By James Mottram
It was thirty years ago that Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise was released, so we return to our 2013 interview with the director – and his two stars, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy – at The Berlin Film Festival, where they were promoting Before Midnight, the final film in The “Before” Trilogy.
Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy will always have Berlin. The team behind Before Sunrise and its sequel, Before Sunset, may have hopped from Vienna to Paris and now, with their third film, Before Midnight, to the Greek islands, but the German city has remained just as important in the life-cycle of this very special trilogy. It was here, to the 1995 Berlin Film Festival, that Linklater brought Before Sunrise, the story of American tourist, Jesse (Hawke), and French student, Celine (Delpy), who meet on a train speeding towards the Austrian capital, and enjoy a wistfully romantic 24 hours in each other’s company.
Linklater left with The Silver Bear for Best Director, though it wasn’t his first time at the festival. “I was actually here in 1990,” he recalls. “My film, Slacker, didn’t get into the festival, but it was in the market. I had a screening that three people came to. It was depressing! I remember walking around – The Wall had just come down, and I had this really tense experience in Berlin because of that. Then a few days later, we had another screening that a lot of people came to; it was night and day different. But it gave a proper contrast to five years later. To be completely forgotten and on your own, and then to be here and winning prizes…I like that high contrast.”
Talking of which, the contrast between Before Sunrise and 2004’s Before Sunset was tangible. While the sequel was critically acclaimed – with co-writers Hawke, Delpy and Linklater eventually nominated jointly for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar – the Berlin unveiling was something of a trial, at least for Ethan Hawke. Arriving in the wake of his split from wife, Uma Thurman, Hawke was fighting accusations of infidelity – with the then 22-year-old model, Jen Perzow, and Ryan Shawhughes, the couple’s nanny, whom Hawke later married, in 2008, claiming that their relationship started after his divorce from Thurman.
Back then, Hawke was in pain during the press junket for the film, which was held at Berlin’s Four Seasons Hotel. When FilmInk entered the room, he was lying flat on the ground, quite literally floored by the emotional, heart-twisting nature of a day of interviews where journalists filed in to ask the most personal questions. After all, Before Sunset moved on from the tender glances of its predecessor to deliver a far more adult tale, as Jesse – now a published author – arrives in Paris on a book tour. Like Hawke, who has also seen two novels, The Hottest State and Ash Wednesday, in print, he’s married and a father – but when he bumps into Celine for another brief encounter, his head is turned. “My favourite kind of writing and my favourite kind of performing is when you can tell that it cost somebody something. That’s why this movie will always be very dear to my heart. It was never a job,” Hawke explained at the time. “Is it representative of what people think they know about me? My only hope is that it feeds the movie. The real test will be that if in ten years from now, nobody will really care what was going on in my personal life at the time. It might be informing the viewers right now, but in ten years, we’ll see. My personal belief is that the movie doesn’t need that to be good.”
Maybe he’s right. Nine years on, back in the same hotel – with Before Midnight this time playing out of competition at Berlin – Ethan Hawke is no longer prostrate on the carpet. Dressed in a navy suit, with silver chains around his neck, and a goatee sprouting from his chin, his hair has been dyed a shocking bleached blonde colour, giving him an almost porcupine-like look. It’s for a role, of course, on Broadway, in a production – that’s he directing – of Clive, Jonathan Marc Sherman’s latter-day take on Brecht’s Baal, in which Hawke plays the title role, a promising singer fuelled by rage.
As for Before Midnight, it’s certainly no less personal than either of the two previous films. Again, like Before Sunset, it moves the action nine years further on. The film begins at the end of summer, as Jesse must say goodbye to Hank (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick), his now-teenage son from his first – and now failed – marriage. They have just spent the holidays together in Greece. As Hawke puts it, “Anybody who’s divorced will tell you that the transition at the end of the summer, which, as a father, is the one time of year when you get to spend a lot of time with your kid, is very painful. You get confronted with the facts of your divorce. It’s always a painful moment for me.”
Once again showing the blur between fiction and reality that these films thrive upon, Hawke’s comment also hints at what happened after Before Sunset drew to a close, when Linklater tantalisingly left us on tenterhooks just at the moment Jesse – in Celine’s Paris apartment – must decide whether or not to catch his plane back to his family in the US. In Before Midnight, there’s no such teasing. “We felt that it would’ve been silly to make a third one about flirting,” says Hawke. “Both the first two films deal with so much fantasy, and projection about who somebody might be, that it seemed begging for a film about who they really are.”
