch the moments
that relentlessly flow through our daily lives and etch them to where we can
get some perspective; or about diving into the mythic, dream-like dimensions
where time is put through the blender.
Even so, nearly all fictional movies are, by practical necessity, made
over a period of weeks or months.
But
could a contemporary drama be made over a far greater stretch – say in the time
it takes for one little boy to evolve, year-by-year, shift-by-shift, into a
young adult?
That
was the question Richard Linklater decided to take on when he began making
BOYHOOD 12 years ago. It started with
the director wanting to make a movie about the singularly private emotions and
hard-to-describe experience of childhood, but childhood was such vast
territory, he wasn’t quite sure where to start.
Then an idea hit him.
“Why
not try to encompass all of it?” he recalls asking.
Linklater
knew there were plenty of rational reasons why such an undertaking might be almost
out of the question: it was creatively
mind-boggling; it was financially impossible; no cast and crew, let alone film
company, could possibly commit for such a long, uncertain time; and it ran
counter to everything about the way the modern motion picture industry
works.
So
he dove in.
“It
was like taking a great leap of faith into the future,” Linklater muses. “Most artistic endeavors strive to have a
certain amount of control but there were elements of this that would be out of
anyone’s control. There were going to be
physical and emotional changes and that was embraced. I was ready for it to be a constant collaboration
between the initial ideas I had for the piece and the reality of the changes
happening to the actors along the way.
In a way, the film became a collaboration with time itself, and time can
be a pretty good collaborator, if not always a predictable one.”
Rather
than a conventional screenplay, Linklater started with something more akin to a
structural blueprint and, with that, was able to win the long-term support of
IFC Films, who stuck steadfastly with the project over the ensuing decade-plus
production. He then began approaching
potential cast and crew, explaining how the irregular production schedule would
work: they would all gather every year,
whenever they could align all the myriad schedules, for 3-4 day shoots. Linklater would write and edit (with longtime
collaborator Sandra Adair) along the way.
No one outside their world would know for
144 months entirely what they had created, and only after the final shoot could
the film’s expansive perspective be experienced.
Linklater
was gratified to find so many people ready to leap with him. “It was especially insane for IFC Films to
commit to this and I know that Jonathan Sehring [President of Sundance Selects/IFC
Films] really fought for it,” he says. “He had to explain every year what this
expenditure was and why there wasn’t going to be anything to show for it for
more years to come. I was lucky to find
that, because otherwise this would not have been possible.”
The
commitment required of the actors on BOYHOOD was also something entirely
different from your typical film or TV shoot.
On a logistical level, they would have to tinker with their schedules to
find room to film for the next 12 years.
But more essentially, they would have to be ready to explore their
characters not just in one intense phase of time, but over a very extended
range – beyond the life of most stage, film and television characters -- going
further and further as they revisited them anew each year in shifting
circumstances.
“It
was a different process and that was truly exciting,” says Patricia Arquette,
who portrays Olivia, the mom who holds the film’s family together, sometimes
with bits of string.
“There
was no real precedent for doing this with a cast and crew,” Linklater
admits. “There’s no such thing as a
12-year contract in this business. So it
was really asking people to take a communal leap of good faith and commitment.”
It
was not only about leaping, but also about staying patient, taking the long
view, which is not Hollywood’s standard modus operandi. It was so difficult to explain what he was
doing, that Linklater pretty much stayed mum about it, even as he made other
films.
When
production began in 2002, Linklater was already becoming one of American film’s
most distinctive voices, having come to the fore with the indie hits SLACKER
and DAZED AND CONFUSED, the innovative animated film WAKING LIFE and the
award-winning BEFORE SUNRISE, each of which exuberantly played with form while
becoming personal touchstones for audiences.
But his career would grow more diverse over the ensuing 12 years, with
films including the mainstream comedy SCHOOL OF ROCK and the award-winning
black comedy BERNIE. He also completed a
widely acclaimed trilogy, adding BEFORE SUNSET and BEFORE MIDNIGHT to BEFORE SUNRISE,
in what has become known as the BEFORE series.
