"...all these little intimate moments, nothing more than that...": Richard Linklater on Boyhood

Dear readers,
Once again it is incumbent upon me to do some figurative flagellation for my neglect to post anything in this phantom country for over a month, though the truth is that ol' JB has been recovering from an accident and the blog had to fall in priority below stuff like, you know, health. 
But hey! Who doesn't want to read a Richard Linklater interview? Will that make up a little? Will that appease those of you who so graciously read this blog with whatever degree of regularity? Huh? Huh? Anyway, more to come real sooooon...

Boyhood’s visual refrain are its protagonist’s wide open eyes, taking in the world, first at six, then at seven, eight and nine, all the way to that age when boyhood is shed for manhood. Mason ages 12 years over the course of Richard Linklater’s truly extraordinary film about ordinary things—trying to make arrowheads by putting rocks in a pencil sharpener, going camping with your father, poring over lingerie catalogues, catching sight of awful images from Fallujah on TV in a bowling alley, watching your smart mother make seemingly inexplicably poor choices in men—as does actor Ellar Coltrane, who began making Boyhood with Linklater in the summer of 2002, when he was only six.

Overwhelmingly moving and brimming with perfectly realized moments of childhood discovery, there has never been anything quite like Boyhood before. Its time-lapse effect has its precedents in, say, Michel Apted’s Up series, Truffaut’s Antoine Doniel films, and Linklater’s own Before trilogy, but the peculiar vertigo you feel in watching characters age 12 years in 164 minutes feels like a watershed moment in movies. And Linklater’s decision to refrain from melodrama feels like the right way to try out this gambit. We can best feel time’s passage by letting it pass without imposing cataclysm or wilds fortune upon it.

Coltrane is joined onscreen by Lorelei Linklater (the writer/director’s daughter) as his sister, Patricia Arquette as his mother, who goes back to school and finds a new career while being a single mother, and Ethan Hawke as his dad, already out of the picture by the time the film begins, though he shows up more and more as time passes, first in a GTO, later in a minivan. The family lives in Texas, and a memorable interlude has Mason receive a Bible and a shotgun for his 15^th birthday, his “redneck bar mitzvah,” as Linklater puts it. Songs by Cat Power, Wilco, Flaming Lips and Yo La Tengo help place us in time, as Mason/Coltrane’s voice changes, face changes, body grows, and ideas gradually get articulated. “I just thought there would be more,” Arquette says near the film’s end, watching her son prepare to leave her with an empty nest. Those words are heartrending and ring true, yet for the viewer, it’s hard not to think, “But there was so much!”

Richard Linklater

I spoke with Linklater a few weeks back. There is indeed so much that can be said about Boyhood, but I’ll cut this short and let the below conversation cover some of that.

JB: Is this a project you would have undertaken were you yourself not a parent?

Richard Linklater: Never. I wouldn’t have had the idea. When I did I’d been a parent about six years. Which really thrusts you into the mind-set of that developing kid, and which can’t help but dredge up memories of your own childhood. It wouldn’t have felt worthy of exploration had I not been experiencing it, I think.

JB: Whatever parenting skills you’d developed by that point must have came into play not only when directing your own daughter, but also when directing your lead actor.

RL: Absolutely. Everybody knows the old saying in film about not working with kids or animals, but I actually found I was good at it. I like working with kids. I went from the first shoot on Boyhood directly to working on School of Rock. That’s how confident I was. That film was nothing but a bunch of nine- and ten-year-olds.

JB: Parents always talk about how time flies when you’re watching kids grow. One of the things that makes Boyhood so moving is that you’re watching 12 years of a boy’s life fly past in a little over two-and-a-half hours. We feel swept up in time’s passage in such a visceral, overwhelming way.

RL: Yeah, there’s something there about the fleeting nature of our lives. I think you can feel that even if you’re not a parent. Everyone was a kid once. Everyone has parents and siblings and schools. We’re so similar in our maturation process worldwide—more similar than we are different. That’s just what I was hoping to get at with this movie and its particular process. Time flies and we do all get a year older.

JB: Is there anything that might have happened to Coltrane that would have thrown you for a loop? I mean, if he became a juvenile delinquent, or something horrible, like he lost an arm?

