Eighteen years after Before Sunrise captured the indescribable feeling of falling in love, Jesse and Celine are still together, and Before Midnight addresses head-on what that entails. Their nine years together have produced two beautiful children, but a grown-up relationship carries with it baggage and responsibilities that are every bit as formidable as youthful passion. And in his collaboration with stars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, director Richard Linklater has captured that rich emotional complexity of adulthood – the familiarity and comfort of a longtime partner as well as the complacency and stubbornness.
Spinoff Online joined a small group of journalists at the recent Before Midnight press day in Los Angeles, where Linklater, Delpy and Hawke discussed reuniting for the third installment of the series, now playing in theaters. In addition to talking about the challenges of creating a compelling emotional struggle between two characters the trio wanted audiences to love equally, they discussed the impact of the films in their own lives, and hinted at the possibility of another chapter, which depends as much on their own fates as those of the characters.
Part of the dilemma this couple faces this time is whether they decide to go back to the States or stay in France. How did you approach this phase of their relationship and how did you decide on that as the focal point?
Ethan Hawke: The idea of the movie is that it's very easy to look at a romantic relationship when there's an obvious bad guy, where one person is an alcoholic or one person is abusive. What if you were to take two well-meaning people who actually love each other and want the best for each other? It's still hard, and could we paint that portrait? I think for anybody who's been in a long-term relationship, you run into ... whether it feels as dramatic as Chicago or Paris, it's whether or not your lives are still growing on the same road or does one need to change the road to keep growing.
Julie Delpy: Yeah, that's what it's about. Here there's no bad guy in particular, but they still have to make compromises and they both feel who is making the most compromises. What compromise might jeopardize their relationship and their love. It's all about finding the right road and the road is like this small for it not to fall apart, you know what I mean? When you have a long-term relationship, you have to make choices. Actually, their relationship starts with a choice that Jesse makes which is to follow his heart, but that comes with consequences and the film starts with the consequences of that choice. We find them in a situation where they have to make a choice again, which is Jesse is putting it in Celine's face that he might want to move back to the States but it might jeopardize their entire lives. That's the life of a relationship.
Richard Linklater: It's age-appropriate for where they find themselves in life. Say the first movie, for instance, they're unattached. You see how easily they can get off the train and go home a day later or whatever. You have that looseness and you learn that they both actually moved around a lot over the years, but when they were single and unattached, but now they're together and you see how difficult it is, to maneuver through life with one other person and be on the exact same track. It's tough.
Did any fan feedback from the first two films inform this one? Did friends and family try to lobby you?
Hawke: There’s a moment in the hotel where the woman who works at the hotel asks me to sign the two books and talks about how important they are. It’s a slight homage of us putting the fans in the movie. Something about Sunrise and Sunset spoke to people. The people that it reached it spoke to them so there’s a little homage to that there.
Delpy: A lot of people come up to me and say, “Oh, I fell in love with my boyfriend watching that film,” or “We reconnected after five years because I saw Before Sunset and he decided to call me after he saw the film.” So we are responsible for a few children. [Laughs] A few marriages. A few kids. I feel like their godmother [laughs].
This trilogy of films has always featured long conversations. One of the opening scenes takes place in a car, which lasts 14 to 15 minutes. How tough are those scenes to shoot, much less to conceive in the first place?
Delpy: You just mentioning that scene gives me a flashback of anxiety -- like my heart, the beats are going slightly faster.
Linklater: The children are the unsung heroes of that scene. They're not asleep, they're acting. Those are two little girls, and I have twins roughly that age, and there's no way. In the middle of that take, how do they not open their eyes and look at the camera? So many things could have gone wrong.
Delpy: There's the girls, there's the car driving on the road, lights everywhere.
Hawke: It was hot. It was incredibly hot.
Delpy: It's a whole combination of things. And then on top of it, we do have to act those 13, 14 minutes. Nothing in those scenes are improvised, I just wanted to say right up front, and everything is scripted. There's no other way. It's long takes, and if you want to have this kind of arc development in the scene with this exact thing happening there, this exact thing happening there and it ending with that? This thing sets up the whole movie, you can't add one line. Basically it's such a challenge, I can't explain just like to tell you, it just hurts my head just thinking about it.
Linklater: I know what these guys can do as performers. We've worked together a lot over the years. I wouldn't try that with most actors, but we've done it and I know they can do it. It's a lot of hard work but I know that we'll get there. It was just important, at the very beginning of the film, I think for people who feel like they know Jesse and Celine to some degree, to be dropped in with them. The reality of that, of that length take with no editing, no telling you who to look at, the emphasis is the proscenium of Jesse and Celine. That you could just feel like you're hanging out with them. I think the viewer has to accept that at some point unconsciously as reality, so I think we're dropped into their reality and everything they're talking about. You're just hanging out with Jesse and Celine. That was just the vibe that the film kind of needed right off the bat.