The
BEFORE series also explored the impact of time on everyday lives -- revisiting
the same couple at three diverse junctures in their unfolding relationship, but
it did so in a very different way from BOYHOOD.
“Time is clearly a big element in the BEFORE films,” Linklater observes,
“but those are each little moments in time and this is really biting off the
whole thing and getting more directly into how time slowly and gradually works
on us.” Of course, one insurmountable
problem of time is that it operates in concert with things like chance and
uncertainty. So the risks were considerable. “Some of standard fears, then stuff like
“what if Ellar moved to Australia or something,” Linklater muses. Toward the end, I was even like, “Ethan, if I
die, you have to finish this!’”
But
time also gifted Linklater with an unprecedented kind of creative
spaciousness: the ability to contemplate
every element of the film over a considerable period of his own life. “It was incredible to have this kind of
gestation time,” he comments. “It’s
something that’s never happened to me before, and I know it’s something that’s
unlikely to ever happen again.”
BOY
One
of the early cruxes of BOYHOOD was finding the boy. “We were looking for someone to come along
with us for 12 years – and that’s not something a kid can fathom at 6 or 7,”
Linklater notes. “So it was kind of a
crazy task, where I was looking at kids wondering, ‘Who are you going to be
when you grow up and what’s your life going to be like?’”
He
found he had an instinctual answer to that answer when he auditioned Austin
native Ellar Coltrane. “I had the
feeling Ellar was going to be an artist of some kind even at that age, in part
because his parents are both artists but also there was just something unique
about him,” Linklater remembers. “And I
felt the world he was growing up in would lend itself to what we were
doing. It became more and more apparent
how smart and interesting Ellar was, and it was a pleasure just watching his
life unfold. He became more and more of
an active collaborator every year.”
For
Coltrane, becoming part of BOYHOOD meant having a boyhood unlike any other, one
that would ultimately be bracingly exposed on the screen. But, in the beginning, he really had no idea
what he was in for, or what it all meant.
“It wasn’t possible for me to fathom it,” he explains. “12 years was already twice my lifetime at
the point when we started. It’s hard
enough to contemplate the next 12 years now for me, or probably at any age, but
then it wasn’t possible. It wasn’t for
several years that it really began to sink in just what the film was or why it
was so different.”
At
the same time, Coltrane looks back now and is glad that he was able to work for
those years in a private space unseen by the world. “I’m extremely grateful to have delayed
having to be confronted right away with seeing myself on screen and being
seen,” he comments. “It’s something that
I think I’m more equipped to deal with now than I would have been at the start
of this process.”
Even
Coltrane’s memories of early production have that blurry childhood haze over
them, with only flashes of direct memory.
He recalls that at first he was strongly guided by Linklater and did a
lot of memorization. But as he grew
along with Mason, the process gradually opened up and he began to assert his
own creative instincts more and more, which became more and more
satisfying.
“Rick
and I would usually start each new year by talking about where I was at and
then incorporating some of that into the character,” he recalls. “Over time, my life and my character’s life
began to meet in places and I became a bigger part of creating who Mason
was. As a kid, of course, everything
feels much more simple and now there’s so much more that I can see now about
how dense and complicated this family’s relationships are. I think, in many ways, being part of the film
gave me more perspective on relationships, especially my relationship with my own
mom which, like Mason’s, is complicated.”
Linklater
says that in many ways Coltrane advanced beyond where he thought Mason might
be, but Coltrane comments: “There were
times when I was getting a bit out there, but I think along the way my
sensibilities mellowed a bit while Mason’s expanded.”
The
extreme intimacy of being with the cast and crew every year for most of his
life gave Coltrane a kind of second family.