RL: [Laughs] I think I would have just kinda gone with it. I never viewed him as a risk. Technically it’s a little insane to make a movie like this, but I had some faith that things would work out. It’s just a way to approach life. You got to assume the best and work hard and hope you get lucky. This whole film involves collaborating with an unknown future. Which is the deal we all make in our lives. So I just tried to feel ready to deal with not only my four cast-members, who are growing up and aging, but also the world in general.

JB: I know that some of Boyhood is autobiographical for you, and I was thinking that, if you were to write a book based on your childhood, or make a period film, like Dazed and Confused, you can control most every aspect of the story and its degree of fidelity to your life, whereas making a film like this one you’re obligated to reflect whatever’s going on around you. That feels like something new to me: it’s fiction, it’s also based in history, yet it’s inherently responding to things happening in the present, like documentary.

RL: It’s a pretty simple idea and people keep asking me why no one’s ever done it. It may have something to do with film people being control freaks. With this MO you have to relinquish certain levels of control and go with the flow. For me, that was exciting! I didn’t know what was coming in the future but I was committed to just adapting. Like life. There was always a life corollary behind our decisions. 12 years is a long time. But I’ve committed my life to film, so to commit 12 years to one project isn’t that crazy.     

JB: One of my favourite scenes in Boyhood is when Hawke is coaching the kids in conversation—and they coach him right back, reminding him that conversation should happen naturally. As I watched this scene it occurred to me that I was watching a lesson in acting in a Richard Linklater movie. Something I like about your films is how people have fluid, easy conversations about big ideas. Ethan Hawke seems particularly deft at capturing that element of your work.

RL: I remember 20 years ago, when I was casting for Before Sunrise, thinking that what I really needed was just the most verbally dextrous and really sharp actor around for that role. That was Ethan. 100%.

JB: Boyhood is filled with things that only happen in a person’s life once. I wouldn’t assume that you’re ever going to do anything quite like this again, so, given that you spent 12 years working on this, do you feel bereft now? I can imagine it might be hard to let go.

RL: I don't know that it’s bereft exactly. On one hand I come away feeling elated that it worked as I’d hoped. On the other, honestly, I just haven’t really processed it yet. It’s out, people are seeing it, but I don’t know that I’m fully cognizant of its being over. With other films there’s been a pattern to help me predict how I’m going to feel. But everything about Boyhood has been unpredictable. Everything about this film was always different.

JB: I think about the moment when Patricia Arquette is driving the kids away from their home forever and she says, “Don’t look back.” That sounds like a crucial survival technique for her. But as an artist you don’t really have that option. It’s hard to tell stories, much less promote those stories, without looking back on your own experience.

RL: Tell me about it. You can’t help it. Your mind is always going forward or back. You have to talk it out lots. But yeah, “Don’t look back” is a way of getting through sometimes, filing something away like it never happened.

JB: I know people keep asking you what would have happened had Ellar given up at some point in the project, but what about you? Did you ever want to give up?

RL: I never stopped feeling lucky just to have the opportunity to make this film at all. I had waves of doubt maybe at the start. We were accumulating all these little intimate moments, nothing more than that, and I did wonder, “Will this be enough? Will it be compelling?” I bet the farm on this idea that the accumulation of such moments over time could be everything. But one or two years in I knew it would work the way I wanted it to. If you can’t draw people in with such moments of universal truth, what can you draw them in with?

                 

Detour as narrative on the streets of Austin

A man arrives in Austin, Texas. It’s 1989. He took the bus here, and seems to have been traveling a great deal. He leaves the station, gets in a cab, lets loose a monologue in which he describes a dream in which he read a book about splintering realities, different dimensions, other versions of himself and of everybody else, even his possibly mute employee of Roy’s Taxi currently driving him around. Soon both dream-raconteur and his stoic audience-of-one slip into the background, making way for a guy in a BE ALL THAT YOU CAN BE t-shirt watching super-8 home movies, for a cheerful babbling conspiracy theorist, for a pedantic youth pontificating on idleness as a route to liberation, for some dude who says he can get three girls into a gig but actually can’t, for a self-described “anti-artist” who claims to destroy works of art (I wonder if he went on to become a film critic), for a young woman who claims to possess Madonna’s pap smear—she knows a gynecologist in Hollywood. Who is the hero of this movie? The answer, of course, is everyone.

