Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood” was universally celebrated in 2014, a total critical triumph that confirmed Linklater as one of the great humanist filmmakers of his generation.
A wildly ambitious film about childhood and the passage to adulthood, “Boyhood” was filmed in real time, or almost, over 12 years, between 2002 and 2013.
A decade later, Linklater is telling Empire that he’d love to make a sequel:
There were things we could have done, opportunities we didn't really take...As far as I know, it would be possible to just pick up the story of Mason's life, at age 30 or something. Who knows?
The film ends with Mason, played by Ellar Coltrane, going to college. Linklater hints that the time gap of Mason in his 20s, is a scenario that has already been shown in his other youthful films:
"I know what happens next - in fact, it's depicted in a bunch of movies I've done about college life… Like Before Sunrise, or Everybody Wants Some."
Rather, since Mason is now close to 30, and college is all but a distant memory, the sequel would have to do with the protagonist’s very real adult life, work and family.
Linklater, who has already dealt in sequels with the ‘Before’ trilogy, is also dead-serious about this potential continuation of “Boyhood” and says it’s been lingering in his head for quite some time now.
"This project still breathes in me. It has not evaporated over time. Admittedly, it is a document on the period of 2002 to 2013, but for me, it was never really about that. My goal , probably my biggest project in this world is to show in an entertaining and hopefully watchable way what life is like. Do you know what I mean? To be a human at any point in time."
For the time being, Linklater has “Hitman” waiting to be released this fall. He’s also in year 3 of shooting his 20-year film “Merrily We Roll Along,” an adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s famous play.