Richard Linklater’s Boyhood is a coming-of-age movie like no other—but it’s not exactly a Richard Linklater movie like no other. The groundbreaking new film, shot over the course of 12 years using the same actors, shares a number of traits with the director’s earlier efforts: it was filmed entirely in his home state of Texas; it prominently features children; it plays with the idea of time; it doesn’t have much of a plot; it stars Ethan Hawke. The only thing missing is a Matthew McConaughey cameo!

Watching Boyhood, which opens Friday, it’s hard to imagine how the filmmaker and his remarkable cast—newcomer Ellar Coltrane as the titular boy, Mason; Linklater’s daughter, Lorelei, as his sister; Hawke and Patricia Arquette as their divorced parents—assembled such moving, let alone coherent, performances over the course of so many years. But Linklater has been pulling off seemingly impossible feats for more than 20 years, starting with 1991’s Slacker, which somehow managed to define a generation with a series of tenuously linked vignettes, set on a single day, shot on a budget of $23,000. He followed that up with Dazed and Confused, the ultimate on-screen treatment of high-school-graduation day, which helped launch the careers of Parker Posey, Ben Affleck, Anthony Rapp, and, most memorably, McConaughey. Later came successful experiments with rotoscope animation (Waking Life, A Scanner Darkly), intelligent kids’ entertainment (School of Rock, Bad News Bears), and second- and third-act romantic comedy (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight).

At 53, Linklater is too young for career retrospectives, but Boyhood feels so climactic—so much like the culmination of his work so far—that VF.com asked him to walk us through his complete filmography: 17 theatrical features in all. (To keep things manageable, we didn’t get into any shorts, docs, or TV productions.) Read on (using the key above for reference) to find out why he doesn’t blame McConaughey for all those romantic comedies, why he considers the portrait of marriage in Before Midnight “optimistic,” and why he had no qualms about inviting a convicted murderer to move into his garage apartment.

The title of Linklater’s little-seen first film, shot for a mere $3,000, gives a pretty good idea of what he was hoping to accomplish with it. “Take one idea, fully articulate it, and actually see it through—finish it,” Linklater says of his motivation. “It’s like how a first novel often remains in the shoe box. But you’ve done it, so you are now a novelist.” (Bonus: the entire film is embedded here.)