Interview:
Richard Linklater,
writer/director
"Apollo 10 1/2:
A Space Age Childhood"
While certainly not Boyhood on the Moon, Richard Linklater’s animated Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood hails from the same set of memories and experiences he mined for his 2014 Best Picture Oscar nominee of growing up in Houston during the Space Race of the late 1960s. The Austin-based writer/director’s latest walk down memory lane is energized by the imagination of Stan, a preteen Houstonian (newcomer Milo Coy) obsessed with the impending Moon landing of 1969. (Linklater regular Jack Black narrates Apollo 10 ½: as the voice of the adult Stan.) Linklater focuses not just on Stan’s fantasy of being an astronaut but also on the trials and tribulation of his five siblings and their loving and considerate parents, Bill Wise’s NASA shipping and receiving manager and Lee Eddy’s stay-at-home mom and grad school student. Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood is Linklater’s third film to employ the animation technique known as rotoscoping following 2001’s Waking Life and 2006’s A Scanner Darkly. Linklater shot his live-action footage at Robert Rodriguez’s Troublemaker Studios with an Austin-centric cast that includes Milo Coy, Bill Wise, Lee Eddy, Glen Powell, and Zachary Levi. Linklater then sent the Sandra Adair-edited live-action version of the film to the Austin-based Minnow Mountain to digitally hand-paint the characters using the process known as rotoscoping. Submarine in the Netherlands completed the rest of the computer-animated imagery. Apollo 10 ½, which received its world premiere during this year’s SXSW Film Festival, is now streaming on Netflix and will screen April 9, 10, and 12 at the AFS Cinema. Richard Linklater’s current project is his adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim musical Merrily We Roll Along, which he plans to shoot over the span of 20 years with a cast that includes Beanie Feldstein, Ben Platt, and Blake Jenner. Aired: April 7, 2022. Web site: https://www.netflix.com/ |
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