Directing with wolves

It's all about making a spectacle

The movie is fiction but its power is as a document to life. To represent aging, Hollywood has long employed a barrage of techniques, but those tools seemed artificial to the independent filmmaker whose Before trilogy (which checks in on a romance every eight or nine years) also chronicles the unexpected twists of time.

Instead, Boyhood was made in just 39 shooting days, albeit ones spread out annually over a dozen years. Linklater edited as he went, rewriting to tweak the largely preplanned story to include changes in Coltrane and the wider world.

Coltrane effectively grows up on camera. Watching himself through his early teenage years, Coltrane acknowledges, can be brutal: "It's like staring into my own soul."

"Everyone kind of wonders how you change, day to day, much less over years," says Coltrane. "You have this idea of you as a child being very different from who you are when you grow up. But really, that's one of the most terrifying parts of this - that I'm the same person."

And that, in some ways, is the revelation of Boyhood - that while we all evolve and mature through time, we are essentially who we are, both child and parent. Our lives aren't defined by the big dramatic moments usually highlighted in movies, but flow more naturally.

"It's kind of comforting in a way to see it all together like that," says Coltrane. "It kind of forces me to accept myself, for better or worse."

Much of Boyhood is keenly observed moments like Mason shoving rocks in a pencil sharpener or being annoyed by his sister singing Britney Spears (music moves chronologically in the movie). Mason's mom goes through a series of unsuccessful relationships; his dad drifts in and out, taking the kids bowling or to post-Obama election signs.