“Even now, I consider Rick, Lorelei and many other people from the
production to be among my closest friends,” he says. “I think a lot of the relationships in the
film came so naturally because we really did form a kind of family.”
Finding
Mason’s sister, Sam, was an easier process because Linklater already knew
someone close to home who wanted the part: his then 9 year-old daughter
Lorelei. “She was at that age when she
was singing and dancing and being extroverted and at that moment, she really
wanted to do it,” he recalls. “It was
also a really practical choice because I at least had a little bit of control
over her availability.”
Still,
Linklater could not anticipate the ways in which his daughter might change her mind,
or her relationship to the project, in the ensuing years. “A few years into the film, she became much more
interested in the visual arts, where she has a lot of talent, and less
interested in performing. At one point,
when she really didn’t want to dress up a certain way, she came to me and asked
‘Can my character die?” he laughs. “In a
lot of ways, Lorelei isn’t much like Sam at all, but participating in the film
probably meant different things to her at different times. I
think the artist in her ultimately appreciated the scope of the thing she was
involved in, however awkward it had been at times.”
The
palpable link between Lorelei and Ellar also shifted over the years, mirroring
the subtle evolution that siblings often go through. “Sister and brother is a really kind of
awkward relationship when you’re a kid, and we had that in the beginning
because we were more stand-offish with each other at first, and there was more
a feeling of rivalry. But that changed a
lot as we got older,” Coltrane explains.
“Today, I really value my relationship with Lorelei because she is the
only other person who has been through this same strange experience of growing
up in this film – and who really understands what that was like, to go through
this and come out the other side. It’s
so nice to have her to talk to.”
For
Patricia Arquette, working with both Ellar and Lorelei was often a
revelation. “I can’t say enough how
great they were,” she says. “It was just
so cool to see them changing so quickly and so beautifully right in front of
us.”
MOM
BOYHOOD
is almost just as much a view of motherhood, as the dance between mother and
son plays out while Mason begins in all kinds of ways to assert his
independence. To take the part of
Olivia, who starts out a struggling, overwhelmed single mom yet wills herself
to become an accomplished teacher and the parent of two remarkable adult
children, Linklater chose Patricia Arquette.
A three-time Golden Globe Award nominee for her role on the television
series “Medium,” and recently seen as Sally Weet on HBO’s acclaimed “Boardwalk
Empire,” Arquette is also known for memorable performances in such films as Tim
Burton’s ED WOOD and Tony Scott’s TRUE ROMANCE.
But
BOYHOOD was like nothing she’d ever encountered in film before.
“When
Rick called I was so excited just to be part of this. I remember he said ‘What are you doing for
the next 12 years?’ – which is really the best sort of come on,” Arquette
laughs. “There was no script, and it
wasn’t a movie you could easily categorize, but his idea was so amazing, no one
had done it before, so I thought I will find a way to make this work in my schedule
for the next 12 years some way and somehow.
Committing to it was the easiest thing for me.”
Linklater
had never worked with Arquette before and had only met her once, but he says
that from their first conversation, he knew she was a good match for the
role. “I really liked that she had also
been a mom at a young age because it was so important to the character,” he
says. “Over the phone, we were immediately
collaborating, immediately talking about our moms and what they were like when
we were growing up and she also had so much to say about parenting.”
“Patricia’s
really an artist and she fearlessly tapped into the character,” the director
continues. “She didn’t mind diving into
the ambiguities of Olivia. She just went
with them. Olivia is flawed, and she
could be seen as passive at times, but I also consider her a brave mom – a
woman who was always trying to balance her own passions with doing the best
that she could for her kids.”
Arquette
says part of the reason she felt able to fearlessly jump was her trust in
Linklater. Though this was the first
time they had worked together, she got a sense right away that it was going to
be the kind of creative collaboration that pushes a person into new
territory. “Rick’s whole way of being is
to always be calm, supportive and clear in his vision,” she observes. “It was incredible to me that he never came
in with an agenda to make a certain kind of movie or allowed what we were doing
to be cheapened. He really followed his
instincts and stayed open to the changes that were happening as we made the
film.”
