Q&A with Richard Linklater and Jonathan Sehring at the Wexner Center of the Arts

When writer/director Richard Linklater first visited the Ohio State University’s Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio back in 2000, he was still a relatively unknown filmmaker with a cult following. Boy, how times have changed. Now an internationally renowned auteur, Linklater returned to Columbus for the first time in almost fifteen years on July 21 to introduce a sold-out screening of his latest film, “Boyhood,” and to participate in a Q&A session after the screening with IFC Films President Jonathan Sehring. Moderated by Director of Film/Video David Filipi, audience members were able to ask Linklater questions about the landmark new film for nearly an hour, and he embraced the inquiries with warmth, casualness, and humour. The event provided a unique opportunity for fans to get an in-depth look into the working habits, influences, and techniques of one of the most innovative directors working today.

Prior to the screening, Linklater was presented with a special gift from Filipi and Columbus native Sehring, who had purchased the filmmaker an Ohio State Buckeyes football jersey. As the audience roared with approval, Linklater, a renowned fan of the Texas Longhorns from his native Austin, accepted the gift with suppressed enthusiasm. According to Sehring, the jersey was bought in revenge for the good-natured ribbing he had endured from Linklater after the Longhorns had beaten the Buckeyes in Columbus back in 2005 (it’s worth noting that Ohio State would defeat Texas the following year in Austin). Linklater took the jersey and folded it under his podium, and the garment was neither seen nor mentioned again the rest of the evening.

After the screening of the film, Filipi, Linklater, and Sehring returned to the stage to host an extensive Q&A session with the audience. Filipi had some questions for the director to begin, then he opened the floor to the audience. What follows is an extended excerpt from the session, which covered topics from Linklater’s influences for “Boyhood,” how IFC Films came to produce the project, and insights into the effect filming over a period of twelve years had on the young actors and everyone else involved.

On beginning the project:

Richard Linklater: “The first year, it started like any film. The end was so far away, it wasn’t even in our consciousness. […] Every year we were like ‘This is the best year ever!’, every time we shot.”

“It got reported early. I think in year one, somebody’s agent mentioned what we were doing and it got written up. It hit IMDb, and we begged them to take it off. We didn’t really want to talk about it. […] So we had to kind of talk about it. And I was just ‘Well, I hope you guys will still be interested when it’s finished, six years later.’”

“I’d never worked on something that felt so much like it wanted to be what it wanted to be. It was kind of designed that way, to just collaborate with the future.”

On IFC picking up the film:

Jonathan Sehring: “We were in Venice, and we were talking about the project. Rick was talking about it, and I was like, ‘Yeah, we’ll do it’. […] Looking back on it, it’s like ‘What the hell was I thinking?’”

RL: “I’d get a call or I’d see Jonathan along the way and he’d be like ‘Well, we had that corporate meeting today. I had to jump through hoops saying ‘What the hell’s this $200,000 here that we’re not gonna get back for nine more years?’ […] I remember one time, we just crossed paths and [Sehring] was like ‘We have one film in production!’ [I said,] ‘And it’s going well!’”

“Jonathan is the hero of the year for doing what he did. Really, he’s the hero of the last twelve years, but I’m glad publicly, [he’s] being acknowledged.”

JS: “This was all Rick and all his vision, and you wouldn’t bet on just anybody to pull it off. This was an easy bet.”

On casting:

RL: “I think Ethan [Hawke] might have been the first person I really sat down and talked to about this idea, and he was in immediately. […] I knew it’d be a logistical nightmare, just getting everybody back together with their schedules. And he really just promised me that he’d go out of his way to make it work with his schedule.”

“I called [Patricia Arquette] up and we talked for over two hours. […] She committed on that phone call. […] She swears I called her up and said ‘What are you doing the next twelve years?’ I’m sure I didn’t ask that until we were in the conversation farther.”

“I didn’t really cast Lorelei [Linklater, his daughter] in the film, she sort of cast herself. She was like ‘Oh, I’m playing that part.’ It was fine with me because I knew where’d she’d be every year.”

“Ellar [Coltrane] was just the sensitive, thoughtful one. Talked very passionately about music, and movies, and stories. He wasn’t precocious, like he wasn’t even reading at the time. I found out at the first rehearsal. I handed him the script and he handed it back to me. ‘Yeah, I can’t really read.’ […] And that’s who he is today. He’s that same sensitive, thoughtful nineteen year old kid.”

On collaborating with the kids:

RL: “That was the real fun of the movie, seeing the kids grow up and working with them as collaborators.”

“There was nothing in [Coltrane’s] life that happened that I was like ‘Oh, let’s use that.’ It wasn’t a documentary about him. In fact, he was so unusual – he was homeschooled – I almost couldn’t take anything from his life. I couldn’t say ‘Well, what happened in school?’ because he didn’t really go to school.”

“I always treated [Coltrane] like a collaborator, like ‘Put it in your own words, let’s talk about the scenes’, and he always had a lot to offer.”

“We’d wrap for the year, and I’d tell everybody what was coming next year, just to have everybody always thinking about it.”

