Richard Linklater: About a ‘Boyhood’
Memories of youth remain forever close and mysterious to most of us, but few recall the everyday moments of early life with the intensity of Richard Linklater. The 54-year-old Texas filmmaker still sees his initialed ID bracelet on the slim left wrist of Jill Hardy as she’s telling him she no longer wants to be his fifth-grade girlfriend; his older sister Susan’s face as she passed along word from their mother, Diane, that it was time to move again; what his mother looked like when things were working out with her latest man, and then when they weren’t – it’s all present for Linklater. So is the dull burnish of the restaurant tables he would bus after his wealthier high school friends had finished eating Sunday dinner with their mothers and fathers. “I really do remember everything,” he says. “I see people I haven’t seen in 20 years, and I can talk with them about what we talked about outside the high school.”
Linklater has been drawing on the fine grain of his Texas youth all the way back to the no-direction travelers of Austin he portrayed in Slacker and the small-town adolescents who populate his ur-teenage rock & roll movie Dazed and Confused. His latest, Boyhood, is Linklater’s 18th film, joining an eclectic body of work from the boy-meets-girl romance of Before Sunrise to the musical comedy of School of Rock. Linklater’s films have an understated feel that can convey a certain directorial nonchalance. But to see the full Linklater in rapid succession is to appreciate the roughneck sweat of thought and detail that has gone into every one of them.
Boyhood recounts a boy named Mason’s childhood from ages seven to 18. Linklater made Boyhood by regathering the same cast and shooting scenes every year from the time Mason enters first grade until he leaves for college. Watching someone grow up right in front of you is inherently compelling. So is the revelation that a man with a camera is confiding in you the truth of his early life. “I felt like I’m collaborating with the little boy I was, with myself as a parent and with my own parents,” says Linklater. “My mom dated, as you can tell.”
Linklater mostly grew up in Huntsville, a supermax East Texas prison town with a college where, like Olivia (Patricia Arquette, the mother in Boyhood), his own mother was a popular teacher. Linklater was a small-time pinball hustler, but Diane wouldn’t allow him to talk like one: “She wouldn’t let me have much of a Texas accent. She’d say, ‘Don’t say “ma’am.” You sound like a hick.’ ” Diane was just 22 when Richard was born, joining Susan and another sister, Tricia.
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