Getting
to know Olivia was also quite different for Arquette from any other character
she has played. “It’s one thing to
approach a character when you have an arc that’s fully plotted out but here,
especially in the beginning, there was so much that I didn’t know, that I
couldn’t know. So that means you play
things differently, which I think was good for this story,” she comments.
Arquette
continues: “The character was always
revealing herself to me. I had no
preconceived conceptions of her. At the very start, Rick asked me to just hang
out with Ellar and Lorelei so we had sleepovers, we spent days doing art
projects. It was a process of finding
these relationships in a real way. I was
never quite sure what was playing out at the time, but I trusted in it. And there were always these fast-moving,
emotional undercurrents that resonated as a human being that I never felt in
another movie.”
As
a mother herself, Arquette brought some of that to her work, but she says that
in the end, Olivia became an amalgam of many influences and many mothers. “There are similar aspects to me in Olivia,
and many dissimilar aspects,” she says, noting that like Olivia, her own mother
went to school to become a teacher when she was a child. “For example, the scene late in the film
where Olivia watches Mason going off to school was really quite the opposite of
that same scene in my life when my son went off to school, but I also remember
it being very intense and heavy, and it seemed to me that Olivia’s was an
equally human and valid kind of reaction.”
Olivia’s
interactions with men – with her children’s father, Mason Sr., as well as a
series of challenging, at times abusive, partners she takes up with along with
the way – also fascinated Arquette, revealing as they do the way we all
struggle to really see other people for who and what they are.
“I
think with Mason Sr., she has sort of put him in this permanent box labeled
irresponsible and she sees herself as the only one who has done the hard,
day-to-day work of raising these kids.
But, of course, she also never sees her ex when he is with the kids, or
what kind of father he is really like,” she notes. “And then along the way, she also starts to
make some radically sad personal choices – yet she truly believes she’s making
all the right choices. She thinks she’s
doing what she should be doing for her kids, looking for a stable situation for
them, but she can’t see -- not the way we can looking back at it -- that she is
sometimes wearing blinders.”
Despite
the blinders, despite the inevitable stumbles and dangers, Olivia is rewarded
with two intriguingly strong, sensitive young adults who really do seem ready,
as ready as any of us ever are, to take on the modern world.
“What
I love is watching Mason, who starts out as this kind of spacy, dreamer kind of
little kid develop into this really exciting young artist and man,” Arquette
concludes. “As disappointing as his
parents’ relationship was to him, somehow, he becomes a mix of their individual
strengths. He has his father’s
free-spiritedness and his mother’s sense of being responsible and caring about
others. And he has become someone
amazing.”
DAD
Mason’s
boyhood is one of divorce – as are the childhoods of 50% of Americans -- and
also one where his father remains a lost cipher until he suddenly pops back
into the family’s life just as the story is beginning. Playing Mason Sr. is Richard Linklater’s
long-time collaborator Ethan Hawke, a three-time Academy Award® nominee,
including sharing Best Adapted Screenplay honors with Linklater for BEFORE
SUNSET and BEFORE MIDNIGHT. An
accomplished writer and director himself, Hawke is known for wide range of
roles, including the genetically modified man of GATTACA, the rookie narcotics
officer of TRAINING DAY, a modern-day HAMLET, the reluctant brother in ONLY THE
DEVIL KNOWS YOUR DEAD, and the lover turned unexpected partner of the BEFORE
series.
When
BOYHOOD began in 2002, Linklater had already worked with Hawke a number of
times and had mentioned BOYHOOD to him, eliciting instant excitement.
“To
make one movie over a 12-year period was the most incredibly unique idea,”
recalls Hawke. “I’d never been involved
in anything like it. And I don't think
anything like it has been done. People
sometimes hear the idea and think ‘oh, it’s like a documentary’ or it’s similar
to Michael Apted’s 7-UP. But this isn’t
a documentary – it’s a narrative film made over 12 years, which is something quite
different. It’s rare to see someone
trying to use the medium in a new way, to explore time in a new way, as Rick
wanted to do.”
