12 Years: Richard Linklater Returns to Boyhood

“A conceptual joke.” That’s Richard Linklater’s explanation for why, rather than celebrating the 10th anniversary of his Oscar-winning feature, Boyhood, he opted to make the 12th anniversary the time for a big reunion.

It made sense, as Boyhood was famously shot in installments over 12 years, charting 12 years in a young boy’s life from grade school to college. The start of this seemingly delayed celebration was a special screening at AFS Cinema – the same cinema where the film debuted in 2014 – on July 18. The film is now in a wider rerelease, but that AFS screening was a rare moment for Linklater and his cast – Oscar-winner Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke, and Ellar Coltrane, who played the central character, Mason – to be reunited and express their deep emotions over such a life-changing act of filmmaking.

Was the selection of an unusual birthday for the film really about Linklater working from the film’s narrative and filming schedule, really an elaborate gag? Not so much.

While he described there as being “something bookend-y” about the timing, “it was really me kicking the can,” the filmmaker confessed. “Two years ago, IFC was like, ‘Hey, it’s the 10-year,’ but I was busy and hadn’t really wrapped my head around it, so I went, ‘What about a 12-year reunion?’ No one ever does odd years, but if any film could get away with it, maybe we could.”

Yet while the film remains constant, the audience ages. Linklater described Boyhood as something he always intended to be revisited over time, as their relationships to the characters change. “There are really four main characters,” Linklater said, “so it could have had a different name.” He half-joked that it could have been called Parenthood if the Steve Martin comedy hadn’t beaten him to the title, but the reality is that Boyhood was not the original title. In fact, it was originally just referred to during production as The 12 Year Project, and there was discussion of releasing it as 12 Years, “but then that movie 12 Years a Slave came out the year before.”

So, Linklater went back to another working title and a different inspiration, Leo Tolstoy’s autobiographical trilogy of Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth. Yet while he describes the child Mason’s as “the primary point of view,” it’s never just his story. “There’s a lot of juxtaposing of perspectives, and you really see the parent’s view, too, and the kid’s view of the parents.”

The process of making Boyhood remains unique. With an annual budget of $200,000 from IFC (now the Independent Film Company), Linklater, his cast, and crew would assemble every year for a few days to capture something memorable from Mason’s life, a moment that would help inform his growth. The structure actually came from Linklater’s own frustrations about wanting to tell a story about growing up but failing to find “that 400 Blows moment” in his own life as inspiration. “There was nothing in my own childhood that was worthy of a film, no big story or narrative, no event, no one thing. I wanted to bite off more and say more about it, and I realized that I was looking for a bigger structure and just couldn’t find it. At some point, the thought hit me, and I had just had this flash of the characters aging and this final flash of a film that covered the whole public education process, and I was like, ‘There’s the narrative structure.’”

Sometimes those moments would be huge, like Mason’s mother leaving an abusive relationship, but others would be less dramatic. Linklater’s guiding concept was simple: “What would you remember from childhood? I was thinking of things that would jump out, and I had my own kid, so I was experiencing it through that lens of being a parent of a kid in that age range. So, it was like, ‘Ah, a Harry Potter book release at midnight. That’s a weird thing.’ So you’re collaborating with the real world.”

Giving himself that freedom to explore the most seemingly mundane aspects of childhood would be a huge influence on one of his later films. “Apollo 10 ½ wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for Boyhood,” he said. During the gap between the first and second years of production on Boyhood, he was thinking of his own childhood, “and the summer between second and third grade is when we landed on the moon, and I was kinda thinking, ‘Wow, what an interesting time to be a kid.’” In another of those inter-year breaks he started thinking about “when we were living in the suburbs for just a little while, near NASA. That was a pretty interesting place to be a kid. Then I went, ‘Wait, I’m the chosen filmmaker to do that. How many other filmmakers were in Houston at that time or were even alive? Well, that’s kind of my movie to make.’”

While Linklater directed a total of eight features while Boyhood was in production, “it became a place to come back to.” In hindsight, he described the process as being like parenthood because it was such a factor in his life for so long. “You have a kid at home all those years, and you’re doing something consistently.”

Boyhood stars Ellar Coltrane and Patricia Arquette Credit: Kelly Zhu / courtesy of Austin Film Society

Like most parents, he also had plenty of time for self-doubt. “I always had this unease with the big choice I had made, which was to make it about life’s mundanity. … I’d sometimes think, ‘Am I squandering this incredible canvas I’ve created? Should I be grander? Bigger?’ But I kept it kind of minimal. I was like, ‘No, no, I’m using cinema this way for a very specific reason, just to be time passing and aging and to hitch everything to that. Don’t get any more grandiose than that.’”

Consistency of vision was a key part of his relationship with Boyhood as a film. Like his cast, he grew and changed during production, and there’s an argument that the director who went straight from the first round of filming for Boyhood into making The School of Rock wasn’t the same director who crafted the mature melancholy of Before Midnight in 2013. But there was a conscious effort to make sure that Boyhood was of a whole. He explained, “I didn’t want it to feel like it was made by different people.” The challenge was “not to get restless within your own project and just do something to amuse yourself.” Luckily, he added, “That film had its own rules, its own aesthetics, from the beginning.”

Considering Boyhood now, “I remember the process more than the final film,” he said. “My biggest reward was to have something to do 12 years in my thinking. You could go through every day going. ‘Hey, could that be part of next year’s episode?’”

Boyhood is currently back in theatres for a limited rerelease run. See movietimes.

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