After the 12-year labour of love that went into making Boyhood, you might expect Richard Linklater to run a mile from the notion of a sequel, but according to the director, he is growing increasingly open to the idea.
“For the first six months of the year, my answer to that was absolutely not,” says Linklater in an interview with Jeff Goldsmith. “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 it.”
Of course, it all hangs on whether Linklater decides he has anything new to say about that period of life, having dealt with it previously in some of his other work…
“I’ve dealt with this before,” he admits. “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 because you want to work with your friends, you gotta have something really inside you you’re trying to communicate about those years. It might happen, but I dunno, it’s in the ether in the moment.”
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