The Boyhood movie production is one of the most unique approaches that made for a more engrossing movie. Director Richard Linklater had already made a name for himself with movies like Dazed and Confused and Before Sunrise when he started production on Boyhood, but he had an ambitious approach that most people would not find out about until decades later. The coming-of-age movie follows a young boy named Mason from the age of six years old to 17 years old as he grows up.
Starring Ellar Coltrane as Mason, Linklakter’s Boyhood tells a very simple story that explores the reality of growing up. The audience experiences the highs and lows of Mason’s young life, including an abusive stepfather, getting bullied at school, making new friends, and meeting a girl. While all of that is familiar in a coming-of-age story, Boyhood sets itself apart with a groundbreaking and brilliant approach to telling the story. It invests the audience in Mason’s story in a much more intimate way and makes for one of the most interesting behind-the-scenes filmmaking stories.
While there are many movies that trace decades in the life of a character, like Forrest Gump or Citizen Kane. However, Boyhood took a very unique filmmaking approach to telling such a story. The production of Boyhood lasted 12 years, from May 2002 to August 2013. Although these 12 years comprised of roughly 4,000 days, the Boyhood team only shot for a total of 45 days. This is a pretty normal amount of time for a feature film shoot, but it’s usually not spread over more than a decade.
Ellar Coltrane, the lead actor, was seven years old when filming began and 19 years old when it was completed. When shooting started, Richard Linklater was calling the movie The Untitled 12 Year Project. Then, it went by 12 Years. Eventually, Linklater changed the title to Boyhood to avoid confusion with another acclaimed Oscar film, 12 Years a Slave.
Mason’s older sister, Samantha, was played by Lorelei Linklater, the daughter of director Richard Linklater because she’d been pestering him to put her in one of his movies for years. It is also likely that the director saw this as a benefit to the long production schedule of the movie as he would have an actor in the main cast who was close to him and could ensure they stayed investing in the project for over a decade. Unfortunately, that proved not to be the case.
After three or four years of shooting, Lorelei got sick of the commitment to Boyhood and asked her dad to kill off her character. He refused to do that because it would be way too dark and violent for this movie. During the remaining eight or nine years of production, she eventually enjoyed shooting Boyhood again.
While the small little movie ended up being a surprise box office hit, dealing with the budgeting for the movie ended up being a complicated process. The budget for Boyhood was $2.4 million, but IFC Films couldn’t legally give it all to Richard Linklater upfront because it would technically contract him to 12 years of work, which is prohibited. So, they gave him $200,000 a year to shoot the new scenes (via Variety).
One year, they forgot to give Linklater the money, and by the time they realized the mistake, it was too late to pay up, because they’d closed their books for the year. Linklater was able to fund that year’s filming himself with insurance money he’d received from his house burning down. Boyhood ended up grossing over $57 million worldwide when it finally hit theaters (via Box Office Mojo).
While Richard Linklater was the writer and director of the project, he followed his usual process of involving the actors in the building of an authentic story. The cast of Boyhood played a big role in shaping their characters and thus the overall story. Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette both went through divorces, remarriages, and the arrival of new kids during the course of production, which helped to steer the ship for their characters.
The father figure in the movie, Mason, Sr., was based on Hawke’s and Linklater’s fathers, who were both divorced insurance agents from Texas. Olivia was based partly on Arquette’s mother, who went back to education later in life and became a psychotherapist (via The Daily Beast). Taking aspects from their own lives helped to shape believable characters at the center of the very grounded coming-of-age drama.
Since Patricia Arquette had been a mother from a young age, she was Richard Linklater’s first and only choice for the role of Olivia in Boyhood. The role ended up being one of the best of the actor’s career, earning her an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. However, Linklater had certain requests of her that speak to the unusual production of Boyhood that helped to ensure its authentic feel was maintained over the long shooting schedule.
Arquette said that Linklater told her not to get any plastic surgery during the 12-year production (via The Guardian). His rationale was that a single mother of a middle-class family would not be getting plastic surgery for herself and the change from one scene to another would take the audience out of the moment. While such things are well-known pressures for actors in Hollywood, Arquette agreed with Linklater’s reasoning.
While viewing the whole movie together tells a very powerful and engrossing story of the journey of one boy, the movie has no clear plot to speak of. Instead, it succeeds as a series of moments in Mason’s life that the audience gets to experience alongside him. When making the movie, Linklater took a similar perspective in thinking of it as a series of short films stitched together into one long movie.
This was an essential perspective to take when overseeing the complicated production. Since Linklater could not foresee what the next year would bring, it was easier to take the story in individual installments rather than attempt to have the later story worked out. This also helped with the crew on the movie as Shane Kelly had to step in to replace the previous DP during production but was able to view it as stepping in for a new installment in the story rather than taking over a project already in motion (via IndieWire).
Though generally not seen as a good way to make movies, it is not unusual for big blockbuster movies to start filming without a finished script. This is often the result of productions needing to meet strict deadlines in order to meet the release date that has already been established. Boyhood obviously didn’t have a release date set in stone 12 years out, but Richard Linklater didn’t iron out the script for Boyhood for a much different reason.
Knowing that the long schedule was going to introduce new elements to the story and cause him to rethink certain things, Linklater decided not to go in with a strict story in mind. Instead, he let the story evolve and the characters grow as the actors got older. In some cases, whatever was going on in the actors’ lives was incorporated into the script. In fact, according to Linklater, some of the scenes were written literally the night before they were shot (via Creative Screenwriting).
Given the fact that Boyhood didn’t have a script when filming began, there are moments in the movie that are improvised. While they can add authenticity to a movie like this, it can also be awkward. Both happened to be true in one particular scene in Boyhood when Mason Sr. takes his kids bowling and he finds out that his daughter has a boyfriend.
Mason Sr. attempts to have a spontaneous sex talk with his daughter only for it to end with them both laughing awkwardly. According to Ethan Hawke (via What’s Up Hollywood), the laugh was genuine as he and Lorelei Linklater were improvising the moment and genuinely succumbed to the weirdness of the situation. Richard Linklater decided to leave the moment in the movie as it felt like an authentic father-daughter moment with all the uncomfortable aspects feeling real.
While getting the studio to agree to help Linklater make a movie they wouldn’t get a profit from for more than a decade, there were more complications facing Boyhood with some potential outcomes that could have easily ended the movie in its tracks. Every year, the cast and crew of Boyhood got back together to shoot that year’s scenes in a week-long increment. However, there was no way for Richard Linklater to sign them up for the 12-year shoot ahead of time.
The De Havilland Law stipulates that it’s illegal to contract employees for more than seven years of work. So, there was no legal obligation for the actors in Boyhood to keep coming back to shoot their scenes every year. Linklater held them all to the honor system, and luckily for him, they all remained invested in the project.