What’s amazing about that is he gives a great performance and hasn’t really done anything else so it almost benefits the film because he wasn’t exposed?
RL: Yeah, he’s not a known actor. Along those lines, I think he had all the possible upside of being a child actor. You get to work with all these cool people, he got to work with Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke, his whole life they played his parents. He worked with me, who’s a real actor’s director. Lorelei too, they had this experience but none of the downside whereas Ethan was in Explorers when he was thirteen, you go back to school, the film opens and people are like, “Hey, you think you’re hot shit because you’re in a movie, I’m going to kick your ass.” All the crap that goes with the public elements, he didn’t have any of that, so he had the good side — the fun, the creative outlet, the expressive qualities of being an actor and the fun life project, element of it — but none of the shit. And now that it’s time for the shit, he’s a 19-year-old young man who has had time to process it.
Not only that, with all the attention it’s getting right out of the gate he can answer the question, “Who are you?”
RL: Watch the movie and you’ll get a pretty good sense of it.
Thinking about that, I was thinking at some point this shouldn’t be called Boyhood. It should just be called Life or something like that.
RL: [Laughing] I know, What is Life? No, it could be anything, it could be Parenthood, it could be Ordinary People, those are taken. Titles are tough, actually we were almost finished with the whole thing — it was last summer, last fall? — and we were like, “Should we go years, or what’s the unique thing about this? What if we called it 12 Years? Yeah, 12 Years, has there ever been a film called 12 Years?” and someone looked up and was like, “There’s a movie coming out called 12 Years a Slave,” and I said, “Well, who’s in it? What is it? Oh, Michael Fassbender, Steve McQueen…” and it’s like, “Ah fuck it, can’t use that.” [laughing]
What’s the coincidence that in the same era there’d be a film called 12 Years a Slave? Not 11 Years a Slave, not 15 Years a Slave, but 12 Years a Slave?
I was also curious about the rights for the movie in terms of music and the Harry Potter moment, I know J.K. Rowling is extremely precious about rights surrounding Harry Potter.
RL: No, we got lucky. With “Harry Potter”, they licensed us the music, the —
Did you have to show them the movie?
RL: I think some people saw a clip and I think we got this kind of [nods head].
I can’t see why you wouldn’t but…
RL: Yeah, but you never know. I had backups for almost everything. Like even when the college girl is playing Pink Floyd, it’s like, I’ve been down this road enough, like, okay, we’ve got that, now let’s do the Townes Van Zandt song that I think I can clear if that one doesn’t. So we had a deep bench on almost every cue, Okay, you can’t let your song in the movie? I’ve got five more.
But still, everything was a pain in post to clear things. There was a little bit of not getting the rights to the “poster on the wall” kind of crap.
And you just CG’d over it?
RL: Yeah, we had a joke twelve years ago — eleven years, ten, nine, over the years — it would be like, Oh, there’s that, but twelve years from now we’ll just… we had all these prognostications of how easy in the future it would be to “fix” things.
I come from the film era where if there’s a mic in the shot you have to rotoscope it out and it’s super-expensive so you can’t use [the shot]. If there’s a reflection, you can’t use it. Things like that, it’s such a precise thing and now, that theoretical thing we were joking about did come to pass and it was so easy to Oh, the NFL won’t let us use that poster in the bowling alley? Fuck ’em. [makes a screeching noise] Done.
So, you mentioned Fanny & Alexander and I think this pertains to the conversation, which is what films stuck out to you as a child that might have inspired, number one, your approach to cinema now?
RL: Well, the films that I liked as a kid weren’t kid films really. They were like 2001, there weren’t a lot of kid films… or maybe there were–
What age were you seeing 2001?
RL: Seven.
So you’re just like a mild genius then? Were you explaining it to people? [laughing]
RL: No, at that time it was a phenomenon, everyone went, of all ages. That’s what’s so amazing about that film, kids went, old people went, it was like watching the moon landing or something. Everyone went. Isn’t that interesting?
