After completing his Before trilogy, with the Oscar-nominated Before Midnight, Richard Linklater returns with another film that charts the passage of time. An entirely unique project, Boyhood was shot over twelve years, beginning in July 2002, shortly before he shot his hit movie School of Rock, with Linklater and his cast and crew reuniting for a few days every year. The film charts the childhood of Austin lad, Mason (Ellar Coltrane), his sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater) and their mother Olivia (Patricia Arquette) as life ebbs and flows around them. Also starring Ethan Hawke as the children’s father, who flits in and out of their lives, Boyhood emerges as a remarkable study of the way we grow, age and develop as human beings. Below, Linklater discusses what attracts him to looking at this theme of time, how he convinced Arquette, Hawke and his own daughter to come on board, and reveals some of the numerous challenges – from financing to shooting on 35mm.  

Q: Had Ellar had any experience when you cast him?

A:  He had acted. We didn’t find him at the playground! He had a résumé and a headshot. He was in the arena.

Q: What sort of input did he have in the process?

A:  He was there at the beginning, but the collaboration element just kept rising every year. Before too long he was just like Ethan or Patricia, just full-on working on scenes.

Q: Why are you so attracted to following characters through the ages?

A:  I don’t know…every movie could be made a sequel. The cliché would be like ‘It never ends or begins’. It’s kind of like that with characters too. Every movie I’ve made, what are they doing now? You feel like they’re living in a parallel world but it’s fun to…in the Before movies, to revisit them. But in this, the flip side of that, do the incremental build through their lives. That was a different journey all together.

Q: How logistically difficult was it to set this up?

A:  Everything about it was technically impossible or really, really impractical at best. So that was a huge challenge. Starting with the funding. I met with a few producers I knew who had some money, but they were like ‘Great idea, but we don’t get that back for twelve years? Can we show a little bit of it on TV every three years?’ I’m like ‘No, it’s a movie!’ They just couldn’t wrap their head around it. They said, ‘We’re not a bank. We can’t just give money out.’ I said, ‘Well, maybe you should be a banker. If you’re a storyteller, then come on board!’

Q: When did you ask Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke to come on board?

A:  I asked Ethan first because I’d worked with him a couple of times at that point. As a friend and collaborator, I just floated this idea by him. I was thinking he could play the Dad. He was right at that age. He was like ‘Yeah, what a weird idea!’ Then I started thinking about who could be the Mom. I had met Patricia once but I just called her up and we talked for a long time. She had been a Mom when she was pretty young – like 20 or something. So that was a big element. But I always liked her. I just liked her acting. She had this gusto to what she did, and she’s very sensitive and yet really strong and passionate. I just felt…I could see her and Ethan as a volatile couple from the past maybe. I knew she was a very conscious Mom. That two hour conversation, we talked a lot about our own Moms, ourselves as parents, ourselves as kids. I knew then this was someone I could collaborate for twelve years on this. She jumped in! It’s really a mother-son story. I always felt the Mom would be the through-line for sure, with the Dad circling around.

Q: Is it amazing to watch the physical ageing process of all these actors?

A:  Well, I did it so gradually, because I was editing the whole way. I guess after eight years or so, I hadn’t seen the whole thing lately, and I would be editing year eight, and then just jump back to the first shot of the movie, and my editor and I would burst out laughing! So I knew it was working. But I don’t know…it was so planned out and schemed. It was working the way I wanted it to work, but it was good to get that emotional hit every now and then to reinforce what this was about.

Q: Ellar’s voice breaks at a certain point, so how did you deal with re-recording dialogue in post-production?

A:  We dealt with it every couple of years. I would listen to it every year, and there were a few scenes that we got in the year following before his voice changed too much. We did it as we went.

Q: And did you have Plan B for when one of the actors might stop acting?

