Growing up on camera: the boy who starred in a movie over 12 years

This was published 5 years ago


Nineteen-year-old Ellar Coltrane's life flashes before his eyes in director Richard Linklater's Boyhood, an audacious film experiment set across 12 years and shot in the same time frame. Well, a version of his life, anyway.

Nineteen-year-old Ellar Coltrane’s life flashes before his eyes in director Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, an audacious film experiment set across 12 years and shot in the same timeframe. Well, a version of his life, anyway.

Linklater (Before Sunrise) cast Coltrane as Mason when he was six years old, and from age seven right up to he entered college Coltrane spent several days each summer filming Boyhood. The footage has now been weaved into an ambitious, affecting and quite literal coming-of-age film, co-starring Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette as Mason's parents, which has its Australian premiere at the Sydney Film Festival on Friday night.

As the title suggests, Linklater, who has played with time in his Before series, attempts to capture the entirety of childhood and adolescence, following Mason as he moves from collecting stones as a child to getting stoned as a teenager, from elementary school through to college, and from one dysfunctional family to another as his mother moves between bad relationships. With each small jump in time we see a subtle change in Coltrane: a sharpening of the jaw, a new haircut, a smattering of zits, the protruding point of an Adam's Apple.


''It's not really like watching myself grow up, but it's something very close to that,'' Coltrane says. ''It's kind of like staring into my own soul; simultaneously horrifically embarrassing and also kind of proof that I am real, or something. That sounds funny but it's really valuable: a lot of people my age can feel artificial or inconsequential.''

Ellar Coltrane in one of the first scenes in Richard Linklater's <i>Boyhood</i>.

Ellar Coltrane in one of the first scenes in Richard Linklater's Boyhood.

Boyhood is fictional, but Coltrane and Mason seem to blur into each other. Both speak quite philosophically (see above), and when Fairfax Media meets the actor in a Sydney hotel room, he's wearing what could be the same ripped, paint-spattered jeans that Mason sports through his teenage years. As filming went on and the actor grew up, Coltrane would suggest episodes from his life and lines of dialogue that Linklater would then incorporate into the film.

Coltrane is a keen photographer, as is Mason by the end of the film. ''It's a case of what came first: the chicken or the egg?'' says producer Cathleen Sutherland, who watched her brother, an on-set stills photographer, teaching a young Coltrane to take pictures, and then watched as Mason developed an interest on photography on screen.

One significant difference between the fact and fictional boy is that the actor was mostly home-schooled. Coltrane's parents are artists – dad a musician, mum a performance artist – and Sutherland says their understanding of the filmmaking process, and the fact they had no plans to move from Austin, Texas, where the crew would be shooting, was important.

In fact, a number of practical considerations were key to the 12-year production, Sutherland says. Arquette and Hawke's characters were written as divorced from day one to avoid scheduling issues; the film needed to be refinanced every year; and Coltrane was put on a seven-year contract, the longest possible, when he was six, to secure against any sudden changes of heart. ''It was a gamble whether you could actually finish it and people would like it,'' Sutherland says. As for what she calls ''the unspoken'' – that something might have happened to one of the actors involved – Sutherland says ''it was something I said a lot of little private prayers about: please don't let anything happen, please let everyone be OK. You don't even want to think about that.''

Ellar Coltrane started shooting <i>Boyhood</i> when he was just six years old.

Ellar Coltrane started shooting Boyhood when he was just six years old.Credit:Tamara Dean

There were times when Coltrane says he was more ''indifferent'' to the project than enthused – about 14 or 15, when he didn't care much about anything – but he is happy with the overall experience. Does he ever wish he had a more "normal" childhood ... fewer cameras and parents that sent him to the local high school? ''No,'' he says, laughing. ''It makes me grateful that they didn't. I am grateful for how weird my parents are.''

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