Richard Linklater said that “Boyhood,” the most acclaimed film of 2014, came to be only after he had entirely given up on the idea of a movie encompassing a boy’s childhood.
“My ideas were all over the place,” he said in an appearance at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s “An Evening with Richard Linklater,” sponsored by Film Independent.
The writer-director, who already had “Dazed and Confused” and “Before Sunrise” under his belt at that point, recalled in a conversation at LACMA that back in 2002, he was baffled as far as how to approach the “Boyhood” narrative structure — so much so, that he was instead embarking on writing a novel.
“I just didn’t ‘have’ the film, and I had pretty much given up on it,” Linklater said. “And just as my fingers hit the keyboard, the whole film popped into my head — proving that I’m not a novelist, I’m a filmmaker.”
The film was shot over a twelve-year period from May 2002, to October 2013 — usually in shoots of two or three days each year.
“Finding the way to tell it was the big idea,” he noted, of his eventual epiphany. After that, his vision was clear: “I knew the last shot of the movie from the second year.”
