Richard Linklater has admitted for the first time that he could be tempted to make a sequel to Boyhood.
The coming-of-age drama was filmed over 12 years, charting the life of a young boy up until the start of his college years, and received universally positive reviews from critics.
Linklater was initially sceptical when asked if he would revisit Mason’s story in his twenties, but says that in the last six months he has started getting ideas on how a sequel might be structured.
“This film first met its audience exactly a year ago and for the first six months of the year, my answer to that was: ‘Absolutely not,'” Linklater told Jeff Goldsmith’s Q&A podcast.
“This was 12 years, it was first grade through 12th grade; it was about getting out of high school. I had no idea about another story, there’s nothing to say. It hadn’t crossed my mind.
“But I don’t know if it’s been a combination of finally feeling that this is over or being asked a similar question a bunch over the last year, that I thought, well, I wake up in the morning thinking: ‘The 20s are pretty formative, you know?'” he said. “That’s where you really become who you’re going to be. It’s one thing to grow up and go to college, but it’s another thing to … So, I will admit my mind has drifted towards [the idea of a sequel].”
A second film would not necessarily follow the same structure as the original, insisted Linklater.
“The 12 years came out of school [structure]. It wouldn’t have to be 12 years. It wouldn’t have to be… I mean, who knows. I mean, if I learned anything on the ‘Before’ trilogy [Before Sunrise, Sunset and Midnight] it took five years to realise that Jesse and Celine were still alive and had anything to say. This one would probably be more accelerated, but who knows.
“I can tell it’s happening [in the same way] because I start coming up with ideas about [that time period]. The same way I thought about Boyhood: just these random little memories about being in my 20s that might seem insignificant on paper, but telling and important. And developmentally, like, ‘oh, that was kind of a moment’; a lot of moments from the fraught 20s.”
Linklater did say, however, that he would not get the Boyhood cast back together unless the idea merited it.
“I would love to keep working with this cast and I think we all would.
“But that can’t be the primary reason to do it. You always need something to say. You can’t do it just cause you want to work with your friends, you gotta have something really inside you you’re trying to communicate about those years. I might happen, but I dunno, it’s in the ether in the moment.”
Boyhood lost out to Birdman for Best Picture at Sunday night’s Academy Awards, with Patricia Arquette picking up the film’s only statuette for Best Supporting Actress.
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