Sitting next to Hawke in the room is Julie Delpy, who – until now – has been largely content to let her co-star/writer do the talking. Wearing her blonde curly hair tied up, she’s wearing a trim black dress, matching tights, and low-heels with gold studs. “Flirting in this one would’ve been a cheat,” she pipes up. “It would’ve been basically fucking with the audience; it’s retarded.” This is typical of the outspoken Delpy – the daughter of two French theatre actors who, aged just fourteen, was cast in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1985 film, Detective – but she has a valid point.
It’s made clear right from the moment that Jesse waves Hank off at the airport that he and Celine stayed together. Now, almost a decade on, they’re unmarried, but have twin daughters (played by Jennifer and Charlotte Prior), conceived shortly after they consummated their relationship in Paris. “I felt sure that at the end of the second film, Jesse doesn’t go home,” says Hawke. “Not right away anyway. So what’s going to happen about that? And I really enjoyed that practical sense of how damaging that would’ve been to the way that he ended that marriage. A lot of the pain of divorce is not actually over the fact of the divorce, but usually people obsess on how it happened.”
No longer merely transatlantic soul-mates, Jesse and Celine must now deal with the pragmatic day-to-day realities of managing a relationship. “We couldn’t do the same thing again – brief interactions,” says Linklater. “That worked for the first two films, but in this one, we chose to take on the notion of the real world. Although they’re on vacation, we’re going to deal with their real life. We see them interacting with people – children, friends, each other. So it’s more grounded in the real world.”
When we join Jesse and Celine, it’s at the end of a six-week jaunt in the southern Peloponnese, staying on a writers’ retreat in an idyllic villa belonging to a genial Greek novelist. Yet as utopian as it all feels, real life has a nasty habit of crashing into their world – with an emotional Jesse yearning to move the family to Chicago, so he can be near Hank, just as Celine has been offered a “dream job” in Paris. Even so, according to Hawke, such a set-up wasn’t immediately obvious. “We thought about any possible scenario,” he says. “They could be married to other people, they could meet by accident – that’s the hardest thing, trying to figure out what the movie is that we want to write about.”
As far as Delpy is concerned, they wanted Before Midnight to reflect the reality of relationships as much as possible – something that she’s also managed in her own directorial films, 2 Days In Paris and its follow-up, 2 Days In New York. “Sometimes I see American romantic comedies, or any romantic comedy, and there are people in their forties who have problems like people in their twenties! They have issues! The reality of Americans is not that. Hollywood – the dream machine – feeds people. We get the chance to explore a little further, without pretention or anything…to try to be a little true. Just a little bit of truth is nice.”
Linklater, dressed down in jeans and a charcoal-grey shirt, believes that much of the film deals with how everyday mundane life can often change the dynamics of a relationship. “If you’re going to be a consistent friend, spouse or parent, it takes away the spontaneity,” the director offers. “And we deal with that as a subject; they feel a little constrained. You hear Celine say that when they’re fighting; all the spontaneity has gone from our lives. It’s easier to feel that way as you get older, but the challenge is to meet your obligations and still feel like you’re an alive, spontaneous person who can still maximise whatever you’re most interested in. It’s really about compromise. So much of life is.”
One of the most curious things about the trilogy is just how close Hawke and Delpy are to Jesse and Celine. “In some strange way, these characters are alter egos of Julie and I,” says Hawke. What does his director think? “Jesse and Celine are constructs; they’re not them,” Linklater replies. “But there’s something about them that runs parallel – to all of us. I’m in both of them. I feel equally actually in Jesse and Celine. And I think that they would start to say that about each other too. I don’t think Julie would say that she’s Celine. They write so much stuff for the other character, and we all participate in that.”
While he’s frequently worked with Hawke in his other movies – Tape, The Newton Boys and Fast Food Nation among them – Linklater has only ever worked with Delpy in this trilogy. Is she as much of a feminist as her character? “Julie? Yeah, she can be. I don’t know if she’s feminist or anti-men! I don’t know which it is! Where does one begin and the other stop? No, I’m kidding. That’s why we all get along so well. But Julie is so strong that way; it seems ridiculous for Julie to ever have doubts, but she does. We all have doubts. When you see her outside, she’s so strong, but she has the same insecurities that anyone has. We try to deal with that in the character. It’s the same with Jesse too.”
