It’s hard to imagine a more difficult editing job than the one Sandra Adair took on for Boyhood, which writer-director Richard Linklater filmed a few days at a time, over 12 years, as a boy named Mason Evans Jr. grows from the ages of 6 to 18. The actor who played Mason, Ellar Coltrane, grew up with his character, and the stars playing his divorced parents, Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke, aged gracefully with their characters.
The resulting film is one of the most beautiful we’ve ever seen. But the experimental approach meant a missed scene or dropped line of dialogue in 2002, when shooting began, couldn’t be picked up in 2014, when it was completed and released. And Adair couldn’t begin editing in earnest until 2013, when shooting was finished, because she didn’t know what scenes shot over the 12 years would pay off later in the film.
So for the 12 years of Boyhood — in which she and Linklater astonishingly collaborated on nine other films — she kept her Boyhood notes close, imaging the final edit.
Still, Adair said Friday of Boyhood, at a 12th anniversary screening of the film for the El Paso <a href="https://cinemamix360.com/2026/09/27/john-malkovich-to-receive-top-honour-at-santa-barbara-film-festival/" title="John Malkovich to receive top honour at Santa Barbara Film Festival“>Film Festival: “Honestly, it’s the greatest gift besides my children in my life, really.”
“When you’re doing it in the moment, you don’t really realize, ‘Oh, this is going to be a film that’s going to live on, and will always be poignant for audiences, and it’s a universal kind of film.’ You don’t think about that. You’re just thinking about we have more to shoot, more to cut, more to put music to.”
Certain scenes in the film still get her, especially Arquette’s final, heartbreaking goodbye where Mason leaves for college. As a parent, Adair relates.
But the film will also quietly devastate anyone who’s been a boy, raised a boy, fallen in love, fallen out of love, or just lived.
Adair has edited more than 50 films, and started her long collaboration with Linklater with another masterpiece, 1993’s Dazed and Confused. On that film, he was with her in the editing booth every day. After all these years, they know each other well enough for him to let her edit solo. They touch base throughout the process and compare notes when she’s assembled her cut.
“I have the best teacher, and that’s Richard Linklater,” she told El Paso filmmaker Carlos De La Torre Friday in a post-screening Q&A, where she received the film festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award. She is currently producing a film for De La Torre, one of many ways she supports rising indie filmmakers, especially in her native Texas.
If 12 years seems like an odd anniversary to celebrate, well, it would be — for any other movie. But the cast and crew are revisiting the film this year to match the length of time it took to make Boyhood.
Sandra Adair on Boyhood and Her Intuitive Approach to Editing
Prior to Friday night’s screening, Adair took part in an El Paso Film & Creative Industries Commission panel on her work. Fellow editor Katherine Horak, whose credits include Pacific Rim: Uprising and the new American Muscle, led the Q&A with questions that delved deep into Adair’s career and process.
Adair shared that she got into editing through her editor brother, Robert Estrin, who edited Terrence Malick‘s 1973 debut, Badlands. She served in several supportive roles in the editorial department before her first feature as a lead editor, the 1988 Whoopi Goldberg film The Telephone.
She said she’s learned through her career that editing is largely about intuition.
“It is a very intuitive craft, and people don’t realize that. You can’t learn that. You have to pay attention. You have to understand the story. You have to understand the intention of the scene that you’re cutting. You have to understand the director’s desire of what they think the piece can be,” Adair explained. “You have to take into consideration that the script goes through changes, then it goes through the interpretation of actors, then the DP and the director have shot it in a way that you inherit, and everybody’s craft all along the line ends up in your in your lap, basically.
“So then, where do you even start? It’s it’s very intuitive to take all the knowledge that you have about the project and understand the intent, and then be able to look at what actually is now not a script… it is now a piece of digital media. It’s very hard to describe. It’s like painting or sculpting or something like that,” she added. “When you’re faced with a big hunk of clay, you got to start somewhere, and that that part of it is intuition.”
Horak agreed: “You just start, and it flows, and you enter kind of a flow state.”
Adair also pulled back the curtain on her dynamic with Linklater.
“He doesn’t really spend that much time in the cutting room with me. He knows himself, he knows me, he knows what he shot. He knows what’s possible and what’s not possible. So you know he is extremely reasonable,” she said.
Her process is this: “We always start with the biggest issues first — like get all the things out of the film that don’t need to be in there. That’s step number one. Step number two is kind of I break features into reels, so they’re 20 minute-long chunks, and we just do one reel at a time. He’ll give me notes. I’ll do the notes. Send in the cut. He’ll watch the cut. Then he’ll give me notes for the next reel. We just kind of methodically march through.”
How do they handle the inevitable disagreements that are part of any film?
“It’s rare that we have a disagreement,” she said. “But you know he’s the director. I’m always going to acquiesce to Richard Linklater. But I stand my ground when I feel like something’s important, or if he’s not understanding what I’m trying to do, I will be persistent until I get shut down.”
Asked during the Q&A if she ever runs into misogyny as a female editor, she praised Linklater for his respect — and explained how she handles people who aren’t so respectful.
“He’s never talked over me. He’s never interrupted me. He’s always been so respectful and genuinely interested in what I have to say,” Adair said. “I can’t say that that has been true for my whole career, but if I run up against that, I say: ‘Hey, man, that’s not cool. I’m here to help you. If you’re not going to listen to me, I can leave.’”
Boyhood earned six Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture, Linklater’s directing, and Adair’s editing. Arquette won for best supporting actress.
The unusual approach to the film was so successful that Adair and Linklater are in the midst of doing it again. One of their current collaborations, an adaptation of the musical Merrily We Roll Along, is being shot over 20 years.
Here are more details on the El Paso Film Festival, one of our 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee. And you can read more of our film festival coverage here.
Main image: Sandra Adair and Katherine Horak at their panel discussion. Photo by April M. Sanchez / Visit El Paso
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