Boyhood is charming

Richard Linklater's 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 six-year-old Mason (Ellar Coltrane) over life's most radically fluctuating decade, through a familiar whirl of family moves, family controversies, faltering marriages, remarriages, 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.

Dreamy-eyed grade schooler

As the story begins, dreamy-eyed grade schooler Mason faces upheaval: his devoted, struggling single mum Olivia (Patricia Arquette) has decided to move him and older sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater) to Houston - just as their long-absent father Mason Snr (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.

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, dreamlike 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.

Creatively mindboggling

Linklater knew there were plenty of rational reasons why such an undertaking might be almost out of the question: it was creatively mindboggling; 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 dived in.

"It was like taking a great leap of faith into the future," Linklater muses. "Most artistic endeavours 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, which 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 three- to four-day shoots. Linklater would write and edit (with long-time 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.

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.

No real precedent

"It was a different process and that was truly exciting," says Patricia Arquette, who portrays Olivia, the mum 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.

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."

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.

Very intense

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."

Boyhood is an ideal film to share with friends and loved ones, and for anyone who wants to take a look back into their lives and see how fate has unfolded. It's one of those unique films that allow us to see our life as a whole, and how a whole life influences the many lives that walk through the turnstile of our existence.

Read more about Boyhood and other new films opening this week at www.writingstudio.co.za.