HAWKE, DELPY ALL THE WISER IN BEFORE MIDNIGHT.
Star sees potential for a life project
TORONTO — Ethan Hawke says he could easily see his Before Sunrise film franchise turning into, “a full life project.”
The star-crossed lovers from 1995’s Before Sunrise and 2004’s Before Sunset return all the wiser in Before Midnight this weekend, with Hawke’s unkempt but charming Jesse now several years into a relationship with French intellectual Celine, played by Julie Delpy.
Hawke says the third chapter offers a satisfying followup to the loquacious couple’s ongoing love affair, but still leaves the door open to even more cerebral explorations into the nature of love.
“I feel that we could walk away right now,” Hawke says from New York, referring to his co-collaborators Delpy and director Richard Linklater. “It doesn’t feel unfinished to me the way it kind of did before. But then again I could also see this being a full-life project. I could see us easily making three more — (with the characters in their) 50s, 60s, 70s.”
At any rate, he’d welcome the chance to keep reuniting every nine years or so with Delpy and Linklater, noting that the intense process of co-writing and shooting each instalment has been more fulfilling than most other projects he’s been a part of.
The latest film offers a more mature look at love than the previous two, Linklater adds from his home in Austin, Tex.
While the Vienna-set Before Sunrise and Paris-based Before Sunset each traced the budding passion between the young romantics, experience and hard-earned life lessons have rooted the Greece-set Before Midnight much more in the harsh realities of being in a relationship.
“There is a familiarity that goes along with being together a long time and it’s just kind of fascinating for me to see how people negotiate that space of another human, another complex human,” says Linklater.
“That’s one of the bigger challenges in life — is how to get through all that with your spirit intact.”
From the opening scene, it’s clear that Jesse has paid a big price to pursue a life with Celine. They are now in their early 40s and on vacation in Greece, still flirty and passionate but also stung by countless hurts over the years that have started to accumulate.
Hawke describes the first two films as “variations on romantic projection” and the notion “that somebody could be your other half, this kind of dream.”
“And it seemed like the third film couldn’t just do that dance again. We needed to look at: ‘OK what happens when you get what you want? What does that feel like?’ And we all felt kind of excited about the challenge of writing that kind of movie.”