A child in time

Though a scripted, fiction film, Boyhood was made in installments over 12 years and captured the actor's own growth from age seven to age 18

"I don't want to live my life through a screen," says 17-year-old Mason Jr in a scene in Richard Linklater's beautiful new film, Boyhood. Within the narrative, Mason - a sensitive young man with an artistic temperament - is complaining about the pressures of staying visible on Facebook and other social media; about wanting to switch off from them. But at an extra-narrative level too, the line is resonant - because young Ellar Coltrane, who (exquisitely) plays the role, has lived so much of his life on the screen created by this remarkable project. Though a scripted, fiction film, Boyhood was made in installments over 12 years and captured Coltrane's own growth from age seven to age 18. In the finished work, when Mason speaks about how futures can seem pre-ordained, one hears an echo of the actor who, as a child barely comprehending the scale of what he was getting into, became part of Linklater's grand vision.

Time, and what it does to people and their relationships, is one of the big themes of Linklater's cinema, most famously demonstrated in the three "Before" films - Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight - made over 18 years with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. But one difference between watching Hawke and Delpy age over the course of those movies and watching Coltrane grow up in Boyhood is that the latter was so young and vulnerable when it all started. In a recent interview he said he barely has any memory of the first two to three years of shooting. One might say that the concept of "performance" (which implies a certain self-awareness to begin with) doesn't apply in the normal sense to his early scenes.

To a degree, that is true for all child actors, and there is a danger of making the story of Boyhood's filming sound more dramatic than it was. Though scenes were shot every year, each schedule took only a few days or weeks; Coltrane wasn't like a compliant version of Jim Carrey's Truman in The Truman Show, under a camera's scrutiny for every minute of his growing-up years. He continued to live his own life, as the other cast members did. Still, it couldn't have been a quite "normal" childhood. And though Boyhood is an absorbing film on its own terms, while watching it I kept thinking about the effect it must have had on the actor.

What is it like to be the subject of such an experiment from an early age? How does your own personality get shaped by and subsumed in the character you are playing, and how does the role affect your own future real-life decisions? In his "young adult" scenes, Coltrane projects such a mature personality that it is hard to imagine that in real life he might be a different, more boisterous person. In his interviews too, he sounds like Mason, and some of his own interests - in photography, for instance - were absorbed into the film's script. When Linklater picked the six-year-old all those years ago, he must have seen the seeds of the qualities he wanted for his protagonist. But could the very process of being filmed every year have contributed to making Coltrane more inward-looking, more understanding of creative processes?

Watching the transitions in Mason's (or Ellar's) features over the film's three hours - dreaminess and reticence shifting into something like confidence, a sense of a young person becoming comfortable in his own skin - I began free-associating, thinking of other films and books. The Antoine Doinel films directed by Francois Truffaut, for example, in which Jean-Pierre Leaud played the central character from age 12 on. Michael Ondaatje's novel, The Cat's Table, in which a boy's three-week ship journey between Sri Lanka and England becomes a symbol for "the floating dream of childhood". Or even the strange career of child actor Master Mayur, who played the young version of Amitabh Bachchan so often that by the time he did it in Laawaris - as a gangly 16-year-old - he had all the expressions down pat and was performing in a pre-constructed mould.

These thoughts, though, were secondary to the experience to watching Boyhood unfold at its leisurely pace. Like much of Linklater's other work, it is driven by naturalistic conversation and by a disavowal of dramatic situations for the characters to respond to in familiar ways. This is slice-of-life storytelling at its sparest. And at the end, here is Mason/Ellar, free from the screen at last, looking liberated and unsure in equal measure as he contemplates a future that is no longer pre-ordained.

Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer