Casting Time as a Lead Character

Slide 4 of 4

Mr. Coltrane at age 9.

Credit...IFC Films
  • Slide 4 of 4

    Mr. Coltrane at age 9.

    Credit...IFC Films

Twenty years ago, Ethan Hawke, sporting a ratty red turtleneck and a scraggly goatee, first worked with Richard Linklater on the set of “Before Sunrise,” playing an impulsive romantic who makes a bold pass at a stranger on a train. Over the next two decades, as Hollywood seemed to retrench into critic-proof franchises, that reckless romanticism continued to animate the friends’ idiosyncratic careers. Altogether, the two men, both Texas born, have made eight unpredictable movies together. On Friday, they will release their most audacious gamble yet, “Boyhood,” a film so formally bold that it is without an exact precedent.

“Boyhood” has been received with rave reviews and tears at film festivals. When it was screened at BAMcinemaFest in June, A. O. Scott of The New York Times called it “one of the most extraordinary movies of 2014, or for that matter the 21st century so far.” But Mr. Linklater’s initial pitch was not nearly so well received. To dramatize the development of a young Texan from age 6 to 18, from first grade to his arrival at college, Mr. Linklater proposed a 12-year shoot: There would be no bad makeup or wigs, no computer graphics, no multiple actors playing a character at different ages.

Every year for a dozen years, Mr. Linklater filmed scenes as the actors playing the boy and his family aged in real time. For the divorced father and mother, he cast Mr. Hawke and Patricia Arquette; for the older sister, he cast his daughter Lorelei. And for the role of the boy, Mason, who would be on screen for every scene, the director gambled on a 7-year-old unknown, Ellar Coltrane, discovered at an audition in Mr. Linklater’s hometown, Austin, Tex.

While many filmmakers use star power to buy leeway for creative risk, Mr. Linklater had no bankable name. Mr. Coltrane, a home-schooled son of musicians with shaggy hair and holes in his jeans, would be his star for 12 years — no matter how he changed, or what puberty wreaked.

Instead of hedging his bet with a dynamic narrative, the director promised no pyrotechnic plot twists. “People would ask, ‘So what happens?’ ” Mr. Linklater said. “And I’d have to say, ‘Not much.’ ”

Mr. Hawke said that Mr. Linklater never minimized the risks at business meetings: “A financier would say, ‘That’s fascinating, but what’s going to make this movie great?’ Rick would say: ‘Oh, it might not be. We’ll have to see.’ ”

Most coming-of-age films are replete with sex and crises like deaths, overdoses and crimes, but in “Boyhood,” Mr. Hawke said, “the event is the nonevent.” The boy just grows up.

Asked to describe his work on the film, Mr. Coltrane didn’t talk about it in terms of specific scenes. “Being 7, you know, 12 years is almost twice your life span,” he said. “It’s just kind of more like a life experience, spread out over such a long period of time.”

Certainly, the story could have gone another way. As Ms. Arquette put it: “Mason could have been strung out at 16, maybe spent a few years in prison. It could have been more Syd Field writing workshop,” a reference to the formulaic school of Hollywood screenwriting.

“But, no, there’s no third-act twist,” she said. “We don’t even see him lose his virginity. Rick had 12 years to overthink it, but he also had the faith that life was enough.”

To Mr. Linklater, the film is “a kind of flowing time sculpture,” which is not exactly a bankable genre in Hollywood. And he doubled down on his concept.

ImageRichard Linklater, right, the director of “Boyhood,” with Ethan Hawke, who plays the father in the film.
Credit...Matt Lankes/IFC Films
Richard Linklater, right, the director of “Boyhood,” with Ethan Hawke, who plays the father in the film.

“Let’s face it, we bet the farm on the cumulative effect of identification, on the idea that you would care about this family and be invested in them, not because their dog died, or some fake plotty thing,” he said. “Execs are like: ‘Why should we care about this guy? Let’s give him a flaw.’ No. You like him because you’re familiar with him. Why do you like your friends? Because you know them.”

When Mr. Linklater pitched the concept, he was confronted with all sorts of obvious logical questions about the film’s inherent dangers. Binding contracts were an impossibility, because actors could not be tied to one for more than seven years; what if the young actor couldn’t handle it, or his parents changed their minds? What if one of the cast members backed out, or, worse, died?

“I’d say, ‘The odds are really low that any of the five major people, the four actors and myself, would die,’ ” said Mr. Linklater, who ultimately convinced IFC Films to put up $200,000 annually for 12 years before adding his own money as costs rose over time. “If I were an insurer, I’d insure that. I’d bet on our mortality schedules. I kind of have that view of the world.”

