In August 2019, Richard Linklater announced a new project. Over the course of the next twenty years, he will film an adaptation of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s musical comedy Merrily We Roll Along. It’s an ambitious enterprise, to put it mildly. Though Linklater is uniquely experienced with extended shooting schedules, he has never directed a musical. Merrily We Roll Along’s screenplay, moreover, has long been considered difficult to the point of being unfilmable. And, lest we forget: by the time the film is released, the perennially youthful director will be an octogenarian.

And yet, this project would seem atypical to anyone but Linklater. After all, he has made a name for himself doing precisely this: rethinking the rules of film production in general and the relationship between film time and real time especially, moving continuously between and across genres, contemplating the cinematic apparatus, all the while winking knowingly to his audience. As David T. Johnson puts it:

To be sure, reading Linklater’s filmography as a plotted career timeline gives the distinct impression of disconnection—a collection of disparate projects that, at first glance, appear almost random in their selection. However, as Johnson notes, on closer inspection it becomes clear that coalescence is not a particularly illuminating lens through which to view Linklater’s oeuvre. Rob Stone instead characterizes Linklater’s approach to filmmaking as cubist in manner in that it “rejects a single viewpoint, preferring to fragment a three-dimensional subject and redefine it in a temporal collage made up of several points of view, as though seeing it in a shattered mirror.”