“I saw the whole film as kind of the emergence of self, and ‘self’ is attitude and your angle on the world. What’s real and what’s not. By seventeen, you’re kind of on your path of how your brain’s going to work in this world. I wanted to show that.”

On writing the film:

RL: “We knew the last shot of the movie; I knew what that shot was ten years before we shot it, at least. But getting the exact dialogue – maybe ten hours before, you get it just right.”

“The screenwriting for this was kind of like twelve scripts, and it was pretty collaborative in that regard.”

On influences for the film:

RL: “I think that [‘The 400 Blows’] is kind of the apex of movies about young people. I think that ‘Fanny & Alexander’ is really up there, too.”

“Truffaut had a real sensitivity toward kids. I think he’s probably the best filmmaker who made more than one film about childhood, if you think of ‘Wild Child’ and ‘Small Change’ and ‘The 400 Blows’. […] I would like to think Truffaut would like this film.”

“[Truffaut’s ‘Antoine Doinel series’ is] kind of where this film came from. I always said I never had my ‘The 400 Blows’ moment. I was trying to say something about growing up. Most films about kids are like, ‘Oh, this one summer, or this one event’ because obviously you’re stuck with the physicality of your young actor. An adult, you can say, ‘Okay, maybe you’re thirty at the beginning and you put some gray in your hair and make you forty,’ but you can’t do that with a kid. You can’t ask an eight year old, ‘Oh, now you’re twelve. Oh, now you’re seventeen.’ It’s impossible, so it’s not even thought of. And that’s what was frustrating me, because all my ideas for what I was feeling on this covered the whole thing. I wanted to talk about how we change and how we gain ourselves in the process and all that. […] So this form had to be created to house that, so I think that this is my own version [of the ‘Antoine Doinel series’], but still very different.”

On maintaining consistency during the process:

RL: “I want to say that I didn’t evolve at all as a filmmaker. That was the plan. I wanted it to feel like one film. And I’m not kidding. I think that’s the director’s job, maintaining a tone and a consistency. […] I didn’t want the film to feel technically like it was changing; even though technology and the world and everything was changing, I wanted it to feel like one [film]. So anything I did in the other nine feature length films I did in this time period, they were their own things. But it was really easy to come back this.”

“Even for the actors, people say ‘Oh, is it tough to get back into character?’ It’s like, ‘No, not at all.’ You never struggle with that. It’s kinda like when you run into an old friend, maybe you haven’t seen him in a couple of years, but you’re really close. One sentence in and you’re right where you were.”

On a potential sequel:

RL: “You always could [continue the story]. I like to be asked that, because I actually did that with two other films. […] Patricia had the best answer for this the other day. Someone asked that question and she said, ‘You don’t ask a mother who is giving birth if she wants to have more kids.’ And that’s kind of how we feel. We haven’t even processed this being over.”

“I haven’t really thought about it, or what that would be. It wouldn’t have to be twelve years. You know, twelve years, first through twelfth grade. It’s the grid we’re placed on at a young age, and that’s how I saw it. Who knows what it could be?”

On shooting “in the real world”:

RL: “It’s not a documentary. It’s all scripted and planned out, but just the nature of the film, how we were trying to be ‘of the real world’ at that moment, it was a fun kind of collaboration with the randomness of the world that you’re trying to control, but can’t totally control. I just felt very lucky that so much of that worked out just the whole way.”

On his relationship with Ellar Coltrane:

RL: “It takes a film crew to raise a child. [Coltrane] was like everyone’s kid. For me, I think he’s like a nephew, he’s like that close. Ethan was certainly like a surrogate dad.”

“[Coltrane] influenced the film, obviously. It was going to go kind of where he wanted in life. But he talks about how the film influenced him. […] He had a very loose[ly] structured home life. He was homeschooled and didn’t have a lot of responsibilities, he says. But our art department would be like ‘Ellar, you’re gonna have to drive next year. We’re gonna go get your driver’s license.’ Like he wasn’t really doing that at home.”

“Every film, it’s always like ‘Oh, we’re like a family,’ and it’s true, you are close, and you remain that way. But we actually were all those years; you can imagine the investment everyone felt in each other and it brought out those maternal feelings from everyone around. And [Coltrane] reciprocated that. He treated us like family.”

“I think for the kids, for Lorelei and Ellar, it was kinda like some kind of art acting camp thing meets a family reunion. That’s what it felt like, it didn’t even feel like a movie. […] You’re working on this film, but there’s no end result that’s in the air. There’s no goal, other than doing what we can every year, so it was very unlike the result-oriented goal of every [other] film. […] There was not any pressure, we didn’t have a release date. It was very process-oriented. So I think the kids benefitted from that. It was all process, and no accountability until the end.”

On selecting music for the film:

RL: “In this decade, I’m already old and out of it. I don’t know what a ten year old’s listening to, or what the culture’s throwing at a super young person. To be honest, Ellar and Lorelei weren’t really any help. We unearthed this little interview from year one, Ellar’s seven years old […] and it’s like ‘What are you listening to?’ And the bands he was excited about – he’s seven – are Tool, Rage Against the Machine, and Pink Floyd. His tastes were so far beyond what a kid [listens to]. So he wasn’t really any help. […] Lorelei was also a strange child. She was a medievalist: She played the harp, and listened to harpsichord music.”