That pragmatic attitude is no accident, and it’s one reason Mr. Linklater and Mr. Hawke are such close friends. Both grew up with divorced Texan fathers who worked in insurance, assessing risks for a living. The two fathers had “a very statistical view of the world,” as Mr. Linklater put it, and Mr. Hawke agrees. His father even used statistics to try to talk him out of acting, he said.

 "It wasn’t as if he didn’t think I was talented or something,” Mr. Hawke said. “He’s just an actuary, and the actuarial tables were not good. I remember him saying the statistical chances of being an Eastwood were just so small.”

But Mr. Hawke studied the careers of actors he admired and deduced that they had taken big risks, not avoided them. “My dad and I talked about how if the goal is a lifelong profession in the performing arts, then the actuarial tables of not taking chances are actually much worse,” he said. “I’ve always used a different actuarial table of my own.”

Image
Mr. Coltrane at age 17 in "Boyhood."
Credit...IFC Films
Mr. Coltrane at age 17 in "Boyhood."

Over the years, that comfort with risk has defined the careers of both creative artists. From “Slacker” in 1991 and “Dazed and Confused” two years later to “Bernie” in 2012, Mr. Linklater has largely avoided major studios and never settled into a specific genre. Mr. Hawke has turned down romantic leads in pursuit of theater jobs, novel writing and directing — while disregarding snark from critics who thought he should stick to playing heartthrobs.

If their fathers are on their minds, it is because Mr. Linklater and his cast describe the lengthy process of “Boyhood” as one long, rolling conversation about childhood and parenthood, growing up and growing older. Over 12 years, elements from their own lives wound their way into the script.

“In a way, we were both collaborating with our dads on this film,” Mr. Linklater said. On screen, Mason’s mother shoulders the burden of raising the kids while his father indulges more bohemian whims. Eventually, he gives up his dreams of a music career for something more stable. “The dad had to end up in the insurance business, because both of our dads did,” he said.

Mr. Hawke recalled: “Rick was a child of divorce, I was a child of divorce, and Ellar’s parents are divorced. I spent many a night walking the dog, calling up Rick and saying: ‘What if Mason Sr. took Mason to a baseball game? What would happen?’ ”

The father does take Mason to a Houston Astros game, swooping in for a play date with the children one afternoon while apparently oblivious to his ex-wife’s sacrifices. Midway through the scene, the Astros hit a home run and the crowd erupts.

“There’s the great Branch Rickey line that Rick and I always talk about: ‘Luck is the residue of design,’ ” Mr. Hawke said, referring to the Hall of Fame baseball executive. “People always tell us, ‘Oh, you’re so lucky you got a shot where there was a home run.’ Yeah, but we’re often lucky. Rick works hard to create an environment that is conducive to luck. And Rick would have made a foul ball work. There’s a great scene in a foul ball, too, just a different tone.”

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From left: Patricia Arquette, Lorelei Linklater, Mr. Coltrane and Mr. Hawke at a screening of the film.
Credit...Imeh Akpanudosen/Getty Images
From left: Patricia Arquette, Lorelei Linklater, Mr. Coltrane and Mr. Hawke at a screening of the film.

In 2008, Mr. Linklater, whose college baseball career was cut short by injury, filmed “Inning by Inning,” a documentary about Augie Garrido, the University of Texas coach who encourages his players to treat each pitch as an opportunity to help their courage overcome their fear. Mr. Linklater said that filmmaking requires a similar in-the-moment attitude toward the odds of success and failure.

“You got to understand, I never saw ‘Boyhood’ as a risk,” Mr. Linklater said. “It was just a fun idea to play out, with the confidence that it would work. If you go all in, you get a percentage of what you put in back. Maybe you don’t get everything, but you get something.”

In the end, Mr. Linklater could never have predicted how the film would end. Mr. Coltrane remains in nearly every scene, and the film was literally built around him. “The design of the film was to meld with who he was,” Mr. Linklater said. “I knew Eller would grow up. I didn’t know how, what or exactly who he would be, but I knew he would be somebody. And I had confidence that, incrementally, I would deal with whatever reality was in my face.”

That said, he recognizes that choosing the wrong actor could have been disastrous. “I did hit the jackpot,” Mr. Linklater said. “Talk about statistical luck. He was growing into this really fascinating guy and, at the end, he looks like a rock star, too.”

Much like a child who looks up to his parents, Mr. Coltrane has spent a great deal of time observing what he called his “other family” — Mr. Linklater, Mr. Hawke and Ms. Arquette — while thinking about the type of man he wants to become. He said the experience couldn’t help changing him.

“I tend to be very cynical, and something I’m trying to take away from all this is this valuable lesson to just try everything,” Mr. Coltrane said at the end of a long soft-spoken digression. “Now, I just try to appreciate every moment, because reality is happening all the time, whether you’re paying attention or not.”

A version of this article appears in print on July 6, 2014, Section AR, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: Casting Time as a Lead Character. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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