I doubt this has ever been done before. Ellar Coltrane was cast in this role at six and continued until he was 18. There weren’t that many actual filming days. It was just spread out over twelve years.
I hope the film is good. It would suck putting 12 years of your life in a crappy film. 
Ethan Hawke discusses his role as the dad in the film.
The film lives up to the hype and then some. Easily the best film released this year, but also one of the best films I’ve ever seen. It’s about how the accumulation of mundane moments in life make us who we are, not huge “cinematic” changes, so some people are already complaining that it’s boring, but that misses the point entirely. It’s a 3 hour Linklater film, after all.
I can’t wait until I can see this film; it sounds amazing. Linklater misses the mark for me more often than he hits it, but this sounds like it’s worth a chance.
Note that there’s an important mistake in this article:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/ar...y-amazing.html
The film budget was $200,000 per year over 12 years for a total of $2,400,000. The article claims that the budget was £120,000 (which is $200,000) total. Here’s the box office and budget page for the film in Wikipedia:
It’s low budget in comparison with most Hollywood films. Hats off to the actors for making a 12 year commitment. I’m looking forward to seeing this one.
Makes me think of the Seven Up series that’s been interviewing the same set of children once every seven years since 1964. It’s a truly fascinating series of documentaries. Neil, in particular, was surprising.
Saw it today. I thought it was phenomenal. Best film I’ve seen in years.
Of movies that have at least 100 reviews, it is now the highest reviewed/rated film of all time on Rotten Tomatoes, and holds a 99/100 on metacritic, which is essentially unheard of.
I had never heard of it until this thread! This isn’t normally something I’d ever want to go and watch… but with such universal acclaim, I think I really need to see this.
We went to see it and loved it. I don’t want to rave too much over it b/c that will alter expectations. It was sweet and moving and funny and sad and I’ll probably have to see it again. When the movie ended, I thought of that line from Huckleberry Finn about how it had to stop then, because if it kept going, it would start being the story of a man, rather than the story of a boy. ( I may have mangled that a bit.)
An odd amazing experience to watch that little boy grow up. (Arquette and Hawke are great too, and it’s easy to forget their work in it.)
To a certain extent, we saw something like this with the Harry Potter franchise. It was a series of movies rather than a single one. But they cast actors at young ages (Emma Watson was 9 and Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint were 11) for a series that was filmed over the course of ten years.
I’ve seen Harry Potter mentioned in a couple of reviews, but there’s really no comparison. The audience also aged 10 years over the course of the series, so it didn’t have anywhere near the force of this one. The only vaguely similar experience would be if 7 Up through 21 Up had been released as a single film, but even then, the difference between the documentary format and a scripted film would be pretty glaring.
Just tonight I’m seeing ads for this movie. What a unique idea. I am looking forward to seeing this, although I’ll probably not see it in a theatre.
drewtwo99 writes:
> Of movies that have at least 100 reviews, it is now the highest reviewed/rated film
> of all time on Rotten Tomatoes,
Not that it terribly matters, but no, it isn’t:
So Boyhood gets 154 fresh reviews out of 156 and The Wizard of Oz gets 100 fresh reviews out of 101, which makes The Wizard of Oz at 99.01% higher than Boyhood at 98.72%. And, of course, older movies get fewer reviews than new movies on Rotten Tomatoes. Some new movies have over 200 reviews, while The Wizard of Oz is the only pre-Internet film with over 100 reviews, I believe. Citizen Kane has 66 fresh reviews out of 66, for instance.
> and holds a 99/100 on metacritic, which is essentially unheard of.
Old movies don’t get rated on metacritic, right, which means that it’s not competing against all movies? Yes, I realize that being rated in the neighborhood of The Wizard of Oz and Citizen Kane makes Boyhood really good. I just wanted to make it clear how Rotten Tomatoes and metacritic work.
I saw it the other day with my nieces- aged 19 and 17. We loved it!
If you can see this movie with people who are close in age to the lead actor, I highly recommend it. I hadn’t thought of it beforehand, but it really adds to the experience, just noticing the things my nieces responded to as they were sitting next to me. The 19 year old is going off to college in a month, she and her sister were watching a movie that traced the timeline of their own growing up experience. Just sitting next to them during the screening made for an extra powerful experience.
I’m wondering how the filmmakers kept the young actor to themselves all of these years.
Not so surprising to me. It’s not like this was a child actor whose parents had him camped out in L.A. for pilot season every year. Linklater stays based in Texas and, even with all his successes, still takes an indie approach to film making. This was a project that was put together with close personal relationships. From interviews, I get the impression this kid’s parents were into the idea because Linklater was committed to this kind of relationship. I don’t think they were stage parents who had goals of launching their child into showbiz.
The actor himself said the experience was like “summer camp”. Seems he’s lived an entirely normal life with this as a pretty noninvasive extracurricular.
It’s also important to note that the reviews for old films are not contemporaneous–they are modern reviews looking back and “reviewing” films that are already accepted as classics. Rest assured, if they took reviews from 1939-1941, neither title would rate nearly so high. That’s hindsight and the canon talking.
The only vaguely similar experience? How about Linklater’s own Before trilogy, also starring Hawke? The characters aged nine years between movies, just as there was actually nine years between the movies in real life. It’s even mentioned in the interview with Hawke linked in the second post of this thread.
I’m not denigrating Boyhood, just pointing out that Linklater has used similar ideas in other works.
I can’t speak to the audience experience since I haven’t yet seen Boyhood. I certainly plan to see it.
Makes sense. For that matter, maybe they wouldn’t have minded had he become a little bit famous part way thru that timeframe.