That Richard Linklater is one sneaky fella. Here we thought he was shit out of luck, what with the plugs being pulled on his various projects left and right, and then he lets it slip to a Collider correspondent that he’s got a long-simmering project with Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette simmering on the back burner. Apparently, the 13-years-in-the-making project is about childhood, with Hawke as the eventually-divorced dad and Arquette as the mother, and Linklater has filmed it on eight separate occasions, including as recently as last week. The filmmaker wasn’t psyched that IMDB listed the project, because now he has to answer questions about the project that’s still in the writing process.
Linklater tells Collider that he, “wanted to make a film about childhood but couldn’t pick one specific moment.” The long-gestating film is a constant work in progress over a significant amount of time, and Linklater seems to embrace this passage of time as a contribution to the film’s evolution. In fact, the child actor in question was cast at age 6 and is now 14 years old. He says,
“Every year I get a year to kind of gestate that year. I always think, 7th grade,what’s going on given the history. It’s set in a contemporary setting and I playoff what we did last year and how the actors are maturing and what’s going on.So it’s a combination of the architecture I’ve already mapped out for the wholefilm and then the specifics are often worked out at the last minute. A lot of improv.”
Definitely sounds interesting and unlike anything we’ve ever heard of, but who knows when we might actually get to see this on the big screen. Maybe with his schedule clear of “School of Rock 2” and the “Dazed and Confused” sequel, it will be full steam ahead for this top secret film. Linklater proves you can’t keep a good filmmaker down, and we’re glad to hear he’s got something original and interesting in the works.
Here’s a link to the video interview with Linklater talking about the project. Ps, when’s the next installment of the ‘Sunrise/Sunset’ projects starring Hawke and Julie Delpy coming ’cause that we really wanna see (and you left us on suuuuch a cliffhanger, dude).
