By: Izumi Hasegawa July 16, 2014
Yes, it took 12 years to shoot this film, Boyhood. We can see hair, skin and body changes of the actors including Patricia Arquette who plays the mom. She was very brave to have no air brushing or make-up with a more natural look in the film. It was very real. I also asked her about the benefit of spending 12 years on one film, and sex education since she also has kids.
Q: Tell me about the benefit as an actor to spend 12 years for one movie.
Acting and making a movie is an intimate process hopefully, anyway to some extent. But to actually have these years of coming back together and growing together, getting married, getting divorced, having children, people having breast cancer, more divorces, babies being born… And we got older, and who we were playing parents at 33, 34, that’s who we are. We were 33, 34, and that was our perspective on life and that was the lens we saw things through. By the time we were 45, it was like, your choices are different, your reactions are different. It was just rich in all that.
Q: How did you handle sex education with your kids?
I think it’s important also to have that conversation because there’s a lot of misinformation that kids are getting. And now because even from their time to now, sexuality is being skewed by the internet and the algorithm of Google when some eight-year-old wants to look at boobs and goes to the deviant-skewed, because the person that’s looking at porn sites, it’s of the most intense breasts, sexuality, acts you could do, and it’s pulling the algorithm that way. Even their sexuality and their emerging sexualities can be totally different than kids of tomorrow. These conversations have to be had, but we’re living in this incredibly exposed culture, and sexuality that’s displayed in what they’re going to be exposed to isn’t human really. It isn’t beautiful really, isn’t necessarily self-loving or respectful of each other.
Boyhood opens July 11th (limited) and 18th (wide) in theaters.
