Starting today, you can purchase ‘Boyhood’ for digital download (it will be available on DVD and Blu-ray starting on January 6). To mark the occasion, IFC Films released this excellent 10-minute featurette, which includes interviews with the cast and director Richard Linklater from 2002, when this unique “12-Year Project” to document these characters’ lives began, and 2014, when it finally concluded. You can see how much they’ve aged physically and how much they’ve matured emotionally, and it adds a lot of eye-opening background detail about the story and its meaning.

I certainly assumed there were autobiographical elements to ‘Boyhood,’ but for whatever reason, I mostly thought they were autobiographical to Ellar Coltrane, the young man who plays the protagonist, Mason. Watching this video, I realized how much of this is Richard Linklater’s own story. He’s the one who was raised by a single mother; he’s the one who (along with his older sister) watched his mom struggle to raise their family through marriages and grad school and endless adversity; he’s the one who grew into an inquisitive artist. No wonder the movie is so brilliant; it comes straight from the heart.

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