Even if you won’t be able to see Richard Linklater’s stunning Boyhood for another five months or so, the epicly elongated process that went into making this film is undeniably amazing and certainly worth a read. Shot over 12 years as a young boy grows from age six to eighteen, Linklater’s ambitious project is truly one of a kind and the product reflects his thoughtful dedication. Alongside his cast, including Ethan Hawke, Patricia Arquette, daughter Lorlei Linklater and debut star Ellar Salmon at his side, Linklater took to the stage at Sundance’s Eccles Theater to answer a host of questions after the world premiere of his sensational film.

Richard Linklater: We couldn’t imagine any place else to show this film to its first audience so it’s really special for us. We started this film 4,208 days ago. So thanks for coming along with us. I’m just so proud of these guys! We’re here to answer any questions you might have.

Q: Was it all your idea and script Richard, or do you collaborate with what’s going on in their lives?

RL: Very collaborative. It’s kind of outlined. But every year we would work out the scenes. The great thing of having that gestation period, roughly a year between shoots, so I could think about it, you know, fourth grade, fifrth grade, and then we would get together and just work on it, sometimes really quickly. It was very intense, like three or four day shoots every time, about a year in between to think about it. That’s the way I always work. At some point, the ideas merge, as the kids got older, at some point Ellar was writing with me much of it.

Q: How did you approach casting?

RL: Casting. Well, you know that’s the key. That was the lucky thing. I mean, I talked to Ethan first. We’d worked together and we’re friends, we run ideas by each other. So he jumped in. Do you guys wanna talk about how you came aboard?

Ethan Hawke: It all started with me. (Laughter) No, sometimes I think that Rick either has a lucky star or sold his soul to the Devil, because this movie couldn’t have worked without Lorelei and Ellar. And you couldn’t really know that they would be able to contribute the way they did. Except for the fact, for your writing question, one of the ways that Rick likes to write a movie is to invite his performers to be a part of the filmmaking process with him. It’s very clear the way he wants to make it and he lets it be incredibly open to us. So Lorelai, what’s going on in her life could inform what is happening in Samantha’s life and vice versa. For all of us, a lot of it was talking about it for us, what it was like in fourth grade, but now a lot of us are parents of fourth graders or have been. So we could benefit from having both points of view. I mean, Lorelai signed up for something…what age were you when you agreed to do it?

Lorelei Linklater: Eight.

EH: Eight. He held you to that promise for twelve years? What was the year you decided you no longer wanted to be involved in it?

LL: Maybe around the fourth year. I asked my Dad (director Richard Linklater) if my character could die. (Laughter) He said it would be too dramatic.

Patricia Arquette: Another thing that Rick did during the process, in regard to the writing thing, sometimes I think Ellar would be a little more advanced than Mason would be, because Ellar’s parents are really cool experimental artists and musicians, incredible people. Rick would say, “So here’s where Ellar’s at, but Mason’s a couple of years behind, so we’ve got to cut his hair, make him look not so cool.” So we had to uncool Ellar. Yeah, the coolest seventh grader on Earth happened to be working on our movie. But when Rick called, we met at Ethan’s hotel at a little party for ten minutes–

EH: In 1994.

PA: So he called me and said, “What are you going to be doing for the next twelve years?” I don’t know, hustling, trying to get a job, unemployed, what I’m doing now. “Ok, wanna do this movie?” Absolutely, coolest opportunity on Earth.

Q: Ellar, do you remember being cast?

Ellar Salmon: Very vaguely, I remember being a variable in an audition process. And, I remember having a distinct feeling that a large part of why I was cast was because of how cool my parents are. He knew he wouldn’t have to deal with those kind of parents. But I don’t remember it. It goes in and out. There are things early on that I watch and remember really clearly and then there are other things that I just have absolutely no memory of.

EH: It was fascinating to see Ellar develop as an actor. Because when he was a little boy, it was like playing with a kid and trying to capture moments. And when I came in, I would miss two years at a time sometimes. We had a camping trip scene, and that was the first time you had agency in the writing, bring in where he thought the character would be. You really wanted to talk about this Star Wars thing and talk about girls. So watching you learn how to act and how to collaborate as a filmmaker as a participant in this film. You learned how to improvise and how to be in character. And that just started growing. And the process of making it felt differently because Ellar was becoming a young man.

Q: With a three hour film, I’m curious if there was something that was a little difficult to cut that the audience would be interested in hearing about?

RL: All of my scenes. There was quite a bit on the floor.

Q: What was your favorite scene that you cut?

RL: Well it would be in the movie if it was my favorite. It was an interesting editing process. You got to spend all those years. Two months ago I trimmed something from Year 2. I had ten years to think about what I wasn’t totally happy about. Everything about this movie was odd. But there’s nothing. The movie’s long but it had to be. I never made a movie over two hours but this one had to be for a reason.