Such is the closeness between the trio that there was no awkwardness when it came to deciding on writing in the trilogy’s first love scene – when Jesse and Celine are given a night in a plush hotel as a present from their friends. “It was something that we always played with, theoretically,” explains Linklater. “What did happen when the last film ended? We made jokes about it that were pretty pervy! Julie said, even years ago, ‘If we’re ever going to have a sex scene, we better do it soon!’ Then we talked about it for this film, and she said, ‘Well, my tits are still good!’ So it was like, ‘Okay!’”
Hawke has a cheeky grin on his face when he thinks back to it. “We felt like we needed to have one love scene in the trilogy,” he says, although the passions between the couple are left to simmer when the presence of modern technology interrupts their intended lovemaking. “We thought that it would be good to have this reality of sex that doesn’t always happen, because there’s always something happening,” adds Delpy. Only when they reach eighty, jokes their director, will there be “a full-blown old people sex scene – something that you’ve never seen before in cinema!”
Before Midnight only really became a reality in 2010. “I don’t think that it was any one person’s idea. It just sort of evolved,” says Linklater. What’s remarkable – at least in the eyes of he and his stars – is how they ever made it this far. “It’s kind of turning into a life project, but there was never any intention,” says Hawke. “I don’t think Rick, or Julie or I would ever have seriously thought – except as a joke – that we would ever have made a second one.” It’s a fair comment; as beloved as the first film was, it made just $5.5 million in the states on its release, just over double its budget.
So it was no surprise that, when Linklater made Before Sunset – originally called “If Not Now” – he seemed almost gloomy at its prospects. Perhaps because he’d just come off School Of Rock, the biggest hit of his career, which took $131 million around the globe. “It’s not really a commercial undertaking,” he said of Before Sunset just before its release. “It’s weird to do a sequel nine years later to a film that wasn’t very successful. It’s kind of an anti-sequel.” Indeed, the Paris-set film managed to recoup a similar total – $5.8 million in the US – to its 1995 counterpart.
So how did the second film ever come about? It was down to Waking Life, Linklater’s animated feature from 2001 that featured a series of dream-like, philosophical skits. One of them featured Jesse and Celine in bed together – and while the resulting film was in cartoon form, the process of making it began with Linklater shooting his movie with the actors. Only later, in post-production, was the footage drawn over frame-by-frame, with “Rotoscoping”, a technique that Linklater re-used in his 2006 Philip K. Dick adaptation, A Scanner Darkly. “That little moment in Waking Life brought us all back together,” Linklater says. “I told Julie and Ethan my idea for Waking Life, and they didn’t quite understand. I said, ‘It’s not a sequel. It’s like some fantasy of you guys together.’ But that’s when we realised that we really liked working together, and thought that we should pursue the idea of another film. If you have a good experience in the film world, you count your blessings and go, ‘That’s great. I won’t touch it.’”
After 2004’s Before Sunset, while that follow-up didn’t exactly set the box office alight either, it did gain an Oscar nomination – Linklater and Delpy’s first, Hawke’s second after his Best Supporting Actor nod for Training Day – and a huge cult following. “Every time that I made another film,” says Linklater, “and did an interview, it would be like, ‘What’s happening with Jesse and Celine? Did he miss the plane?’ So it was more present. But that was our own fault for making the second film! We had to live with it as a possibility a little more consciously than the first time.”
Hawke particularly noticed the difference between the first sequel and Before Midnight. “People weren’t really expecting a sequel to Before Sunrise,” says Hawke. “So nobody had any agenda or opinion about what that sequel should be. But once it was announced that we were making this movie, I saw that online people were blogging about what this movie should be. I haven’t met a film director in the last nine years that didn’t tell me what he thought the third film should be! So we knew that we were up against a lot of people having an agenda about where Jesse and Celine should be. And that agenda is stifling. You would obviously like to make people happy.”
In the end, they could only make Before Midnight for themselves; when they started, Hawke and Delpy’s first stage in their “writing assignment” was to sit down and watch the first two films back-to-back. They clearly didn’t pay a lot of attention. “What’s so funny,” notes Hawke, “is that sometimes Julie and I would work on something and take it to Rick and say, ‘We came up with this great thing last night.’ And he’d be like, ‘That’s in Before Sunrise!’ Or we’ll say, ‘That was in one of the films’, and Rick will say, ‘No, I cut that scene out!’”
