Richard Linklater's Daughter Wanted Her Character Killed Off In Boyhood

There's ambition and then there's Richard Linklater shooting "Boyhood" with the same core cast from 2002 to 2013.

The "Before" trilogy director's Oscar-winning 2014 drama follows Texan boy Mason Evans Jr. (Ellar Coltrane) as he goes from age six to 18. It's a journey that takes Mason and his family from the highs of camping trips and the midnight release of a new "Harry Potter" book to the lows of having an abusive, alcoholic stepfather and experiencing romantic heartbreak for the first time. Call it "boring" all you want, but Linklater's film makes for a fascinating cinematic time capsule of life in the 2000s. One could even argue it embodies what the legendary film theorist André Bazin was talking about when he asserted that photography "embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption."

Linklater, in comparison, was perfectly humble when discussing his intentions for the movie during an interview with The Guardian to mark the upcoming release of a commemorative "Boyhood" Blu-ray. "I always described it as a film about growing up," he said. "But it's also a film about parenting. It's about figuring your life out as a kid and figuring out how to parent." Indeed, "Boyhood" frequently calls attention to Mason's biological parents (Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke) as they struggle to get the hang of the whole adulting thing. This also makes it a movie one can revisit at different ages and come away with radically different interpretations, so far as your outlook on its characters is concerned.

Its director would surely agree, seeing as he himself was still "figuring out how to parent" while making "Boyhood." Having cast his real-life daughter, Lorelei Linklater, as Mason's sister Samantha, Richard Linklater wound up getting a crash-course in the challenges of employing actual kids for your decade-in-the-making movie.

When it came to "Boyhood," Richard Linklater admitted to The Guardian he used to joke Ethan Hawke would have to step in and direct it, if he died before finishing the film. In the real world, however, the closest the film came to flying off the rails was when Lorelei Linklater asked if her character could be killed off part-way through production. Richard Linklater explained:

 "That little extrovert kid who you see singing and dancing in the early scenes? Well, suddenly she hits puberty and everything changes. So one day she asked me: 'Can you kill me off?' Like an actor leaving a TV soap. 'It'll be a memorable episode and then I'll be off the show.'"

For all the drama that transpires in "Boyhood," Linklater declined to go that route, telling his daughter, "No, that's a little too dramatic for what I have in mind." That doesn't mean it would've been unrealistic, mind you, as, sadly, plenty of people in the real world have had to deal with tragedies of that magnitude growing up. In the end, like any single movie, "Boyhood" is limited in its ability to encompass the entirety of the human experience ... which is a polite way of saying it's a film about a middle-class, seemingly cishet white family from Texas, so your mileage may vary so far as how much you feel it represents your own life. Even so, that it's able to capture so much of its actors' real-life coming-of-age journeys though a fictionalized lens as poignantly as it does it a testament to what Linklater and his collaborators were able to pull off here.

"Boyhood" will release in the 4K disc format on March 27, 2023.