When I was a kid, I lived in a town where a new movie came every Friday and we would just watch it. I think the most I ever just loved a movie — when I was like ten or eleven — was the John Wayne movie The Cowboys. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, I want to see it again. I would have been on the younger spectrum of those boys and it just seemed like, Wow, hang out with John Wayne, you know, even though he gets killed, which traumatized me as a kid. Even when Bruce Dern is doing well I have to go, You know you did shoot John Wayne in the back, I can’t totally forgive you.
But you know, on [Boyhood] I didn’t really reference other kid movies at all–
Except for Star Wars, which is great by the way.
RL: Isn’t that interesting. And it’s one of those things, you throw out there and you go, “I think there’s a lot of Star Wars rumbling.” Even as we shot that, years ahead of the announcement, several years ago, but you kind of throw down with the cultural reference and you kind of see what happens with it and it gets kind of a knowing laugh now, but at the time it was very serious.
There was that Star Wars computer game he was playing, that he was kind of obsessed with and that was about the time Ellar was really coming into his own, and I always knew the movie would kind of fuse with who he was at some point and that’s a good example.
It’s almost like the
magical thinking of a kid
to think you havemore control than you do
One thing I’m really surprised about, and it started with me never understand why Warner Bros. never picked up Before Midnight having the home video rights to both Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, is when it comes to Boyhood, did major studios stay away or did IFC jump on it?
RL: Well, IFC financed it.
Oh really? I didn’t know that.
RL: Yeah, they gave me $200,000 a year to do it. They earned it. Back then they weren’t a distributor, but they were just kind of producing and had their cable thing, but I had down Waking Life and Tape with them and Jonathan Sehring just took a leap.
No kidding…
RL: Yeah, I mean that’s heroic. He deserves film executive of the year for me, or the decade or the century. Because I would lay the idea out to artists — Ethan, Patricia — and they’re like “Cool! Oh think of the storytelling possibilities!” but you lay it out to a producer or a business person and their eyes glaze over and they’re like, “How? You’re asking me to put in money, but not see it for thirteen years?” Even young producers, I’m dealing with these very young producer-type people I knew and I’m like, “What are you going to be doing twelve years from now? You’re going to be trying to produce cool movies, this will be one of them.” And no one got it, but Jonathan at IFC was like, “You know, that could be cool, that sounds pretty great.” And he sort of trusted me.
And were you checking in on a yearly basis?
RL: Yeah, every year we’d beg for our $200,000 and never got any more. At that point they were producing a lot of movies and over the years they started producing less and less movies. They’re business model changed and I’d run into Jonathan and he’d be like, “Well, we have one film in production,” and kind of glare at me and I’d be like, “It’s going to be cool John, I promise!” And I would show him footage over the years, but he just sort of trusted me.
But studios could have– we showed it at Sundance and others probably could have come aboard.
Yeah, and it surprises me that–
RL: Are you really surprised they don’t want to distribute Before Midnight?
I guess we could get really negative, but yeah, when Warner Bros. didn’t jump on Before Midnight, yeah, it surprised me. Because you have the marketing opportunities, the Blu-ray version of the entire trilogy and you look at what Her did and I think there’s so much more that could have happened there.
RL: Yeah, a studio could have… it’s kind of sad because a lot of people at Warner Bros., they actually saw Boyhood and loved it and they were all like, “Oh, we loved it and maybe we can do…” and then they just never did anything. They’re just being nice and that’s how much the industry has changed.
Now along those lines, you seem to me to be a director that sticks to and does what he wants. How much of a heart ache is that?
RL: Oh, you pay the transgressor’s price, make no mistake, if they think you’re not in it for the money or for them. I’m in the same boat with every film. With Bernie I’m like, “You know, it’s a Jack Black comedy, I really think audiences will like it.”
School of Rock, come on!
RL: Yeah, last time we [worked together] that turned okay. It’s just “glass half empty”.
Because now I’m reading you’re having a hard time financing the Dazed and Confused sequel.
RL: Yeah, that’s actually a Dazed and Confused sequel and a Boyhood sequel. How’s that? It’s actually an interesting sequel to both films, but it wouldn’t have any of the same actors. But, a spiritual sequel.
