On Jan. 5, director Richard Linklater and actors Patricia Arquette, Ellar Coltrane, and Ethan Hawke gathered at the New School in New York City to discuss their 12-year project, “Boyhood.”
Moderated by Joe Neumaier of the New York Daily News, the SAG Foundation talk touched on several aspects of the film following Mason (Coltrane), his sister (Lorelei Linklater), and his parents (Arquette and Hawke) as they navigate childhood and parenthood in suburban Texas.
Technically, “Boyhood” is unlike anything that’s come before. Aside from its 12-year shoot, the actors didn’t rehearse tirelessly, spend countless hours getting into character, or shoot out of sequence.
Linklater noted that many people have asked him what he and the actors did to reacquaint themselves with the characters, to which he said, “We never even talked about it.
“It was like a friendship where you run into the friend every year and just pick up right where you left off. It was like that,” he explained, snapping his fingers. “I don’t think it was ever any big plotting thing where we had to figure out what we were doing; we just sort of established these characters and just kind of grew with them.”
Arquette explained that it was Linklater’s rehearsal process that made it easy to get back into character year after year. “He’d call us months before to talk about that year’s stuff, and we would come together and we’d bond just like friends who missed each other,” she said. “[We’d talk] about the material, [read] about the material, [talk] about stories in our lives or friends’ lives that correlated, and just that working process brought you back to things.”
Additionally, the passing of time made shooting easier; as Hawke explained, for many of the actors the last scene they shot was their last scene in the film.
“Normally when you make a movie, oftentimes you shoot it out of sequence and sometimes, many times in my life, I’ve shot the last scene on the first day,” explained Hawke. “If I’d been asked to do our last scene on the first day of shooting, I would have expected so much more to have changed. I feel like I would have put on a fat suit and totally grayed my hair and walked with a limp like, ‘Well, son, you’re off to college,’ and instead it all happened so effortlessly.”
“People are kind of obsessed with how much of it was planned, and it’s like, how much of your life is really planned?” Linklater pointed out. “We were collaborating with an unknown future, but a future, nonetheless, that you knew would happen.”
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