Take all the time you need!
Director Richard Linklater’s next film will take 20 years to complete — here’s why we should all be patient
WHEN RICHARD LINKLATER’S latest film was announced, a few sceptical eyebrows were raised. The filmmaker, who famously took 12 years to make Boyhood, will now spend a full two decades making Merrily We Roll Along, an adaptation of the musical by Stephen Sondheim and George Furth, which is set across a 20-year period. Many corners of the film world carped: why bother? When there’s deageing CGI as seen in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, or make-up and prosthetics at hand... what’s the point?
But this surely misunderstands the artist. Watch any of Richard Linklater’s films, from Slacker to the Before trilogy, and you will understand why he is not interested in CGI. This is not a filmmaker accustomed to green-screens and dots on faces. He is a student of filmmakers like Eric Rohmer and Robert Bresson, minimalist directors who emphasised realism over flashy genre stylings, and took their time with long, lingering dialogue between characters. Even in his more visually experimental films like Waking Life or A Scanner Darkly, he keeps the foundation of a kind of cinéma vérité throughout. Boyhood allowed him to tell an enduring story with this philosophy. It was, really, the first coming-of-age film that actually showed its characters quite literally come of age. Even with the advances in technology, audiences recognise the difference.
But even beyond the superficial effect, Merrily We Roll Along will benefit from reality seeping into his fiction, as Linklater lets his story develop organically over the years. This kind of drip-feed filmmaking technique was the real, astonishing value of Boyhood, which evolved over the years, incorporating the cast and crew’s lives as they went. Linklater encouraged his lead actors to participate in the writing process, bringing their experiences of the previous 12 months to the screen. That rich, authentic tapestry of life, like “timelapse photography of a human being”, as Ethan Hawke put it, will be what makes Merrily We Roll Along so unique.
It’s no mean feat, and a huge commitment — Linklater will be pushing 80 by the time he’s done. But he has the patience for it. We should have some patience, too.