Delpy: I think what Richard does in that scene, to me which I very much respect, was to actually do push us to that one take. What to me it does, which he does especially in these films, is those long, uncut scenes to me is like by not using those typical tricks of filmmaking which is cut, close up, medium shot, you basically break the language of typical filmmaking and in a way you kind of feel like you're witnessing something that is not a film. It makes you feel very real. It's the goal that he wants to achieve, which I respect very, very much and admire. I don't mean to kiss his ass, I've worked with him many times. I believe that it's a very rare thing, and we're given that. It's hard work but it's also a wonderful thing to do as actors.
The hotel sequence is also so volatile and emotional. How intense was that to film, and were there any moments when you felt like things went too far in a particular direction?
Linklater: Your question about do we ever go too far, usually in the script phase we think we've gone too far, that's usually in a spot we should explore. What people think is too far is usually not that far.
Delpy: What's funny is, to me, is when you drew those scenes that lean on emotions, I feel that actors ... I mean, it's pleasurable for an actor to cry, to suffer. It's a pleasant thing for an actor. That's what we trained for. We trained to do it. When you see someone on camera crying and being hurt, they actually enjoy it. This is our training. [laughs] Actually what's most painful is the simple things, that's the hardest thing to find as an actor. Believe it or not, the walk in that beautiful village that we were at, is actually more draining as an actor than ... It is draining as an actor to do scenes where you're emotional and stuff, but there's a certain pleasure to it. I can't explain, or maybe I'm weird.
Hawke: What's fun is what's challenging. We dove into it. We were locked in that room for a long time and we came out with that scene. We were also very ... this is, the whole film had been filming to that. We filmed that part in sequence, for us it was challenging? Yeah, but we were so glad to be there.
Delpy: To be there to do it.
Hawke: We've arrived where we've worked for nine years to get to.
These films have always left the audience to speculate about what will happen after the end of that particular installment. How much have you thought about them during those intervening years, and how much work do you do to catch them up when you’re embarking on a new film?
Hawke: I remember once doing something ridiculous of being at a deli and trying to shop and buying some things and having a bunch of kids with me, just trying to talk on the phone. I had this thought of, "I wonder if this happens to Jesse?" Would this be a moment where, when nothing like that happened in the script, over the period of years you collect a few of those moments. There's a certain tone and a mood and theme to Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, and sometimes life pops up. Is that the tone and mood? And it logs in there as something.
Delpy: We have to think about the back story every time we try to write one line on the screenplay. You can't start writing the second screenplay or the third screenplay more without knowing everything that happened in between. I wouldn't say Celine lives with me 24/7, otherwise I'd be crazy.
Hawke: She's just at home watching Before Sunrise and Before Sunset all the time.
Delpy: For nine years, that's all I did. [laughs] Truly, we let go of them, but when we get back into working on those films, it's like a tremendous amount of homework figuring out what happened in those nine years, basically. You can't even write a line of screenplay on those films without having done that first. We have the luxury of time which is ... we have nine years in between those films.
Many of these conversations are familiar to people in long-term relationships. What do you learn as Celine and Jesse as you’re acting it about how to handle conflict in your own relationships?
Hawke: It’s so nice to be able to have time to come up with the right witty response.
Delpy: This is the ideal argument. We get to write it for like eight weeks. We get to revisit it, rehearse it. In real life, I don’t think I’m that good. I never come up with the right, you know. I scream and I throw things around [laughs]. I’m joking. Actually, I don’t argue very much so it was a real stretch for me to write that scene [laughs].
Over the span of 18 years, how have the characters and the stories changed you as performers or actors?
Hawke: I'd like to say I learned how to speak on camera on Before Sunrise. As a young actor, you kind of get asked to pose or affect an emotion, but Richard wanted Julie and I to talk and to be present in front of the camera, to not act. This adventure in not-acting started then, and it's ...
Delpy: I was thinking about that, because it's really hard, actually. You really are rarely asked to do that as actors, maybe once in a film, doing a big monologue to tell a story. You might have it once every 10 films, but usually it's like dialogue, dialogue, one word, one word, but here it's big chunks. You should see the script. How do you do that without... It can sound really boring if we're not super-duper natural at saying it. It sounds like we're telling the story to someone we care for, so that's the real challenge of these films. That's been the challenge of actors every time. As writers we worked on the screenplay of the first film, but it was really how to learn to really talk on camera without being boring, and that's the hardest thing. To tell a story on camera without sounding boring is the hardest thing. I've experienced it on other films and it's really, really hard. So it's finding the right tone to do it.
Linklater: I don't know if we evolved that much. I think the way we work over these films is very similar to the dynamic between us. We're a band who’s still performing in a very similar manner. We're the Ramones or something. The way we sat in Vienna, 19 years ago ... is the way we're inter-dynamic, the way we push each other and pull out.
