The Toughest Scene I Wrote: Richard Linklater (“Boyhood”)

Once again, Vulture does screenwriters a solid:

Over the next few weeks, Vulture will speak to the screenwriters behind 2014’s most acclaimed movies about the scenes they found most difficult to crack. Which pivotal sequences underwent the biggest transformations on their way from script to screen?

In this article, Richard Linklater discusses a pivotal scene just before the movie’s final sequence.

If there was one scene that felt like it was looming over all those years, it was the good-bye scene. I knew that the last shot of the movie would be Mason at college meeting someone — I had that in my mind for ten years, and I was looking forward to that — but I knew that the scene before it had to be the emotional break of the movie, when son parted from mom. It’s where Boyhood kind of ends emotionally, although spiritually, it continues.

So much of this movie was personal, and I had this image in my head for all these years of what my mom looked like when I said good-bye and went to college. She was just sitting there at a table alone, smoking a cigarette and uncharacteristically quiet. I could tell that she was very emotional, but she didn’t say that much. I’d had that image in my head during the 11 years of making this movie, but as we got closer to shooting it, I realized that I needed to flesh it out more with words. People say to me, “Did you have this scripted in advance?” and I say, “No, why would I do that?” We needed to live those 11 years first and experience them, not only in our lives, but let the characters live them, too.

For the rest of the article, go here. Kudos to Vulture for this annual series which puts the spotlight on screenwriters.