An Evening with Richard Linklater

The Film Society is thrilled to honor Richard Linklater with the 2014 Founder’s Directing Award. The event includes an onstage interview and a selection of clips from his notable directing career, which will be followed by a screening of Boyhood.

Richard Linklater charted the evolution of a relationship over the course of three films with his beloved Before series; now the filmmaker ups the ante with this bold, brilliant experiment in time-lapse cinema. In 2002, Linklater started constructing a fictional story centered on a seven-year-old boy named Ellar Coltrane. For 12 years, Linklater, Coltrane, actors Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette and several nonprofessionals (including the director’s daughter Lorelei) got together once a year, working out a loose storyline and incorporating his young star’s experiences into the mix. Stepdads come and go; ditto a girlfriend. Time is marked by fluctuating weights and heights, as well as a jukebox’s worth of pop songs. Not much happens…just life, in all its messy glory. A boy becomes a man before one’s very eyes. The result is nothing short of a masterpiece, an extraordinary collaborative gamble that succeeds in charting the rocky terrain of childhood like no other movie. Linklater puts his laissez-faire style of filmmaking to perfect use here, dropping in seemingly random snapshots of young adulthood and turning the “banal” moments of American adolescence-hanging out with friends, talking trash, working slave-wage jobs into something transcendental. It’s impossible not to watch Coltrane go from baby-faced kid to emo-brooding teen without thinking about one’s own journey. They- and we- grow up so fast. 
-D. Fear (USA, 2014, 162 min) 

The award will be presented to Linklater at Film Society Awards Night, Thursday, May 1 at The Regency Center.