Slacker (1991), Richard Linklater’s second feature and a key work in the story of American independent cinema, is one of those rare films that succeeds at pluralizing the protagonist, at capturing a community, a spirit, a place and time—the anniversary of the moon landing, the ’88 presidential election, the leaning towers of VHS tapes and the death of L. Ron Hubbard all provide Slacker with a timestamp. Employing what Linklater described as a “vertical narrative,” the movie moves like a narrative relay race in which no one is in a hurry. The story, as such, goes wherever the next character takes it. The production company is titled ‘Detour,’ a nod to Edgar G. Ulmer’s beloved poverty row noir, but also a directive for a trajectory devoted to alternate routes. The movie seems inspired by late period Luis Buñuel; it is rigorously associational. Which is not the same as random—Slacker’s cast are very much all of the same world, sharing many of the same preoccupations: the unseen hands that control modern life; freedom as something inherently elusive, given our insistence of laying traps for ourselves (a theme explicitly alluded to in the title of Buñuel’s The Phantom of Liberty); and the potential heroism in passivity.

This last theme isn’t mere irony or slacker bravado. The notion of passivity as being socially useful is critiqued in Slacker’s very first transition, when numerous passersby come upon the unconscious, possibly dead victim of a hit-and-run splayed out in the road and each of them passes the buck, uninterested or unwilling to get involved. There is a dark side to this seemingly mirthful, seemingly humanist, seemingly ambivalent movie whose title is totally misleading: this project was a tremendous, ambitious undertaking, and Linklater, still in his 20s at the time, was anything but lazy. He would soon after prove to be one of the contemporary cinema’s most prolific directors, with an astonishing range of works under his belt, most notably Dazed and Confused (1993), School of Rock (2003), the Before… trilogy (1995, 2004, 2013), and Waking Life (2001), which unfolds like a series of dreams and to which Slacker is most closely related—Slacker’s first line: “Man, I just had the weirdest dream.” Previously available only on DVD, Slacker is now available from Criterion on a lovingly packaged new blu-ray edition. It remains striking original, frequently hilarious, at once loose and mesmerizing, and an inspiration for anyone who feels cinematic form to be riddled with constraints. 

      

Nine years from now we will meet again

Their story already goes back some 18 years, to that night in Vienna, when Jesse (Ethan Hawke), an American, and Celine (Julie Delpy), a Frenchwoman, were just two wandering kids in their early 20s, soaking up the world, meeting perchance on a train, taking a dare to honour the connection both felt so acutely, to not let it simply slip away and wind up always wondering what might have become of the one that got away. 

That night was captured in Before Sunrise (1995), a perfectly lovely little film, but one that came to mean much, much more to me once I saw Before Sunset (2004), in which Jesse and Celine reunite in Paris on the occasion of Jesse’s book tour: his first novel was a fictionalized version of that night they met, maybe fell in love, and parted for nine years without any way of contacting each other. Now in their 30s, they wander the city of light, tell each other of what their lives have become; she’s single, and a somewhat domesticated activist, while he married, had a child, and became a writer, though the married part isn’t going so well. As with its predecessor, this most meaningful of sequels ends in a moment of heady suspension, in Celine’s apartment, with Celine dancing seductively to Nina Simone, and Jesse very much in danger of missing his flight home. (Does it make me a cynic or a romantic that when I last re-watched Before Sunrise, in preparation for seeing Before Midnight, I was suddenly struck by the feeling that the film may just depict the ideal relationship, one composed almost entirely of longing and projection?) If you’ve seen these films and were drawn deep into them as I was, you hardly need me to tell you about Before Midnight to convince you to see it. Read ahead if you wish, though you may want to let the film do the work of bringing you up to speed and come back to this review later.

Before Midnight begins with a farewell, not between our eternally returning lovers, but between Jesse and Hank, his now 13-year-old son, who is returning to Chicago and his mother, now divorced from Jesse, who did not catch that plane. In fact, he stayed, married Celine, and the couple, now in their 40s, have children of their own: angelic bilingual flaxen-haired twins. The family is vacationing in Greece, and while driving from the airport to the idyllic seaside house where they’re staying Jesse raises the possibility of their trying out the States for a while, just to be closer to Hank. Celine immediately pegs this suggestion as symptomatic of a bigger scheme of Jesse’s to avoid responsibilities to his current family, not to mention ignore the fact that she’s been offered an important government job that would keep her in Paris. Jesse’s seemingly innocent idea lays the seed of discontent that will grow into a potentially cataclysmic battle between a passive-aggressive husband and a more brazenly resentful wife. Some friends arrange to mind the kids so Jesse and Celine can run off to enjoy an interruption-free night of love in a nice hotel, but the chances of erotic fulfillment slowly erode as the couple make their way into town, exchanging some of the most unnervingly resonant dialogue between long-term lovers I’ve ever heard in in any film.

