Richard Linklater is fast becoming my favourite director. I love the Before Sunrise/Sunset/Midnight trilogy and the idea of following the same actors on-screen over the years, watching their relationship and their faces change, is genius. The other day I switched sitting at my computer for hours on end, to sitting in the cinema for hours on end - much as I liked Boyhood, at 163 minutes I did find it a tad long. Anyhow. Boyhood was actually filmed over a 12-year-period. The main character, the boy (Mason Jnr played by Ellar Coltrane) is the son of divorcees Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke, and he goes from being a six-year-old child to an 18-year-old college student before our very eyes.
I can't even begin to imagine the logistics of filming over such a long period of time, but using the same child actor was a massive risk. What if Coltrane had had a teenage strop and decided he didn't want to be involved anymore? - his sister in the film is Linklater's daughter Lorelei, so I guess that side of things was a bit easier to manage - or turned out to be a rubbish teen actor? Anyhow. He doesn't and the film is brilliant, the whole time-span scenario is a bit mind-blowing. There's a scene where Mason Jnr is leaving home to go to college and Patricia Arquette bursts into tears and runs through a sort of timeline of motherhood announcing that with both kids packed off to college, the next big life event is going to be her funeral. Which is much funnier than it sounds, honest.
