Paul Mescal has been filming the same movie for years (and will continue until 2040)
When Merrily We Roll Along finally hits theaters, Paul Mescal will be very different from the actor we see in the film’s opening scenes. That is precisely the plan.
Richard Linklater is indeed pursuing one of the most ambitious projects of his career: to shoot the same film over roughly twenty years, periodically returning to the set with the same actors and letting them actually age in front of the camera.
Filming began in 2019 and the project has been divided into nine sections. Three have already been completed, and Linklater recently confirmed at the Zurich Festival that the fourth should be shot in a few months.
To understand how long we’ll have to wait, the director’s own words on the state of the work provide the answer:
“See you in 2040.”
In the cast we find Paul Mescal, Ben Platt, and Beanie Feldstein, respectively in the roles of Franklin Shepard, Charley Kringas, and Mary Flynn. At the heart of the story are three friends and how success, ambition, and the choices made over the course of their lives end up transforming their relationship.
Mescal plays Franklin, a Broadway composer who gradually pulls away from his theater career and his friends to chase Hollywood success. Charley, played by Platt, is his lyricist and collaborator, while Mary, portrayed by Feldstein, is a writer deeply connected to Franklin.
Why the film must be shot over the course of twenty years?
Behind this seemingly insane production choice lies, in fact, the specific structure of Merrily We Roll Along.
The film is the adaptation of the eponymous musical by Stephen Sondheim and George Furth, which debuted on Broadway in 1981 and is itself based on the 1934 stage work by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. The original production had a notably troubled run and closed after only 16 performances.
Decades later, the musical found a new fortune: the Broadway revival featuring Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe, and Lindsay Mendez became a huge hit and, in 2024, earned four Tony Awards, including Best Revival of a Musical.
The story’s peculiarity is that it is told backwards.
At the outset we meet Franklin, Charley, and Mary when their relationship is already deeply compromised. From that moment the narration proceeds progressively backward in time, showing the audience the earlier stages of their lives until it returns to the origins of their friendship and their dreams.
It was precisely this structure that convinced Linklater to choose such an extreme production method.
According to the director, one of the problems with stage versions has always been asking relatively young performers to portray their characters as they age. Cinema, instead, allows him to do something completely different: to wait for the actors to genuinely reach that age.
When we see Mescal in his forties on screen, therefore, the actor will have truly arrived at that stage of his life.
Richard Linklater had already done it with Boyhood
As crazy as it may seem, for Richard Linklater this idea has an important precedent.
The director had already used real-time passage to make Boyhood, shot over twelve years with Ellar Coltrane, Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke. Instead of replacing the young lead with different actors, Linklater periodically returned to the set to follow his growth from childhood into adolescence.
With Merrily We Roll Along, however, the experiment becomes even more radical: the project is expected to stretch over about twenty years.
A choice that inevitably brings along enormous production risks. Linklater has said he is often asked what would happen if, during a project this long, one of the leads could no longer participate in filming. For the director, though, this element of unpredictability is part of the experiment: making the film necessarily involves relying on the future.
This time, moreover, the project is much harder to keep under wraps than Boyhood. Linklater recalled how that film was made for years almost in anonymity, whereas Merrily We Roll Along, being the adaptation of one of Sondheim’s most famous musicals and featuring stars like Mescal, Platt, and Feldstein, inevitably continues to attract attention.
For the moment, however, the plan is moving forward. Three sections have been completed, the fourth is in preparation, and there are still many years of filming ahead for the cast.
Seeing the final result will therefore require quite a bit of patience. If everything goes according to plan, the date is around 2040.
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