“But I got these consultants, a lot of young people around the editing room and interns. Some great stuff came out of that. It was fun to familarise myself with that decade of music. […] There were a lot of iconic songs that I obviously knew, but it was the other stuff that some of it I didn’t really know.”

“As [Coltrane] got older, I could actually put stuff in I did like, like Arcade Fire. ‘The Suburbs’ was a big album for the high school portion of this movie, over the last few years.”

“I made my consultants write little narratives about every song. I would just go through tons of music and pick songs that I liked, but I wanted somebody in the world to tell me what that song meant to them as a young person at that time.”

“The song at the end from Family of the Year, ‘Hero’, a guy in my office suggested that. He remembered hearing that song and thinking that everything was going to be okay. I like that emotion attached to that song. […] It was almost too on the nose. I was saying to my editor, ‘Is that too on the nose? It’s almost too perfect.’ […] And she was like ‘I really like it. Don’t screw it up. It’s perfect.’”

On the challenges of marketing and distributing the film:

JS: “Everybody in the exhibition community wants to play it now. The biggest challenge is picking the right theatres, picking the right time to roll out. We’re not a Hollywood studio, so we are never going to spend the amount of money that a studio [spends].”

“Earlier we did exit polls over the weekend in the three cities, and it’s sort of like the perfect movie that plays across [demographics]. You could be a teenager, you could be in your eighties, and equally everybody loved it. […] We’re in the middle of Hollywood blockbuster season, and the movie is just doing tremendous business so far in the first two weeks that it’s opened in ten cities.”

“It’s been sort of a dream movie so far.”

On the length of the film:

JS: “Once you watch it, it flies by. You are watching twelve years.”

RL: “Hell, ‘Transformers[: The Age of Extinction]’ is exactly the same length.”

“I’ve never made a film over two hours, but it wanted to be what it wanted to be. I was editing things out of the first episode between years eleven and twelve. It’s exactly not a minute longer than it could be, not a minute shorter than it wanted to be.”

“See, [IFC Films] had just done ‘Blue is the Warmest Colour.’ That movie’s three hours. We’re two hours and forty-couple minutes. People say ‘Oh, it’s three hours,’ and I’m like ‘It’s not three hours! It’s two hours, forty-two minutes.’ There’s that threshold. I’m not going to three hours. But how much time will we watch a football game? Four hours, with commercials. It doesn’t bother anybody.”

On what it was like directing his daughter:

RL: “It was easy. I don’t know any other way to put it. It was just simple. It’s our lives. It wasn’t a big deal for her to be in a movie; she’d been in other things of mine and she’d been around movies her whole life. She’d known Ethan since she was nine months old.”

“She claimed the part. She wanted to do it. It was kind of ‘her’ at that time. It probably meant different things at different times in her life. I think that because of the casual relationship she had with the movie, it was just something she had to focus on for about a few days a year. […] Ellar, I think it was a bigger deal for his family, for that commitment and everything. But for her, it really wasn’t. So much so, that she could be the one who was like ‘You know, I kinda don’t want to do it this year. Can my character like die?’ But that was just one year.”

“I would be editing the whole movie, and I would be back hanging out with nine year old Lorelei, and then thirty-eight minutes later, I would be sitting at the dinner table with seventeen year old Lorelei.”

On the kids’ reactions to the film:

RL: “[Lorelei] never saw the footage, nor did Ellar. I usually don’t show stuff to actors, unless there’s a reason. […] I knew that was building up to a big moment, obviously. I was just very sensitive about it, and I knew it’d be a big thing for them.”

“I gave [Coltrane and Linklater] each a Blu-ray and I was like, ‘I think you should probably watch this alone. […] Build up your own relationship with this movie. It’s not you, it’s a fictional character, but it’s a representation of you.’ An actor has to get used to that.”

“It took them a while. I gave it to Ellar and I didn’t hear from him for a while. I was like, ‘Hmm, is Ellar okay?’ He’s [seen] it a lot. He’s very thoughtful that way, and he has this wonderful relation[ship] with the movie now. […] With Lorelei, it was not quite so smooth. She really likes the movie and she thinks that everybody else is good, but poor young women, they often struggle with this. They’re like, ‘Oh, look how hideous I am that year,’ that kind of stuff. But she’s okay. People do love her in the movie.”

“I think as time goes on, it will be a different thing. They’re just kind of in the moment. Where the film ends is where they are now, but ten years from now, it won’t be them now. It’ll all be somewhere in their past. […] I’m really proud of them. I think they’ve handled it well.”

“It’s tough. Not many actors have ever been in this position, where you’re so documented in narrative to that degree. So it’s pretty heavy. But we were all advising them over the years. Ethan was very eloquent in his advice to them over the years. We were all very sensitive about it. I think that we did what we could. It’s there. It is what it is.”

Photo courtesy of the Wexner Center for the Arts.