While Richard Linklater is promoting his latest movie with Glen Powell, Hit Man—which began streaming on Netflix on Friday—the Oscar-nominated filmmaker is also chipping away at his upcoming film adaptation of Merrily We Roll Along.
“We will be shooting another [sequence] here pretty soon,” Linklater told Decider, in a recent Zoom interview for a Hit Man press junket. “We’re trucking along here. So all good.”
Much like his 2014 Oscar-winning coming-of-age drama, Boyhood—which was filmed over the course of 11 years, to achieve the effect of the actors actually aging along with their characters—Linklater’s adaptation of this beloved Stephen Sondheim musical will continue filming over the course of the next 16 or 17 years. The story follows three friends (played by Paul Mescal, Ben Platt, and Beanie Feldstein) over the course of a twenty-year friendship, told in reverse chronological order.
Linklater told Decider that, by the end of 2024, he’ll have filmed most of the early years of that friendship. “By the end of this year, we might be technically a third of the way through, content-wise, but not year-wise. It’s a little top-heavy, in the years—it gets spaced out.”
Mescal will star as Franklin Shepherd, the successful composer who sells out and abandons his friends in favor of pursuing a glitzy, Hollywood career. (Based on Sondheim himself.) Platt stars as Charley Kringas, the disgruntled playwright who was once Franklin’s writing partner and best friend; and Feldstein stars as Mary Flynn, the alcoholic journalist who’s always been in love with Franklin. The musical first premiered on Broadway in 1981, and a 2023 revival starring Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe, and Lindsay Mendez is currently running on Broadway.
Linklater’s film will be the first Merrily We Roll Along movie, as well as Linklater’s first musical. With a production length nearly twice as long as Boyhood, it also might just be Linklater’s most ambitious project to date.
“It’s weird to talk about something that’s so… the final thing is so in the future,” the filmmaker told Decider. “But it’s in process.”