THE BEFORE TRILOGY
Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy trace making THE BEFORE TRILOGY, a love story through and for the ages
In a collaboration spanning decades, Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke and Richard Linklater talk love.
Before Sunrise (1995)
In October 1989, 29-year-old richard Linklater entered a toy shop in Philadelphia and met Amy Lehrhaupt serving behind the counter. the pair sparked and spent the evening walking and talking around the city — and then went their separate ways. the night inspired Before Sunrise (1995), starring ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy as US slacker Jesse and French student celine, who meet on a train bound for Paris, get off at Vienna and fall in love before our eyes. Marked by a unique collaboration between director and actors, who shaped the script through controlled improv, the film birthed the greatest romance in modern movies, spawning two unlikely sequels, Before Sunset (2004) and Before Midnight (2013), at neat nine-year intervals. As the three films bow on criterion UK, Linklater, Hawke and Delpy reflect on what the director calls an “accidental trilogy”.
Ethan Hawke (co-writer/jesse): rick has this great sensibility where he has never been in a gunfight or a helicopter crash or been involved in international espionage but feels like his life has been full of drama. contemporary movies make you feel like your life is so boring. He said, “I want to make a movie that makes you feel like your own life is pretty thrilling because it feels thrilling to live it, to connect with another human being.”
Richard Linklater (co-writer/director):
I wanted to take what I had done with the big casts in Slacker and Dazed And Confused and work in small ways; work with someone on a scene, rewrite it, find new humour and find new things via the actor. I just wanted to simplify and make something really intimate with that same methodology.
Julie Delpy (co-writer/celine): We all write all the characters. I am not just the female voice. I’m sometimes the male voice. that’s the thing that’s exciting about it.
Hawke: In the first 15 minutes of Before Sunrise, I have ten times more lines than I have in the whole of The Magnificent Seven or Training Day. We had these huge monologues. You’d spend your whole frickin’ Sunday running lines.
Delpy: the first one was hard because it was a night shoot and I’m not a night person at all.
Hawke: I remember there was one day when Julie said [adopts French accent], “rick, zis film is going to be so boring. We need to write some jokes.” richard said, ‘I have been sitting watching you in Vienna for a month-and-a-half and I haven’t been bored for one minute. So if somebody is going to be bored in a two-hour film, they are not our audience. Fuck them!”
At 32 minutes, the couple share their first kiss on the Ferris wheel at the Prater amusement park made famous by the third Man.
Hawke: Julie was miserable on that Ferris wheel. “Oh my God, it’s going to break! We’re going to die.” I remember kissing her and she told me I kissed like an adolescent.
Delpy: I love to bug him. He doesn’t hold the grudge very long.
Linklater: The core premise was they decide not to meet up again. The farther we got, I remember thinking, “I don’t believe that anymore.” So we worked at it and found the right note of, “Okay, we won’t run off together now but we’ll meet together in six months.” We came up with that in the last week — that wasn’t there before.
The film won Linklater a Silver Bear for Best Director at Berlin and received critical raves, but took years to find an audience, earning a measly $1.3 million on opening weekend.
Linklater: I thought it was the best version of itself. Castle Rock had a hit with Four Weddings And A Funeral. So you go, “Well, a romantic film can do pretty well. You never know.”
Delpy: I was happy with a lot of what I put in the film as a writer. People pointed out certain things I had written. So for me it was like, “My romantic ideas are not just a young girl’s ideas, they resonate with other people.”
Linklater: Ethan was on the cover of Rolling Stone around that time. I remember standing in an airport thumbing through magazines, and there were these two young ladies. One says, “Ethan is in a new movie.” “‘Have you seen that yet?” “Uh, yeah. It’s pretty boring.” I was like, “That’s the American public right there.” Hawke: I was really disappointed that the movie didn’t do well and people didn’t really get it when it first came out. It’s not commercial material. I think they were hoping “from the maker of Slacker and the star of Reality Bites” meant some kind of Gen X sensation. I loved the movie but there’s certainly a lot of people who thought the movie was boring when it first came out. Julie was not wrong.
Linklater later learned Amy Lehrhaupt, the story’s inspiration, was killed in a motorcycle accident just as Before Sunrise started shooting. The filmmaker dedicated Before Midnight to her.
Linklater: It’s just crushing. Even though we had drifted I always thought I would see her again. But in some strange way it made sense. For all their youth, the first one has a certain mortality in the air and that kind of permeates the movie. Maybe she was with us that whole time.
Before Sunset(2004)
Jesse and Celine laid low until Hawke and Delpy reprised the roles in Linklater’s dream-like animated flick Waking Life (not canon). Still, the five-minute scene stirred something in the trio and they devised a meeting between Jesse and Celine at a French bookshop where Jesse is promoting his new book, the story of Before Sunrise. Sunset subsequently follows the pair around Paris in real-time until Jesse catches his plane. Or does he?
