The Premiere of Boyhood

Last night, the Brooklyn Academy of Music opened BAMcinemaFest with the New York premiere of director Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. The film not only evokes the trials and tribulations of coming of age, it captures the real-life transformation of its star, Ellar Coltrane, as he grows from six to eighteen in the span of 166 minutes.

“I wanted the whole canvas of childhood,” said Linklater, for whom the film’s twelve-year investment was necessary. “It was the only way to tell this story.” Centering a film on an unknown six-year-old might sound like a risk, to which Linklater asks, “How much do you want to worry about your life? Or do you just want to live it? “

At the after-party at Skylight One Hanson, nachos, snow cones, Dark Horse wine, and lollipops kept guests like Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jenna Lyons, Imogen Poots, David Byrne, and Jenny Slate feeling like kids after the film ended. Leaning shyly against a marble column of the historic site, Coltrane blushed as admirers complimented his work.

It’s something he’ll get used to as the now-nineteen-year-old plans to build on his career as an actor. “Having something year after year to throw myself into showed me what I wanted to do with myself.

I always craved that artistic process.” Watching the cavorting crowd, he reflected on wrapping a film as personal as this: “It’s beautiful and heartbreaking. It’s totally heartbreaking. I don’t think any of us realized until the end just how important it had become to us. But to have it move people the way it is is the best reaction you can get.”