Even if he was snubbed for the two biggest Oscars this year in favour of Birdman, Richard Linklater’s star is as high as its ever been — and he’s now in talks for his next post-Boyhood project.
He’s being lined up to helm a film adaptation of Maria Semple’s novel Where’d You Go, Bernadette, which became a slow-burning bestseller following its publication in 2012. The book is being adapted by Scott Neustadter and Michael H Weber, who turned John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars into a hit screenplay.
They may well smooth out Semple’s novel a little — it’s a fragmentary work told through instant messages, letters, doctor’s reports, a TED talk and more, exploring how the titular Bernadette absconds from her family and her career as an award-winning architect. It’s told through the eyes of her 15-year-old daughter Bee, who goes on a cruise to the Antarctic to try and find her.
The film is being shepherded by Annapurna Pictures, the indie powerhouse run by Megan Ellison, daughter of software billionaire Larry Ellison. Known for taking quirky stories to big audiences, the company’s previous hits include Her, Spring Breakers and Foxcatcher.
Linklater also partnered with Annapurna on That’s What I’m Talking About, a drama about college baseball in the 1980s starring a group of relative unknowns — it was filmed last October, and will get a release later in 2015. “It’s also a continuation of Boyhood, believe it or not,” Linklater said last year. “I don’t know if one film can be a sequel to two different movies, but it begins right where Boyhood ends with a guy showing up at college and meeting his new room-mates and a girl. It overlaps with the end of Boyhood.”
The director, whose previous hits have included Dazed and Confused, School of Rock and the Before Sunrise trilogy, is now considering an actual sequel to Boyhood, which was filmed in real time over 12 years and charted a boy’s coming of age. Linklater told the Q&A podcast: “The 20s are pretty formative, you know? That’s where you really become who you’re going to be. It’s one thing to grow up and go to college, but it’s another thing to ... So, I will admit my mind has drifted towards [the idea of a sequel].”
