Here’s how they did it.

In an interview with Screen Daily’s Jeremy Kay, the producers behind boyhood, Richard Linklater, Cathleen Sutherland, Jonathan Sehring and John Sloss, elaborates on how they approached this very unusual cinematic endeavour.

While Linklater assembled his cast and crew, Sloss and Sehring began to thrash out the deal points on what would become a $4m-plus production.

“We structured it in a way that took a little pressure off [Sehring],” says Sloss. “He committed to finance the first year and could stop at any time, but if he did we could bring in someone else in a more favourable position.

“It took pressure off him and still created enough for us to be able to go out and find other financiers if IFC changed their business agenda. Jonathan stuck with it. Rick and the cast stuck with it. About 400 crew people worked on it throughout.”

“It’s almost like financing a short film every year,” adds Sehring. “We did it on an annual basis. We were committed for 12 years and a big part of the production process.

“In terms of finance, Rick would come to us every year and we’d talk about the project and we would give him roughly $200,000, give or take 10%. That was our commitment, and it doesn’t include post and music, etc.”

The flexibility in funding and the fact that IFC did not have to assume full financial risk from the outset of such an unconventional production made all the difference in getting the project off the ground.

And then there’s the cast. Of Richard Linklater’s choices:

“When he was casting Ellar, he was also casting his parents. He knew his parents and had confidence they were going to show up every year and be responsible. That was the wild card, because the [on-screen] daughter is Rick’s daughter [Lorelei Linklater], anybody who knows Patricia knows she’s a stand-up person and we started this film before they conceived Before Sunset [the 2004 middle episode in the Before series], and Rick and Ethan had a very strong bond by then.”

With the cast in place, it came time for logistics.

“Ultimately it’s 12 years, 12 scripts, 12 productions,” says the director, who sent a rough outline to IFC that he would update each year. “Within that it had quite a structure. I knew the last shot.”

By the time shooting wrapped at the Big Bend Ranch State Park in West Texas in October 2013, they had filmed for 49 days in total and Coltrane was 18.

While 49 shooting days is more than some of the films Boyhood is up against in the 2015 awards race, it’s not a lot when you consider that they are spread out over 12 years. The cast and crew met once a year for 3-4 days, at times that worked with everyone’s schedules.

“People think we had this set date every summer. It wasn’t like that. It had to shift because Ethan was in a movie or doing a play, Patricia was in Medium, Rick had things going on. The kids were the easiest ones, with the rest of us trying to juggle life and responsibilities.”

And it wasn’t just the cast that was committed. Most of the crew was consistent year after year, which undoubtedly helps give the film a uniform look and feel.

“It didn’t always work out that every crew member came back but for the most part people tried to repeat the job,” adds Sutherland. “It became a very close community. By the end of the film there was the 10-Year Club. It was great having that commitment from people.” As Coltrane says: “When you work on an art project with people for any amount of time, you become like family.”

Although this was an IFC production, the plan in Park City was always to go in with open eyes. “If somebody had made us an offer we could not refuse, we would have sold it,” says Sehring, who wound up distributing Boyhood.

A deal was struck at Sundance with Universal for international rights excluding Canada (Mongrel), France (Diaphana) and Benelux (Lumiere), and after more international festival kudos the film opened in July in the US. By mid-November the audacious $4m experiment that had seemed so risky had amassed more than $23m Stateside and around $50m worldwide.

In conclusion; it worked. An almost impossible project with a modest budget turned into an Oscar contender. Or perhaps it was one from the very start? While this is certainly an impressive and moving feat, personally, I can’t help but see this as more of an exercise in filmmaking. Impressive, but not as groundbreaking on screen as on paper.

Chin up, friends. It might be hard, but it’s not impossible.

Whichever way it’s done, it’s never too soon to start preparing for this holy grail of festival submissions. Watch above and below to get a head start on the competition.

These video interviews, from our colleagues at Film Courage, center on Diane Bell and Chris Byrne, and their Sundance experiences with ‘Obelidia’ – which, even though it was submitted on the very latest day possible and with no personal connections to the festival, went on to win the Alfred P. Sloan Award, a cinematography award AND was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize.

The biggest take-away from these interviews, in short, is that a unique, personal vision and a great product will get you there. And once you’re there, don’t sit back and hope for the best. Make the most of every single bit of publicity your Sundance acceptance gets you. That’s how you open the door to the distributors.

A friend of mine works for a little company called Quiver. While I’ve yet to use their services myself, every time my buddy talks about it, I make a mental note for when the day comes that I have a film of my own to share with the masses. Let’s face it, distribution is not the sexiest part of filmmaking, but unless you’re an auteur who doesn’t give a crap about the life of your work after it’s done (’cause it’s about the PROCESS, man!), distribution may very well be one of the most important parts. Not knowing a whole lot about shopping distribution rights, theatrical releases or how to get anything up for sale on Amazon, services like Quiver are a godsend.

So naturally, I was excited and intrigued when Mashable broke the news about a new partnership between Quiver (which has been around since 2011 as en extension of Premiere Digital Services) and the Sundance Institute, announced right before the Sundance Film Festival. Enter Quiver Digital.

First, a word from Quiver – about Quiver:

Quiver is a digital services and distribution company.  We provide technical services for your feature and short films, episodic content, music and music videos.  We also provide aggregation and distribution capabilities for content to popular digital retail platforms like iTunes, Amazon, Google Play and more.  Unlike much of our competition, we provide services for one-time service fees, so you keep all revenue from your specified retail platforms.

 

Quiver is a tool in the filmmaker and rights holder’s arsenal. We give control to the people who deserve it most.

 

You.

And here’s an excerpt from the Mashable story:

Quiver Digital is a distribution dashboard through which participants can very quickly and easily push their movies to iTunes, Amazon, Netflix, Google Play, Vudu and Sony Entertainment Network, all at once and all in one place. No more need to deal with different distributors and their Byzantine conversion protocols, which can still be a headache-y and time-consuming process.

 

Sundance Institute’s deal with Quiver’s parent company Premiere Digital Services, announced Wednesday on the eve of the Sundance Film Festival, gives artists streamlined access to the major retailers through Quiver. The software is available only through the institute’s Artist Services initiative, which has been providing filmmakers with creative self-distribution, funding and marketing tactics since its launch in 2011.

 

“In today’s market, creative funding, marketing and distribution strategies are required to ensure that that independent content creators retain their rights and earn fair, sustainable revenue, and audiences find distinctive, authentic narrative and documentary stories,” Keri Putnam, executive director of the Sundance Institute, told Mashable. “Artist Services through Quiver Digital offers efficient and easy-to-use tools that allow filmmakers to more effectively connect with their audience.”

 

Premiere Digital put the software suite together via direct distribution deals with major digital platforms. Quiver offers encoding, licensing and digital delivery services, giving filmmakers exclusive access to a diverse menu of distribution models. It can be used alone, or to complement deals for certain territories, categories or time frames.

 

The Artist Services initiative has already launched over 100 new and encore Sundance Institute films into the digital marketplace, with more than 200 alumni artists — including Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (Detropia), Shane Carruth (Primer and Upstream Color) and Tiffany Shlain (Connected) — taking advantage of the services in its four years of existence.

Easy access to all the platforms? For a one-time fee? I’m on board.