Richard Linklater is pretty confident no one will die while making Merrily We Roll Along

Merrily We Roll Along is based on a play that later became a Stephen Sondheim musical about the interconnected lives of three friends, told over 20 years in reverse chronological order. The most recent Broadway production of Merrily starred Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe, and Lindsay Mendez. The revival won four Tony Awards, and a filmed version of the stage production was released in theaters in December. Linklater’s movie will star Paul Mescal as Franklin Shepard, Ben Platt as Charley Kringas, and Beanie Feldstein as Mary Flynn. Linklater knows a thing or two about long-term filmmaking. He filmed Boyhood over 12 years with the same cast, tracking the coming-of-age story of the character Mason Evans Jr. (Ellar Coltrane).

The director hopes to achieve the same thing and accurately show the aging of the Merrily characters in his adaptation. “I’m hoping to get lucky again, but it’s very different from Boyhood,” Linklater said of Merrily. “I’ve always made music films, and it’s fun to be making a full-on musical.” Aside from a more ambitious timeline, Linklater said that Boyhood was created “in complete anonymity,” meanwhile all eyes are on his version of the musical, and he’ll have to answer questions about it for 20 years. Trying to get a head start on those inevitable questions, Linklater offered a status update on the production timeline: “My progress report is this: It’s nine sections in 20 years, and in a few months, we are filming a fourth. So see you in 2040.”