The script is a collaboration between Hawke, Delpy and director Richard Linklater, and this trilogy of films—along with a wonderful little Jesse and Celine cameo in Waking Life (2001)—will likely stand as the most enduring work in all of these artists’ respective legacies. There’s nothing in cinema history quite like it, though Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage (1973) and its follow-up Saraband (2005) come close, while as a stand-alone film Before Midnight perhaps most closely resembles Certified Copy (2010). The trilogy allows the actors to age and the story and characters to age with them, to ripen to the point where, wordy as these films are, so much is left unsaid. Before Midnight feels to me like the best of the three, but is it simply that I too have aged with Jesse and Celine, who are only a little older than me? That I see things gained and lost in my own life as I watch theirs unfold in nine-year wallop-increments?

Linklater elegantly lets Before Midnight’s five sections play out in long takes, adding to the sense of the real, to the earned intimacy and organic burgeoning of tension. As the film reaches its end, there are cups of tea left un-sipped, glasses of wine left un-drank, bodies left unloved, questions left unanswered. Again, that heady suspension, though now altered by so many unalterable life choices riddled with consequence. Will there be a fourth film? The door has been left open. But for now we get to live for a while with this one. 

             

"If you were to go to Carthage today and get in line at Sam’s barbecue, you might find someone telling you how Bernie should have done it": Richard Linklater on Bernie, gossip, death and Texas

Richard Linklater’s fourteenth feature chronicles the strange but true tale of Bernie Tiede (Jack Black), the young man who arrived in Carthage, Texas with some neatly pressed shirts and pants, a smart little moustache, a gift for politeness and a mortuary degree, and Mrs. Nugent (Shirley MacLaine), the crabby, extremely wealthy old widow loathed by everyone in town. Bernie and Mrs. Nugent became close companions, so close that, despite Bernie’s apparent homosexuality, many wondered if their relationship didn’t include a sexual component. But that relationship became increasingly oppressive for Bernie, and one day in 1997 Bernie shot and killed Mrs. Nugent, hiding her body in a freezer. No one discovered her for nine months.

Inspired by Skip Hollandsworth’s 1998 Texas Monthly profile of the case, which much of the film quotes directly (Hollandsworth is credited as co-scenarist), Bernie comfortably hovers somewhere between semi-staged documentary and true crime feature. It’s a black comedy and place study narrated by a chorus of townsfolk (the cast mixes actual Carthagians and hired actors, including a very funny Matthew McConaughey) speaking direct-to-camera from front stoops or greasy spoons or seated before farm equipment. Their Bernie is a Robin Hood figure, killing the rich and donating to the town: murder as a benevolent act. “He had the ability to make the world seem kind,” one of the locals says. Linklater, a Texan himself, exudes affection for his subjects and their things (check out the attention to detail in the set dressing, ie: the horse painting lampshade on Scrappy Holmes’ desk). Told from the inside out, Bernie neither condescends nor soft-pedals, and seems ever-fascinated by its own incongruities and enigmas.

Richard Linklater 

I’d never spoke to Linklater before but found him just as friendly and easygoing as I’d always assumed he’d be from watching his films, some of which feature an occasional director’s cameo. He appears in Bernie as a deadbeat dad engaged in one of those weird contests where you have to keep your hands on a car for as long as possible. 

JB: I realize that the film is called Bernie, but I was really struck by how beautifully it works as a portrait of a community.

Richard Linklater: When Shirley first read the script she said to me, “Really, it’s the gossips’ movie.” I laughed. To some degree that’s true, because it’s seen through their eyes.

JB: That’s just it. The film refrains from psychoanalyzing Bernie. It offers little about his roots. It doesn’t try to get inside his head. Instead you build your portrait as much as possible from the perceptions of the Carthagians. You let them author your Bernie.

RL: We’ll never know what really happened between Bernie and Mrs. Nugent, but we do know the effect their relationship had on Carthage. It always seemed like the most interesting choice to hear these multiple voices testify to how the events reverberated through the community. Such events are more poignant in a small town, because everyone really does know each other. Small town gossip has this unanimity to it: Bernie was the nicest guy in town and Mrs. Nugent was the meanest bitch. Life is high school. Ultimately you are what everybody says you are. If you were to go to Carthage today and get in line at Sam’s barbecue, you might find someone telling you how Bernie should have done it—without getting caught.