Hawke: I was scared about doing a sequel but I had no doubt I wanted to do it. I remember Scott Derrickson, who directed me in Sinister, telling me he was so mad at us for making a sequel. He resents the idea so much I don’t think he’s ever seen the other two.
Linklater: We always joke Before Sunrise is the lowest-grossing film to earn a sequel.
Hawke: It’s also the lowest-grossing trilogy of all time.
Delpy: When I started writing Before Sunset with the guys, I had an agent at the time. I told him, “I am not going to go to the audition for Rush Hour 2 playing the sexy Latina because it’s a waste of time. I am going to go write a screenplay with friends, a sequel to a film.” Two days later, he called me and said, “We’ve dropped you at the agency because you are wasting your time writing a sequel to a movie that no-one cares about. Goodbye.” I was like, “Okay, goodbye.”
Hawke: The hardest part was the writing. The thing about Before Sunrise is everybody loves youth, everybody loves possibility. You cross 30 and you start getting into serious adult conversations and the bloom of youth is leaving. It becomes hard to make that romantic.
Linklater: In a way, the second one was the purest. Julie was so at home; we were on her turf. We just had a great time.
Hawke: The second one was even more magical to make than the first. Julie and I were older, more mature. We got along even better. I was going through a divorce [from Uma Thurman] that was really, really sad. It was a very healing summer to be in Paris and revisit this time period in my life that had been so wonderful.
Linklater: Julie and Ethan don’t get credit as actors for what they’re actually doing.
Delpy: The toughest scenes are not the emotional scenes, it’s the most middle-of-theroad scenes. Walking and talking and being natural — that’s the shit that’s hard!
Sunset became a bigger hit than Sunrise ($16 million worldwide) and earned an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Hawke: I remember there was a poster for Before Sunset. One of my friends said, “Did you actually do another one of those movies? Wow, you guys really believe in yourselves, don’t you?”
Delpy: After the film was quite successful for an indie film, I remember bumping into my former agent and he said, “Oh, we were so sad when you decided to leave the agency.” I was like, “What?!” It’s like Trump. People who feed their own fantasy to not recognise their mistake. It’s hilarious.
Before Midnight (2013)
Despite Oscar recognition, it took another nine years to revisit the couple. Fortysomething and together, they’re on holiday in Greece, and trying to keep the relationship alive in the midst of angst about her career and his son.
Hawke: I felt very strongly we made two movies about romantic projection, and I wanted to make one that dealt with romantic reality — a movie about middle-aged people with children that was romantic but didn’t have one lie in it. Linklater: On Sunset, we were able to write remotely, emails, editing each other’s stuff. On Midnight, I wasn’t getting much done. So it was like, “We all have to get in the room together.” So we went to Greece six, seven weeks early. Delpy: The writing period in Greece was a lot of fun. We would write all day, then at 6pm go and swim in the sea and look at the sunset. We talked a lot about sex during our writing sessions. It’s interesting that the writing sessions are very different from the films because we get out all our jokes and bullshit and really have fun. But what comes out is not superficial.
The film builds to a huge argument as the fault lines in Jesse and Celine’s relationship crack open.
Linklater: For the fight scene I studied the Ali-frazier fight from 1971. No, I’m kidding.
Hawke: That’s the hardest thing the three of us have done together — a 30-page scene that takes place in one room. They call it the Argument Scene but we always try to call it the Love Scene. The scene starts and they are going to make love and it gets worse and worse.
Delpy: I came up with the “kissy-kissy, titty-titty, pussy” line [it’s the order in which Jesse always makes love to Celine]. When it’s the word “pussy” it’s usually coming from me because I am less nervous about saying that word than Richard and Ethan are.
Linklater: We rehearsed the hell out of it. It was so choreographed. Julie was like, “If you’re ever going to show my boobs, you’d better do it now.”
Delpy: I was pissed off. Usually my breasts look great but of course the air conditioning broke that day and it was so hot my breasts were falling to my knees.
Hawke: Acting that scene was really fun. You don’t often get that kind of scene-work.
Delpy: How do you make it exciting when people have been together a while but they are still connecting on so many levels? Argument is connection. That was a very important scene to all three of us, to create something exciting to watch for 18 minutes of people arguing.
Hawke: That was so much work; writing those things, memorising those lines, yelling at each other. The wrap party after Before Midnight was as tired as I’ve ever been. I was exhausted. I remember getting on the plane saying, “I am never working with you two people again.” And I say that with all love. I wasn’t mad at them.
Linklater: It’s now six years but we never signed up and said, “Hey, we’re going to do one of these things every nine years for the rest of our lives.” It was a total accidental trilogy in the first place.
Hawke: There’s something that appears very complete to me about the three films together. But Rick has an idea to use Jesse and Celine to start a different story in a different part of life — obviously they’d be connected but it would be its own thing. For the first time since we wrapped Before Midnight, I’ve been thinking we might actually do this. It could have a very cool title. It could just be ‘B4’.
Linklater: Or we could switch to ‘After…’
Delpy: Or how about ‘Before We Kill Each Other’?