A:  No, there was no escape plan! Those thoughts vaguely cross your mind but you don’t really go there. We had great faith in the process. I don’t know why. I think everyone believed in the core mission of the film. I was just trying to make it work within the reality. That was tough enough. Much less imagining dark scenarios about what could possibly happen. We all go through life with that. The phone can ring any minute and we can get the worse news of our lives. So it’s no different on this film than it is in life.

Q: Did you ever think about shooting a companion film about Sam – maybe called ‘Girlhood’?

A:  Not really, no. This incorporates a lot of her perspective. But it is from the boy’s perspective. She’s incorporated in a lot of his view. [Ingmar Bergman’s] Fanny and Alexander is really Alexander – his view in that.

Q: Did you have to do a lot of takes?

 A:  Yeah, we did a lot of takes on the day, but we don’t re-shoot. I never go ‘Oh I have an idea, let’s go back.’ We never re-shot a scene. But the key is to make it work that day, to work really hard in the days leading up to that. Some scenes were more difficult than others. Like the camp out scene went over. We had another scene we had to come back and get later, and we just didn’t get to that day. I thought I could shoot that in half a day and that took a whole day. 

Q: What about the Harry Potter scene? Was that real?

A:  That’s real. We got permission at a book store in Austin, and got paperwork from people…we did that on the fly. We couldn’t have afforded to stage that.

Q: When you started on this, was it right ahead of Before Sunset?

A:  Yeah, it was the year before. I always say these films intertwined. Having committed to this for twelve years, I think Ethan…the Dad you see at first, it’s like he just got back from Paris [at the end of Before Sunset]. We did it right around that same time, so it’s the same guy! But it kind of emboldened us to take the leap into this. It made us go ‘Let’s go ahead. Why not?’

Q: What props did you choose to make us think of the eras? Did you shoot six months later to latch on to what was popular?

A:  No, we were pretty much in the moment. I just knew when I’m looking at an iMac – ‘This is going to change.’ Certain technological things. But I’m really amazed, looking back, at how little things changed in the physical world. That’s more interesting to me than most of the changes that are technological.

Q: There are a lot of Apple products in the film…

A:  And they give you nothing! Apple gives you nothing for a film! They’ll let you use it, that’s it. It’s almost like Apple are the cars from before – like ‘Oh, that’s a ’64 Mustang’ or that’s a ’67 Mustang’. I grew up, able to name the year of a car. Now you can name the year of a computer, sadly. That’s the world we’re living in – at least where I live.

Q: How did you licence the music?

A:  It was a big challenge. It was a year-by-year chronology, but also trying to get the point-of-view of the character – like, ‘Who is listening? Is this on the radio? Is this what Patricia is listening to? Is this is what Ethan is listening to?’ It’s trying to get a point-of-view into the music. So, yeah, it was fun. It was a challenge for me. I started thinking about this when I was 40. I can’t tell you what an 8 year-old is necessarily listening to, but I had some consultants. Ellar was not that much help either! His taste was like Pink Floyd, Radiohead…his taste was so advanced for his age!

Q: At what stage did you think about putting your daughter in?

A:  It was around the time I was casting Ellar. She was this very exuberant, singing-dancing girl. She had been in my film Waking Life, briefly, at the very beginning, and she had been trying to get in every film. She grew up on movie sets, so it was not a big deal for her to be in a movie. It would’ve felt unnatural for her not to be. She would’ve been very angry at me if I had cast a girl anywhere near her age. I would probably have never heard the end of it. But that was the first few years of the shoot. Then I think she realised that wasn’t her passion – acting.

Q: Was it hard to shoot the last few years with 35mm cameras?