JB: For all the movies that have been made in Texas, I feel like very few have paid close attention to a sense of place, to how it really feels to live there. I think of The Whole Shootin’ Match...

RL: [Laughs] Speaking of Sonny Carl Davis! You know Sonny Carl is in Bernie, right?

JB: I had no idea.

RL: He’s the guy with the map of Texas.

JB: Holy shit. I didn’t recognize him.

RL: Well, it has been 34 years since Whole Shootin’ Match. He’s a real character. I’m glad I finally got to work with him. He’s one of a handful of actors that I mixed in with the, quote-unquote, real people.

JB: One of the really intriguing things about this whole story is the way the theme of disguise and the denial of death weaves its way through Bernie’s vocation and right into his crime.

RL: Even in death we disguise ourselves. There’s that telling line from the opening scene, where Bernie’s demonstrating his craft: “You don’t want him to look unhappy to be there.” Put a little smile on the dead man’s face, you know? [Laughs] I heard that from a lady who dresses the dead as her job. She was our consultant, giving me some pointers. I thought it was hilarious. I don’t think she thought it was funny.

JB: The casting of Jack Black struck me as really inspired. He’s very funny as Bernie, but he also has this quality, this very particular pathos, that feels both native to the character and distinctly Jack Black.

RL: I’m so proud of Jack’s work here. When you’re funny no one thinks you’re a good actor, but the truth is Jack’s a great actor. And a great singer. And both skills are required for this part. It’s hard to think of other actors who could bring all these things, the right kind of charm. Jack has this ingratiating element; he wants to be liked. But then there’s this tinge somewhere in Jack that’s a little off. This edge. That edge itself is funny. It’s forever intriguing. That’s what makes him a movie star.  

JB: You’ve been carrying around this idea since 1998. Did your concept of the film change a lot over the years?

RL: Not much. All I did the whole time was think about the tone, and that was beneficial. Everything clicked when we met the actual Bernie. I had been writing to him for years, but when Jack and I got to visit him in prison and spend some serious time, it kind of confirmed my hunches about Bernie. He truly did seem like the nicest guy who did this one horrible act. To me, that was the story. He’s not a psychopath, so the question arises as to whether any of us, under the right circumstances, could be driven to kill somebody. 

JB: The scene where Bernie pulls the trigger really isn’t especially dramatic. It’s just this moment where the barrier between fantasy and action becomes so slim.

RL: And it’s so easy with certain weapons. It happens in a flash.

JB: Have you given any thought to whether you’d like to be buried or cremated? Would you like someone like Bernie to prepare your remains for your grieving loved ones?

RL: [Laughs] That’s a great question. You’re first person to ask me that! I’ve spent all these years thinking about the death industry and you’re the only person to ask me that question. So I’ll tell you honestly, because you deserve it: I will in no way let the death industry get close to me when I die! [Laughs] I’ve been researching this and there’s this thing called green burial. You die, they put you in a biodegradable stack, bury you vertically so you don’t take up much room and you immediately return to the soil. You don’t kill a bunch of roots. They just throw you out in the woods, really. It’s the least you do can do and it only costs about $200. Not $10,000. The idea of putting all these fluids in your body and going through all this rigmarole to act like you’re not dead is just crazy. It’s a horrible industry, really. So expensive. They treat the bodies like shit. There are these companies where you go to the funeral home and then they ship the bodies to Mexico immediately because it’s $75 cheaper. It’s ridiculous.

JB: I know. This whole idea that you can buy a casket that will keep worms off your body for an extra hundred years. At some point, when the people that loved you and even all your grandchildren have all died, you know, maybe it’s time to finally let go. I’ve always liked the idea of cremation, though I hadn’t really thought about the pollution aspect.

RL: That’s an issue. And it’s expensive because of the fire and because they still do all these things to treat the body beforehand. Mind you, they make you think you have to do so many things but if you check the books there’s actually very little that you’re obligated to do, legally.

JB: Well, I hope that neither you nor your loved ones will have to be thinking about your death rites for a very long time. 

RL: Thanks, but we all get there sooner or later. Thinking about it’s not so bad.