(Credit: Netflix)

Richard Linklater‘s 2014 film Boyhood elevates the coming-of-age genre by literally capturing the physical growth and ageing of its characters over an extended filmmaking period. Production started in May 2002 and concluded just a year before the movie’s release.

Around his 40th birthday, Linklater had decided to make a movie reflecting on childhood for the first time in his career. But when it came to coming with a script idea, he decide on one specific part of childhood to hone in on. “I couldn’t find that moment,” he told Film4 at the time of the film’s release. “You know, you’ve got the limitation of the age of the actor, so nothing seemed worthy of a film about one little moment.”

And so, he decided to do something “impractical” and “crazy”. He would make a movie about the whole of childhood, and film it over the course of a child’s entire development from infancy to adulthood. He cast unknown seven-year-old Ella Coltrane in the main role, alongside his own daughter Loreli Linklater and seasoned actors Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke.

Linklater’s plan was to shoot “a little bit every year” until he had the final movie, with each year of his characters’ lives reflected in the real ages of their actors. In a similar way to how Michael Apted’s British documentary series Up charts the lives of its real-life protagonists. Aside from shooting days, Boyhood’s production team could spend months each year behind the scenes and in the editing room, ensuring the footage and the narrative had a coherent flow.

So how long did it take to make Boyhood?

Before he had to change it for marketing reasons, Linklater had initially settled on the movie title “12 Years”, because that’s how long it took to shoot the picture. The story is also set over a 12-year period, as we see the protagonist Mason Evans grow from a six-year-old to a college freshman. The Oscar-winning film 12 Years a Slave put paid to that idea, though, and the title was changed to Boyhood.

Linklater has explained how he “only wanted 10-15 minutes a year” of screen-time. Accordingly, “it ended up about a three-day shoot every year.” The writer-director would take his time developing the next part of the story in detail between these annual shoots, in conjunction with his principal actors. “I had the luxury to think about what goes on that year.”

A little over three days of shooting per year added up to a total of 45 days for the entire movie, on a production budget of just $2.4million. That’s two weeks less than the average number of days it takes to shoot a Hollywood movie within a one-year timeframe.

Linklater’s idea may have been outside the box, but he made it watertight, both in artistic and in technical terms. And he was rewarded with a final result that more than achieves the realism he was aiming for.