Hawke
had few qualms about the commitment. “I
remember Rick was concerned that I would get too busy and wouldn’t be able to
clear the time in my schedule, but I told him I really believe in this and we
will work around the barriers. It became
a giant good-will juggling act for the next 12 years. But if you really believe in something, you
find a way.”
Once
he jumped in, Hawke would take Mason Sr. through changes almost as dizzying as
those his young son goes through, as he too wanders through a kind of late
coming-of-age – and goes from a GTO-driving, Alaska-trekking, barely-making-it
musician to an insurance guy in a mini-van with a second family, though his
playful instincts never fade.
“As
soon as we meet Ethan’s character, he’s already made a big decision: that he’s going to be a part of his kids’
lives, that he’s going to try to be a good dad,” says Linklater. “I think he’s someone for whom parenting came
chronologically before his maturity, so when we meet him, he’s still learning
to become a functioning adult.”
Hawke
adds: “He’s a guy who grows up, but that
growing up also comes with a cost to him.
He gives up his own artistic dreams to be a more decent father. Over time, like a lot of men, he takes on a
mask – the insurance guy – but part of him is still in the art world.”
The
tricky subject of part-time fatherhood was especially intriguing to Hawke, who
is both the child of divorce and went through one during the span of time that
BOYHOOD was in production. “I think the impact of divorce both as a child and a
parent is an interest that Rick and I share – and it’s something we also
explored a bit in BEFORE MIDNIGHT, but in a different context,” he notes.
Linklater
purposefully kept Hawke out of the first year’s shoot to further emphasize that
sense of a father who only sees his kids on occasions and has to break through
that wall of shyness and mistrust because he’s out of the loop of their
day-to-day lives. At the same time,
Hawke says there was always a very close intimacy on the set.
“One
thing about Rick is that he has this unbelievably relaxed style of directing
that is really conducive to working with young actors like Lorelei and
Ellar. He has a mix of patience and
compassion that gets to something very real.
In truth, I’ve known Lorelei since she was a baby, so this was a
wonderful thing for us to share. And as
for Ellar, he was sort of thrown into the Twelve Year Richard Linklater
Artistic Program. I do think what he
went through was something very intense.
More than any of us, he was on uncharted ground.”
As
filming continued, the naturalism of the performances astonished Hawke. “Stanislavski would be absolutely exhilarated
by this film,” he laughs, referring to the legendary acting teacher who
advocated for an ideal of unvarnished truth.
“There’s
nothing documentary about it, but the film seduces you into believing these
characters are real,” Hawke observes.
“That’s why even the tiniest minutiae of their lives is so
engaging.”
In
keeping with the realism, Hawke even wrote several songs for his song-writing
character and performs them in the film.
He says Linklater’s openness to letting life and fiction merge into one
fabric is what kept the flow going so strongly for 12 years. “The truth is that Rick was incredibly
receptive to whatever happened,” he summarizes.
“So in hindsight things might look lucky – but there was something more
going on. He was working patiently with
what reality gave him.”
SHIFTS
A
dynamic sense of motion underlies the structure of BOYHOOD, allowing the
audience to be acutely conscious of time’s trajectory and time’s pull, even as
they are caught in the grip of the day-to-day events unfolding throughout
Mason’s youth.
For
Linklater, a major part of the concept was allowing the film to feel all of one
fluid piece, as a life does, rather than reflecting the project’s stops and
starts. On the technical end, this meant
sticking with his original choices. “I
wanted the look to always be unified, knowing that the culture and the
characters would change within that look,” he explains. “So that meant keeping all the formal
elements of the film the same throughout.”
