Richard Linklater’s ongoing fascination with the passage of time has seen him use lengthy shooting schedules to make some of the most beloved independent films of the last quarter century.
He famously spent a decade shooting “Boyhood” in order to accurately showcase the process of his actors aging, and the 18-year gap between “Before Sunrise” and “Before Midnight” (with “Before Sunset” coming in between) allowed him to capture a relationship from its initial spark to the domesticity of marriage.
But his upcoming adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s “Merrily We Roll Along” might be his most ambitious undertaking yet.Sondheim’s musical — which has a book by George Furth and is based on George S.
Kaufman and Moss Hart’s play of the same name — famously tells the story of three friends whose lives change over the course of 20 years as they pursue diverging career paths in show business.The…