‘A BIG PART OF WHO I AM’
Actor Ethan Hawke has had a longtime love affair with Sunrise movies
Ethan Hawke has played many memorable characters. But it’s the brash Jesse, who courts the French student Celine (Julie Delpy) in 1995’s indie romance Before Sunrise, that sticks with him the most.
“It’s turned into a big part of who I am,” he says from New York City. “I could never have anticipated that.”
Directed and co-written by Richard Linklater, the modestly budgeted original spawned two Oscar-nominated sequels — 2004’s Before Sunset and 2013’s Before Midnight.
The first film finds Jesse and Celine meeting on a train and spending a conversation-filled night wandering the streets of Vienna, becoming soulmates by the time the sun comes up. They promise to meet again in six months, but a Paris-set sequel in 2004 reveals that never happened. When we catch up with them again in 2013, cracks on their marriage have begun to show. On the occasion of the first film’s 25th anniversary, being able to revisit the story of Before Sunrise with audiences new and old gives Hawke great joy.
“Obviously we’re in a strange moment right now,” says Hawke, 49. “It’s impossible not to imagine what Jesse and Celine would be doing in quarantine. That would be an interesting movie.”
Q Before Sunrise has a timeless quality to it. Why do you think it has endured the way it has?
A It sounds kind of arrogant, but it was really designed that way. We wanted it to have no pop culture references. Jesse and Celine are operating completely outside of time and we wanted to capture that moment in your life when you’re really connecting with another person. It’s almost like a ghost story, and they are ghost characters. You don’t meet their parents, you don’t meet their friends … and it’s just a magical moment when that happens in your life. You’re so connected to another person that everything else disappears.
Q How did you first react when you read it?
A I was doing a play and one of the guys in the play, Anthony Rapp, he was in (Linklater’s 1993 movie) Dazed and Confused and he got us invited to an early screening of that film. I was blown away by Dazed and (Linklater) came to see the play we were doing. We went out afterwards and … got along like a house on fire. A year later he sent me the script and it was really a blueprint for a movie. (He) was very clear that the movie he was trying to make was about human connection. He used to say this very beautiful thing that most movies are so exciting to make it seems like your own life is boring. But when he was inside his own life, he didn’t think it was boring. One of the most exciting things to happen to him was connecting with another person (Before Sunrise is based on an encounter Linklater had in a Philadelphia toy store in 1989). So he wanted to know, what if we could make a movie that captured all the drama that was in that? What it feels like to really connect with another human being? He wanted to use his actors to do that. So his audition process, with Julie and I, found us being co-collaborators as much as we were auditioning.
Q The ending was a cliffhanger. People didn’t know if Jesse and Celine would reconnect six months later. Did you think they would meet on the platform six months later?
A I knew that Jesse would come.
Hell or high water, he was going to be there. I’m such a romantic, and so is Jesse. I couldn’t imagine a scenario where he didn’t come back. But the one thing that is dated about the movie now, of course, is the idea of not exchanging emails. That didn’t exist when we made that. The idea that you could just shoot someone a text saying, “Hey, I’m running late,” that was impossible back then.
Q So far, you’ve revisited these characters every nine years.
Are you intrigued by the idea of catching up with them in 2022 as they enter into the latter part of their life?
A I really don’t know. For us to continue, we’d have to have an idea that the three of us were all in love with. When it came to the sequels, the shock for the three of us was that we all kept seeing the same movies. We were all on the same page. The next set would need to be the same. We wouldn’t want to be together just to continue. Those three movies are my favourite things I’ve done in my life, so I wouldn’t want to ruin it by making a bad one. The stakes feel really high.
Before Sunrise and Before Sunset are streaming now on Crave.