Richard Linklater talks about his amazing 'Boyhood'

RICHARD Linklater told the young, unknown star of his movie "Boyhood" not to worry too much about getting famous - nobody was going to see it.

For a long time, the only people who thought that "Boyhood" was a good idea were the folks making it - Linklater, longtime collaborator Ethan Hawke and the small cast (including Linklater's own daughter and his own GTO) that assembled in Austin a few days a year to shoot the ongoing story of a lad growing up in small-town Texas.

"Boyhood" was so commercially far-fetched, nobody wanted to finance the project - Linklater's experimental attempt to film the same actor (Ellar Coltrane) once a year from age six to 18, assembling the footage into a coming-of-age movie about a boy who grows from boy to young man in the span of two and a half hours.

Linklater remembers blank stares at pitch meetings.

A coming-of-age movie - without vampires?

"You can't describe it in a sentence," he said. "The typical pitch is something that people can completely grasp beforehand, they can see the movie in their head beforehand, and this is something you can't see. So, I was kind of warning Ellar that no one was ever going to see it."

The director knows whereof he speaks. Linklater is a true independent filmmaker, and no Michael Bay when it comes to box office. He had a hit with "School of Rock," but his "Sunrise" trilogy and the wonderful "Bernie" played to modest audiences.

"Boyhood," though, is getting the kind of phenomenal reviews that seem to be pushing the movie into new territory for Linklater (it's playing to packed houses in very limited release; it goes wider today).

"We were worried that the idea of filming this movie over such a long period of time would be weird for people. But that's actually what's resonating with people. The conception of the movie is what everybody finds interesting."

And once people, persuaded by the unique premise, get into the theater and see the movie, many are profoundly moved. Something to do with the way the time-lapse growing-up-before-your-eyes bends cinematic time in new ways.

"There's this multigenerational refraction of time throughout the movie, and it all has to do with the way the movie makes you feel," Linklater said. "It gets to what parents know about life - it does go by quick, doesn't it?

"I think the film is this kind of incredible record of how we value time as it slips away. The way it feels as an adult is very different than the way it feels as a child. It's funny, Ethan summed it up perfectly. He was watching a cut of the movie, and he's looking at his performances, and he's like, 'I get it. They're growing up. We're aging.' "

Which sounds obvious, but what makes "Boyhood" unique is the way you feel these sensations in the condensed arena of the 160-minute movie - which, trust me, will flicker by in an instant. (You know, like your youth.)

I asked Linklater if there was a moment in the edit-as-you-go process when he knew he had lightning in a bottle.

"It was only two, three years in that I felt it was definitely going to work. And it was good to get that little affirmation, because the cast was making this tremendous commitment," said Linklater who operated without contingencies. If anyone quit, or changed their minds, the project was sunk.

"It was important that everybody had a reason to stay invested. And the momentum only built over the years. The last years were really special; we'd look at each other and say, 'This is the best year yet,' and I think every time we were right."