Hawke: We're a little less impressed with one another. [laughs] We were getting to know each other, but the result is the same. The way we were getting to know each other.
What qualities did you want Celine to have now that she’s in her 40s? And what aspect of her emotional story resonates with you the most?
Delpy: About Celine, I really wanted to make sure that she was a strong woman, she's looking towards the future, she's not someone who dwells in the past, and she's a very active person. She could seem at times very vindictive and she's not going to let someone tell her what to do or how it should be done. She also believes that if they do move to Chicago, it will destroy their relationship. It's not just about the work, and she's completely convinced of that. She's probably -- personally I think she's right. I think she makes sense. To me it was very important that she's not the wife of the writer. She's her own person and that's very important for me to depict that character as so. It's the same for Richard and Ethan to make sure that it's not just the wife, otherwise it's out of balance. Then it's a film about a guy who has a nice French girlfriend, French wife. It was very important to make sure it is balanced female-male, that it's not a macho movie or a feminist movie without meaning or anything, that it's very, very balanced in that sense. That's our goal actually, that when we write this it's neither macho or feminist or man-hating. She doesn't hate men. It's like we find the right balance between the two.
Celine is enormously honest and complex, which seems to be a rare thing for female roles. How much is that sort of a response to the fact there are so few female roles that are like that in movies?
Delpy: It’s always been my issue since I’ve been very young. I’ve seen movies and stuff and I see complex women. But I remember as a kid growing up, I’d be like, OK, I see complex women in like Bergman films. [But] there’s very few. Usually, it’s like one dimension if any. Two dimensions is a miracle. It’s really hard to find characters that are written in a way that is truthful, multi-dimensional. She’s not good, she’s not bad. She can be a bitch, she can be adorable. You have that in male characters a lot. You have extremely complex, extremely conflicted characters and stuff. There’s been characters like that too a lot, for example, in the cinema in the ‘70s. The U.S. was wonderful. In the ‘60s, it was wonderful. Then it kind of died in the ‘80s when the woman became one-dimensional again. Something happened. I don’t know what it is. Anyway, for me it’s essential. For us, too, because we really work together. It’s not me writing just Celine. I write tons of lines for Jesse. We all write for each other. But basically, to make sure the character is really multi-dimensional and really real, and not some kind of cut-out cardboard of a fantasy or something like that. I would never let that happen anyway, with me in that room. And they wouldn’t let me do that anyway.
If we were to revisit her in her 50s, where would she be?
Delpy: In her 50s? Ten years from now? Well, we don't know yet. I don't know. I have no clue. We actually don't think about the future, that's how we kind of operate.
Hawke: We're just so happy to be done with the third film. It was just so much work.
Delpy: We might not even do a fourth film. That could be it.
Linklater: It's fine. It turned out a trilogy and we never planned on it in the first place. I think we're fine with it as it is.
Delpy: We made three ...
Linklater: It's impossible for us to know anything until the years go by.
How has it felt to keep this series going, to continue their story over the course of almost 20 years?
Delpy: Especially with this last film, writing it I was like "Oh, my God," you go so deep into certain things in the writing and emotionally. When I say we're having fun doing the end scene, we're having fun but it's kind of like moving a lot of things within us. It's not something as simple as having fun, it's a lot more complicated, those emotions and stuff because we've all been through those emotions in a relationship and it's not a fun thing to go through. So we know how heavy it is. It's just a very ... We try to be as genuine and honest as possible. What's amazing is that people relate. In a way sometimes I feel like. “Oh, my God, nobody's going to be interested in this and that.” Sometimes you have doubts because sometimes you have such a deep emotion that people are like I just want to see happy people! In the end, some people can relate, which I guess what cinema is about, for people to identify, right? Or dream. Maybe it's less dream and more identification.
Linklater: We have some ideal audiences in mind, believe it or not. The second film we felt nobody wanted. When we made the first film nobody asked, "Is there going to be another film?" That wasn't a logical question. When we were making the second film in Paris every day we were looking at one another and said, "How are we getting to do that?" This is amazing that we're getting to make this very personal film that no one really even cares about except for three people, which means you're in a good spot if you're ever making a film like that. And so the way that one ended, there has been that kind of build-up. We've gotten all sorts of questions over the last nine years about "Oh, Jesse and Celine are together?" We sort of stubbornly rebelled against that in our minds but once we let that go and put it out of our mind that there are only three people out there who cared about them, and just kind of dug into ourselves and concentrated on that. We do have this very small audience in mind when we get to a crossroads and think, well, cinema, storytelling, narrative, storytelling says this plus this equals an unlikeable character, and you just don't do it. We think, well, that's a construct. That's not really real, that's just the narrative storytelling bubble that so much cinema exists in. Well, maybe our audience, whoever that is, might appreciate that we go there up on this subject because we built an artificial thing that could support that. We would support a lot of brutal honesty, I hope, in what we built.