Boyhood
Just when it seemed like Boyhood’s Richard Linklater was done with the film that took twelve years to shoot, he’s recently announced the possibility that Boyhood may get an unlikely sequel. While the first film followed the story of a boy growing up into a young adult, Linklater has admitted that the story of this man’s journey into adulthood during his 20’s could be an equally compelling project for the director.
Although Linklater has flat out rejected the idea of a follow up film to Boyhood in the past, he recently expressed his interest in continuing Mason’s story after college. He recently told Jeff Goldsmith during a Q&A Podcast, as reported by The Playlist, that he’d be open to the idea of filming a second installment of his Oscar winning film.
“To be honest… 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. This was twelve 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?’ 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 [this idea for a sequel].”
Boyhood
However nothing’s set in stone, and with his new film That’s What I’m Talking About coming to theaters this upcoming year, perhaps his ambitions for Boyhood 2 will be forgotten. In addition, Linklater doesn’t want to be derivative of his previous works, and wants to make sure he has something to say before he decides to say it.
“I’ve dealt with this before… I have, in my movies, touched on people in their 20s. So to what degree I’ll be going over certain territories again—I dunno, It’s impossible to say what may or may not come of 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.”
Although the chances of Boyhood getting a sequel are slim, we can’t help but get excited over the potential for a second decade-long project by Linklater which, hopefully, will win more Oscars than Boyhood did.