Even
his decision to shoot entirely on 35mm was a gamble, since film itself was
becoming a fading format. “Towards the
end of production, it became harder and harder to shoot on 35mm,” he
reflects. “But it helped give us that
seamless flow.”
There
was little need to clue the audience in that time had moved ahead from scene to
scene since it was written on his two young actors’ faces. “Every time we started to shoot, you could
see various indicators in Ellar and Lorelei that things had changed,” Linklater
comments.
He
also explored the never-ending transitions in the cultural biosphere over the
12 years – using clothes, design trends, the morphing tech devices that have
become entwined in our lives, and especially music, to demarcate even subtle
shifts in era.
Of
the music, Linklater says: “Usually, I
pick songs for my films that are meaningful to me – but here I was thinking
about what would be meaningful to Mason. I wanted the music to mirror the culture
at the moment, but that was kind of a challenge.”
Ellar
Coltrane was little help to Linklater because he had unusually eclectic and
retro taste. So he brought in several
young consultants to give their opinions and personal recollections of the most
resonant tracks from the early 2000s and beyond. From Weezer and Coldplay in Mason’s early
childhood to Arcade Fire and Daft Punk towards the end of the film, snippets of
music both place the film in time and help to carve out its pendulum span of
moods.
“What
really mattered to me was that someone had a really emotional experience with
these songs,” Linklater explains, “so I looked for a lot of personal feedback.
And then, as Mason grows up, the music converges more and more with his
development and taste.” In terms of
keeping seamless continuity over so many small shoots, a lot of it came down to
carefully working out as much as possible in pre-production -- scouting
locations and doing casting work well in advance so that there were no
surprises in those areas. There were occasional snafus, but Linklater says most
of it went surprisingly smoothly.
“It
became a bit like getting together every year at camp,” he laughs. “We had this core group of people who united
every year for 12 years and it really did become like a family in its own
way. But it also kept growing, and we
ultimately had 143 cast members and over 400 crew. It did seem to get a little tougher every
year to pull it all together, but I think we all felt increasingly that we were
in a creative groove together.”
By
the time shooting wrapped, the film was nearly formed since Linklater and
Sandra Adair had been working throughout on the cut. The final editing was minimal. “It was all kind of working,” the director
recalls. “It was a longer than I had
originally conceived; I had originally thought 10 minutes per year, adding up
to 120 minutes. But I realized after the
first year that wasn’t exactly how it was going to work. I decided to let the film be what it wanted
to be without imposing that kind of restriction. Ultimately, it’s both kind of an epic and
yet, at the same time, very simple and intimate.”
Seeing
the film for the first time was an emotional, even cathartic, experience for
the cast. Linklater suggested Ellar and
Lorelei watch it alone several times.
Coltrane says he was grateful for the suggestion. “It was very intense because I was looking at
a side of myself I wouldn’t normally see,” he explains. “And at that same time that it was so deeply
personal, it was also very broad and amazing to me. It’s such a window into human existence, and
in many ways the main character is, as Rick says, time itself. I’ve never seen anything else like it. It was so much a part of my life, but I think
it will be really universal because it gets to something a lot of us are
missing– that appreciation of moments for what they are.”
Patricia
Arquette waited to see the film with an audience at its premiere screening at
the Sundance Film Festival. “At first I felt so fiercely protective of this
experience, I almost didn’t want anyone else to see it,” she muses. “But it was amazing to see how people became
so engaged with it in their own ways.
That was really beautiful.”
Linklater
says that one of the most stirring moments of the whole production came for him
at the very end, while shooting the last scene, as Mason, no longer a boy,
heads into the mountains, and into the vast unknown, on his first day at
college. There is a sense that Mason’s life could take any infinite number of
turns from this point forward, but all we know for sure is where he has been.
“I
remember standing there and the sun was setting and there was just this
incredible vibe,” Linklater recalls. “It
was the final shot of a 12-year experience and there’s just no way to describe
that feeling. It’s not something that
can be repeated.”