Q: As far as it how it was shot, seamlessly, it looks so beautiful and has incredible the production value but I was just curious about the technology involved. Did you keep using the same camera or was it changed in post?

RL: That’s a good question about technology. That was a big issue upfront. So we shot it on 35mm, negative, I wanted it to look the same way. I knew it’d look a lot different if we jumped into the digital, hi-def formats. So I don’t know how many 35mm films are at Sundance this year, but we’re one of them. Can I give a big shout out? There’s a hero in this film. It’s the crazy guy who took a leap of faith. Obviously, this whole thing, we all took leaps of faith. It was a lot of belief in the future to commit for something for so long. But it’s the strangest proposition to ask someone to help finance something for twelve years, in our industry. So I want to really thank Johnathan Sirak, at IFC. He doesn’t make a lot of films, and as years went on, I’d run into him and he’d say “Well, we have one film in production.” (Laughs) Every year, I just had a board meeting. Everyone asks what the hell this is on the books. He had to lie, every year. But we have to thank him so much for his support.

Q: You guys wanna let me know about any other films?

EH: You’re gonna be in the next episode. This is part of the movie now.

RL: We started a reality show actually. (laughs)

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“Boyhood”
Directed by Richard Linklater
Starring Ellar Salmon, Ethan Hawke, Patricia Arquette, Lorelei Linklater
163 Mins

A monolith of cinema, Richard Linklater‘s Boyhood is a soaring accomplishment of product and process. Famously filmed over the course 12 years, Linklater’s long form approach allows for an intimacy and connection like no film before. From the time we meet young Macon at the tender age of six until he moves to college, Linklater fosters his audience’s near parental ties to this young man, making us feel for a character in unprecedented manner. It’s a masterpiece in all senses of the word; a rare trailblazer of a film with macroscopic vision that’s as uniformly jaw-dropping as the final product.

The cat has been in the bag for the bulk of filming on Boyhood but when Linklater and frequent collaborator Ethan Hawke announced last year that their yet untitled 12 Year Project would likely see the light of day in 2014, I wasn’t the only one to rush it to the top of my most anticipated films of 2014 list. While most movies film over the course of a few months, Linklater showed unprecedented patience with a willingness to craft this story over the course of a dozen years. Although the end product probably shared a similar amount of shoot time, breaking it up over that extensive period of time is wholly original (even in regard to Paul Almond‘s celebrated Up series which only checked in once every seven years.) Going into the project, Linklater had a general arc in mind but would let the times reflect unforeseeable changes, moving the direction of the film in line with the sway of culture and ethos. In that regard, the film serves as a time capsule for an ever changing American zeitgesit over the past decade.

Not above chats of Star Wars and girls, The Beatles and drinking, and the once celebratory naivety of Obama’s campaign of hope, Boyhood feels like a film Linklater designed particularly with me in mind. I wonder how many other people will feel the same way; how many will experience such a visceral gut punch and how many will find younger versions of themselves in a morphing Mason. Feeling such a instinctive connection urges questions on the universality of the human experience, it compels us wrestle with the past and acutely acknowledge the shifting paradigm that is the individual. Scientists, and stoners, say that because of our cellular lifespan, a human body is completely replaced within the span of 7 years. Looking at snapshots in time like this, we could be easily convinced this process is even more rapid. From one year to another, there’s a base consistency of character in Macon but its overshadowed by the omnipresent winds of change perennially blowing him into new directions.

Calling it a coming-of-age story feels slight as Boyhood tracks the joy and pain of growing up, one delicate moment at a time. We find ourselves in Macon, a perceptive youth, in his strength and in his weakness, in his whiny teenage angst and his youthful abandon, in his quasi-stoned prolific moments of reflection and his meekest helplessness. When he’s too young to stand up for himself, I felt the pangs of my 8-year old vulnerable self, reeling from my parent’s separation. As his hair grows long and he starts dipping into the pleasure pool, his raw arrogance is a relic I can robustly relate to.

I found myself beaming with pride at moments, disappointed in him at others and silently heartbroken and yet joyful as he reached new milestones. I watched him grow up, I witnessed him learning valuable life lessons, I feel in love beside him. To young Ellar Salmon‘s credit, there’s never a moment where we don’t fully believe the deeply personal yet universal John Doe plight of a boy coming of age. He’s an every man and an intellectual and Salmon’s maturing performance helps to auction the many faces one man can put on. When you stop to consider that Linklater had to take a half-blind shot in the dark with Salmon, casting him well before he could prove himself as a consistent and talented actor willing to put in a dozen years of his life into one performance, the fact that Salmon turned out as good as he was is nothing short of a miracle, much like the film itself.