Hawke likens the writing process to building a snowball – collecting ideas, and adding them to the basic notion, one by one. “Rick keeps notebooks of cool lines, and things that inspire him, or that he thinks relate to the movie,” Hawke explains. “The snowball just builds and builds, and then we’ll get together for a five-day retreat. And we’ll get it to 25 pages. Then we’ll get together at a different time – and once we decided on Greece, we had eight weeks to turn our forty-page outline into a screenplay. And that was a lot of pressure.”
Still, after three films, they’ve got their collaboration down to a fine art. “Because we know each other, the only advantage of having worked together before is that we’re not polite with each other,” says Delpy. “When I think it’s an obnoxious thing that Ethan has written, I’m going to tell him right away. Ego doesn’t get in the way as much when you know each other well. We’ve gone past that stage.” Hawke looks at her and laughs. “Sometimes you call me a macho jerk!”
He continues: “Sometimes I’ll think that this is a great idea for Jesse to say this, and Julie will be like, ‘Everyone in the world will hate you if you say that. That is obnoxious and stupid.’ We help each other have a better understanding; we help each other create the characters.” Do they really get on as well as it seems today? “Actually, I like Ethan – he’s a good guy,” nods Delpy. “He knows about culture. He’s a little bit educated. He’s interested in theatre. He has some qualities.” Hawke can’t resist chipping in: “I’m not as dumb as most Americans!”
Despite the casual, semi-improvisational air to the resulting script, both Hawke and Delpy seem shocked when it’s suggested that they might conjure up the words on the day of the shoot. “We never improvised one word,” says Hawke, firmly. “Rick’s very meticulous about how he wants to shoot things. You can’t do a thirteen-minute shot, and tell a story, and improvise at the same time. Rick wants to cut as few times as possible, so he obsesses on the script, and obsesses on us creating the illusion of spontaneity.”
Early on, after Jesse drops his son at the airport, Linklater trains his camera on his actors for just such an unbroken thirteen-minute shot, set in the car as the couple and their children are driving back to the villa. Beautifully performed by both Hawke and Delpy, a scene that typically might take four days to shoot – three to four pages of the script a day – the director was determined that he’d do it faster. “I’d look at it and go, ‘Well, we’ll be really well rehearsed – and I can do that in two days.’ So we get a few runs at it, over a two-day period, and that’s enough.”
Another lengthy scene takes place over dinner, when Jesse and Celine join their hosts for a meal of wine and stuffed peppers (Athina Rachel Tsangari, the Greek director of Attenberg, and her star, Ariane Labed, are among the guests at the table). The conversation drifts, sometimes maddeningly so, across a number of topics – from the meaning of love to the passage of time and the differences between men and women. Linklater, who came up with the idea to shoot the third episode in Greece, believes that being in such classical surroundings inspired them. “I like the ancient-ness,” he says. “We were all attuned to that. It really is profound when you’re there, and you’re talking to someone digging through ruins – some archaeologist who talks about discovering a coin that is 3,000 years old. Wow! There’s a certain depth to that. We never reference it, obviously. But whatever goes on between people, you realise has been going on forever – and it will. There’s nothing really special about the micro and the macro. Our lives have to feel important to us, but you realise that there’s hardly anything that you experience that hasn’t been experienced for millennia.”
Naturally, if only to start the snowball rolling again, FilmInk is keen to know if they’ll consider a fourth movie – and make it a quartet. What about in Berlin – their spiritual home? “I want to do St. Petersburg next,” counters Hawke, as Delpy lets out a noise that is part sigh, part scream. “I tell you, I feel like I left Greece two months ago,” she says. “I feel like I could be doing a take tomorrow with Ethan! So we can’t even think of a fourth film right now. The intensity of the work…those films are so intense in the work that it takes us nine years to recover!” Hawke: “So much of our lives go into the movies that you’d need a long time to refill the tank.” Delpy: “A year or two years would be pointless.” Hawke: “Unless we did an erotic film! That’s always interesting.” Delpy: “Like you don’t see my tits enough in this one? It’s ten minutes of me walking around!” Hawke: “It’s the best part of the movie!”
For much more on The “Before” Trilogy, check out Lucas Hilderbrand’s book-length appraisal of the series as published by BFI Classics and Bloomsbury. Click here for more information.
