Writer-director Richard Linklater's "Boyhood" opens in New Orleans this Friday (Aug. 8, 2014), and it can be expected to be with us for a while. It's already won major awards at the Berlin, Seattle and South by Southwest film festivals -- and, as critically acclaimed as it is, it can be expected to be a constant presence throughout the 2014-2015 award season. In the meantime, here are five cool things to know about Linklater's film before heading to theaters:
5. The long play. "Boyhood" is nothing if not ambitious. Linklater started production in 2002, shooting for a few days a year for 12 years so audiences could see his characters -- and, by extension, his actors -- grow up before their eyes. Lead actor Ellar Coltrane, who was 6 years old when the shoot started and 18 at its conclusion, admits he didn't really understand what he was getting into. "It wasn't possible for me to fathom it," he says in the film's production notes. "Twelve years was already twice my lifetime at the point when we started. It's hard enough to contemplate the next 12 years now for me, or probably at any age, but then it wasn't possible. It wasn't for several years that it really began to sink in just what the film was or why it was so different."
4. Nimble, but not necessarily quick. There's a reason there aren't too many narrative films around that have been shot over a 12-year period. First there's the logistics -- what happens if one of your stars backs out eight years in? -- but also there's the havoc that the years can wreak on the overall story, which in this case was fleshed out year by year. "It was like taking a great leap of faith into the future," Linklater says. "Most artistic endeavors strive to have a certain amount of control, but there were elements of this that would be out of anyone's control. There were going to be physical and emotional changes, and that was embraced. I was ready for it to be a constant collaboration between the initial ideas I had for the piece and the reality of the changes happening to the actors along the way. In a way, the film became a collaboration with time itself, and time can be a pretty good collaborator, if not always a predictable one."
3. Close to home. To find the right child to play the film's lead kid, Linklater auditioned young actors for the role and settled on Austin native Coltrane. To play Coltrane's on-screen big sister, however, the filmmaker didn't have to look quite as far. She is played by Linklater's real-life daughter, Lorelei, who was 9 at the start of filming.
2. The name game. The original title for Linklater's film wasn't "Boyhood." Rather, it was "12 Years." Then the New Orleans-shot Oscar film "12 Years a Slave" came along, and Linklater had to reconsider or risk generating confusion. "I was like, not '10 Years a Slave?' Not '15 Years a Slave?' Are you kidding me?!" Linklater said with a laugh in a recent Variety write-up. "I was like, OK, the world is telling us to stay out of numerical titles."
1. "The Black Album." In "Boyhood," actor Ethan Hawke's father character gives his son a homemade gift on the occasion of the boy's 15th birthday: a "secret" Beatles album. Titled "The Black Album," he made it -- he explains -- by taking the best post-Beatles work of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, and arranging them in a three-disc set intended to function as a whole. The album isn't necessarily fiction, according to Buzzfeed. In fact, Hawke made a version of it for his real-life daughter, Maya, complete with liner notes that inspired the movie's version: "Mason, I wanted to give you something for your birthday that money couldn't buy, something that only a father could give a son, like a family heirloom. This is the best I could do."