Richard Linklater: “I was really afraid for my mom to watch Boyhood” – LFF Screen Talk

Fittingly for a Screen Talk with a director with two features playing at this year’s BFI London Film Festival, moderator Ian Haydn Smith joked that clip selection for the event was tricky because Richard Linklater has “made too many bloody films”. The conversation was wide-ranging but unsurprisingly favoured the pillars of Linklater’s career, such as the Before trilogy, over deeper cuts – though the man himself made sure to bring up his bank robber tale The Newton Boys (1998) when there was a miscount of how many films he’s made with fellow Texan Matthew McConaughey.

The prolific filmmaker was on characteristically amiable form throughout, getting early laughs from an opening defence of his new movie when coming on stage after the audience saw a clip from Nouvelle Vague (2025), his chronicle of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960). The scene includes a gag where director Roberto Rossellini (Laurent Mothe), visiting the Cahiers du cinéma office, swipes several sandwiches before joining Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) for a drive. As Linklater explained, the party at the magazine’s office was being thrown for Rossellini, so he had a right to those sandwiches.

On the subject of naming the film after the French New Wave rather than a reference to Breathless, Linklater said, “I called it Nouvelle Vague because it’s about a community. That’s what I think is so important for cinema. Films don’t just spring out of nowhere. Every filmmaker, even if it’s you and your handful of friends making the film, that’s a community. You love films. I wanted to show how it comes out of cinephiles [coming] together and [getting] excited.”

Further clips shown on the NFT1 screen included a taste of fellow LFF title Blue Moon (2025), about celebrated lyricist Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke); a long, unbroken take of Jack Black laying out gig plans for a class of kids in School of Rock (2003); and scenes of Hawke and Julie Delpy as Jesse and Céline in Before Sunrise (1995) and Waking Life (2001), respectively. One highlight package collected two car-based conversation scenes from Slacker (1990) and Dazed and Confused (1993). “This is a different world,” Linklater said of the latter high-school comedy’s making, “that Universal would give some punk who made an indie film $6 million to make his next one. But they liked the script and the idea. I think they didn’t realise there wasn’t really a story for a while, until it was finished. They did like it, but it was weird. It’s just a pure character piece; you’re hanging out with these people. The genre I’ve been tagged with is the ‘hangout movie’. But that’s life. Why can’t cinema be that?”

Accompanying the Slacker and Dazed and Confused scenes in the same package was a sequence where five of the leads of Everybody Wants Some!! (2016), including recent regular collaborator Glen Powell, sing along to the Sugarhill Gang’s ‘Rapper’s Delight’ as it blasts from car speakers. That film is Linklater’s spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused (set in the following decade with different characters), although – as the discussion suggested – as it was Linklater’s first movie after Boyhood (2014) there’s the sense it’s also continuing that film: Boyhood ends with the boy arriving at college as a first year, while Everybody Wants Some!! tracks another young man navigating the freshman experience.

Whether it’s the crucial nine-year gaps between each instalment of the Before trilogy or the 12-year production of Boyhood, Linklater is known as one of cinema’s great experimenters with the passage of time. He stressed that his projects involving years-hopping principal photography have only done so as inventive solutions to storytelling hurdles, never as the original idea behind the projects. This includes the upcoming (but not soon) musical adaptation Merrily We Roll Along, which is being filmed across 20 years as the cast ages appropriately – a third of it has apparently been shot.

Before questions from the audience, Boyhood chat took up much of the talk’s closing stretch. “Once you go into your own life, you can pull out all the fun things that ever happen,” Linklater said of seeding parts of his own 1960s and 1970s childhood into a 2000s and 2010s-set coming-of-age story. “And the horrible things.”

“It doesn’t make you seem less creative that you can’t just pull things out of your head, naturally,” he continued on the subject of autobiographical cinema. “[François] Truffaut was obsessed that it happened to somebody. He wasn’t obsessed with [stories] having happened to him, just that it happened to someone, that it was from the real world.”

“I was really afraid for my mom to watch Boyhood,” he said of Boyhood’s more upsetting autobiographical resonances. “Because it was her, it was those marriages. And she didn’t seem to see it. She’s like, ‘Oh, I remember that [house] move! I said there’s gonna be a pool at the apartment complex.’ She just thought it was lovely. Oh, okay, [and] the stepfather?! My sisters say, ‘Yeah, we went to therapy, you made a movie.’”

Richard Linklater was talking at the 69th BFI London Film Festival.