A:  Interesting question. Twelve years ago, I said ‘I want to shoot on film because I think a 35mm negative will be the most consistent visual medium I can get a consistent look.’ So I committed to film back then when a lot of people were starting to shoot on digital. I knew there would still be film around, there are just too many cameras, still too big a business. I remember Super 8 or 16mm – they declare it dead but it’s still available, twenty years later. So I knew it would be available, but I did catch the death spiral of film. The equipment got in worse condition – the mags are jamming and the cameras are jamming. You can tell it’s in worse condition. You can’t keep up the maintenance, the lab work is dropping off – it gets a little tougher. I wanted to shoot on an Alexa. And I wanted my Hi-Def. But it was fun, because my two films before this I’d shot on an Alexa, and it was fun to hear ‘Checking the gate’ and other things that are film-related. So it caught the end of a certain era. I’ll still shoot on film, again. It depends on the movie.

Q: Was it hard to keep a visual consistency over time?

A: No, no. That was the plan. Like I was saying, the culture helped us to stay the same, to a large degree. That was just the plan – shoot on film. I had a visual plan for the movie. I didn’t want the styles to change.

Q: Whose car is the GTO that Ethan drives?

A:  That’s my car! I have a Minivan, but I still have a damn GTO! It’s in the garage right now, probably won’t start, but it’s there. I’m not giving it up.

Q: What is the love story between you and Ethan Hawke?

A:  I think its comrades, like blood brothers. It just evolved. It was twenty years ago now when we were probably gearing up to go shoot in Vienna, Summer of ’94. We were talking about it. I don’t think we would’ve predicted that we would work together seven times or whatever. But it just worked out that way. I’ve worked with a number of actors over the years.

Q: How many films have you done during this twelve years period?

A:  Yeah…as soon as we shot the first episode, I went to do School of Rock, and I think I did eight features in that period. I had a lot of things on. This was always percolating on a burner but I would be busy, Ethan would be busy, Patricia would be busy…I would sometimes be on post on a movie and I would shoot a couple of weeks on this, and then I would fly off to something with another movie, and not be able to edit this for a few months. This was always around.

Q: How close was Ellar’s personality to Mason?

A:  Yeah, we knew that it would meld together at some point. Ellar was a little advanced for his age, but at some point this film would catch up with Ellar’s essence a little more, who he really was.

Q: How much of your personality is in your movies?

A:  I consider them very personal so I guess my personality is in there. I always said this was a collaboration between my childhood memories, Ellar’s childhood, Ethan’s childhood, Patricia’s…but it’s hard to say, hard to give a percentage.

Q: A lot of your movies deal with time. Is it an obsession?

A:  I don’t think it’s an obsession. It’s just an approach. It’s just a way I think story-telling wise. Time is the essence of cinema in a way. This is really linear. But I was trying to capture the way your perception of reality unfolds through your mind.

Q: Do you feel really sad now it’s all over?

A:  Bittersweet. It’s not sad. I never felt sad, because it was too satisfying. But we were very aware of it ending. The last shot is the last shot in the movie. It was like ‘Wow, it’s over. But it’s not. Now it’s out there.’ It goes to a different level. Just watching it with an audience, now it’s getting beyond us.

Q: Has anyone else, that you know of, ever tried something like this?

A:  That’s a good question. It seems to obvious. Isn’t it so simple an idea? It really is. It’s so simple an idea, yet so impractical! So I can see why it hasn’t happened. When you’re a teenager and you think you have some philosophy, and then you read a real philosopher and you realise it goes back hundreds of years…so I’m not big on the notion of originality, because I think everything has a precedent. We’re not that unique! But I did ask myself ‘Well, I haven’t seen it in a movie. I don’t think it’s been done.’ This slow, incremental ageing thing I hadn’t seen. It feels like it was the answer to a problem – and that was how to tell a story about childhood that I wanted to tell, thought worthy of telling, which was kind of the whole thing.

Q: And the title?

A:  That was based on Tolstoy’s book Childhood; Boyhood; Youth – that early novella of his that I like so much. But we didn’t think it would be the title. It just became the title. But it seemed like the right title I guessed. So there it stayed.

Q: What are you doing next?

A:  Nothing for sure. I have a number of a projects but I’m not in production. Hopefully summer I’ll be shooting something.

The film opens in Australia on September 04.