Before Midnight, again starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, is the third instalment in a cinematic romance that's lasted almost 20 years
Down a crackling phone line, from his home in Austin, Texas, Richard Linklater – cult slacker icon, unerring romantic and one of Hollywood's earliest successful independent film-makers – is contemplating love. You would think he is a master of it, being the man behind Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, both full of hopeful, beautiful, naive romance. But, he says, things have changed. For Jesse and Celine, his two most famous protagonists, who met in 1995, reunited in 2004, and now, another nine years later in Before Midnight, find themselves married with twins, love is an entirely different beast. A "kind of brutal" beast. Almost 20 years after their first chance meeting, on a train bound for Vienna, young and free from battle scars, things have moved on. Now, in their 40s, is the love, romance and hope that made them one of cinema's most beloved couples still a possibility?
"We'd had these more obvious romantic encounters in the previous two films," Linklater says. "They were very different, but yet they both had this romantic notion. Can you do that at 41 in the situation that Celine and Jesse find themselves in? At the beginning of a relationship, you're bending yourself to fit and to please the other person. You withhold a lot, but hopefully over time, you come to accept the rougher edges of each other. For me, I saw it as how people negotiate, and how they agree to disagree. You either break up, or you learn to deal. Love expands hopefully, if you can get there. But that's a life project, I guess: how you define it, how you recognise it. The film was a bigger challenge in that you had to dig deeper into this stage of life and make it more interesting, and that's why there's a lot of romantic movies that don't go here."
Before Midnight is certainly a harder pill to swallow than the first two films. Once again, we meet Celine and Jesse in Europe, in Greece this time, on a family holiday. Cracks are not papered over, and the trials of marriage are laid bare, in a way that may prove all too realistic for, well, anyone who has ever had a long-term relationship. However, for Linklater, the "ugly" honesty of real-life love was vital to bringing the two characters back to screen.
"My initial impulse on the first film was to reflect what love felt like in real life, versus what you see in movies," the 52-year-old writer-director explains. "I like to fill in the gaps of things that are often left out. Life gets more absurd and more tragic the older you get. In this movie, there is a melancholy, but there's kind of a wonderful recognition of each other in there, too. They are still making each other laugh and that is hopeful."
The stories and scars in his latest film have come from a collaboration of tales cooked up between Linklater and his writing partners for this project, the film's stars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. "The three of us come to this realisation about the same time," he says. "usually five or six years after the last instalment. We have no ideas for a long time, then it's like, 'You know what? I'm kind of feeling something.' Like any three writers, things are both autobiographical and things you pick up from the world. It's a personal reflection from all three of us, for sure. But whatever it is from our own lives, it's going to be something different by the time it's in our movie."
*'Any film with a brain in it, any film that is vaguely adult, you're going to have trouble getting made. Every film I feel a bit like I'm being treated like it's my first'*
Despite two male writers and one female, Before Midnight, as with its predecessors, has what Hawke refers to as a "genderless" voice. "That was my goal on Before Sunrise," agrees Linklater. "I felt my previous film [Dazed And Confused] had been commandeered more by a male voice. There was such testosterone and that's where my head was at. But with these, we're really trying to be in a place where we don't favour one sex. It's a struggle, it's tricky to pull off, but the three of us are all very in touch. Ethan and I do have this feminist side, and I think Julie has a very strong male side, so that's the way it works: Ethan writes plenty of Julie's dialogue, Julie writes for Ethan, and I'm the swing vote."
After more than 20 years of writing and directing, Linklater's career is not easy to categorise. The same brain that created Before Sunrise also created School Of Rock, Slacker and Dazed And Confused. "I don't think anyone would like all of them," he laughs. "But on the other hand, there's got to be a film somewhere in my filmography that you can somehow relate to on some level. I was never striving for anything like consistency and I've never put myself in any category in film. I feel like I could attempt anything if the story was compelling enough. I don't go into anything trying to convey something I necessarily know. To me, that would be boring. I'm not trying to render something I have all tied up in a bow. Like a lot of people, what you're seeing is the process of figuring something out, figuring out how I feel about something."
While feeling his way along undoubtedly makes for a more interesting filming process, it's not a way of working that guarantees a big budget from financers. Linklater certainly has the ability to draw big names – Matthew McConaughey, a fellow Texan, starred in Dazed And Confused and, alongside Jack Black, signed up to his offbeat black comedy, Bernie, with little persuasion needed – but getting backing from studios isn't always as easy.
"Any film with a brain in it, any film that is vaguely adult, you're going to have trouble getting made," he says, candidly. "Every film I feel a bit like I'm being treated like it's my first. Some young executive is like, 'Oh we think this film could be more funny.' Well, it will be, I haven't even cast the film yet! Give me the talent, give me three weeks to rehearse, and the fucking scene will be funny! You're back at the well every time, having to convince people to trust you. I'm amazed some of my films ever got made, I know they wouldn't get made today. Bernie was a very odd-looking script, you couldn't tell from reading it what the film would be at all. But once I got the cast, I was like, 'OK, the film might suck, but we can sell the DVD.' You've just got to keep the budgets low, that's all."
It is perhaps not the dream of most film-makers, to operate on a small budget, but for Linklater, it works out well. He gets to make his films the way he wants, and as a result Celine and Jesse live on – albeit with a little more baggage.
*Before Midnight opens in the UK on Fri 21 Jun* Reported by guardian.co.uk 11 hours ago.
Down a crackling phone line, from his home in Austin, Texas, Richard Linklater – cult slacker icon, unerring romantic and one of Hollywood's earliest successful independent film-makers – is contemplating love. You would think he is a master of it, being the man behind Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, both full of hopeful, beautiful, naive romance. But, he says, things have changed. For Jesse and Celine, his two most famous protagonists, who met in 1995, reunited in 2004, and now, another nine years later in Before Midnight, find themselves married with twins, love is an entirely different beast. A "kind of brutal" beast. Almost 20 years after their first chance meeting, on a train bound for Vienna, young and free from battle scars, things have moved on. Now, in their 40s, is the love, romance and hope that made them one of cinema's most beloved couples still a possibility?
"We'd had these more obvious romantic encounters in the previous two films," Linklater says. "They were very different, but yet they both had this romantic notion. Can you do that at 41 in the situation that Celine and Jesse find themselves in? At the beginning of a relationship, you're bending yourself to fit and to please the other person. You withhold a lot, but hopefully over time, you come to accept the rougher edges of each other. For me, I saw it as how people negotiate, and how they agree to disagree. You either break up, or you learn to deal. Love expands hopefully, if you can get there. But that's a life project, I guess: how you define it, how you recognise it. The film was a bigger challenge in that you had to dig deeper into this stage of life and make it more interesting, and that's why there's a lot of romantic movies that don't go here."
Before Midnight is certainly a harder pill to swallow than the first two films. Once again, we meet Celine and Jesse in Europe, in Greece this time, on a family holiday. Cracks are not papered over, and the trials of marriage are laid bare, in a way that may prove all too realistic for, well, anyone who has ever had a long-term relationship. However, for Linklater, the "ugly" honesty of real-life love was vital to bringing the two characters back to screen.
"My initial impulse on the first film was to reflect what love felt like in real life, versus what you see in movies," the 52-year-old writer-director explains. "I like to fill in the gaps of things that are often left out. Life gets more absurd and more tragic the older you get. In this movie, there is a melancholy, but there's kind of a wonderful recognition of each other in there, too. They are still making each other laugh and that is hopeful."
The stories and scars in his latest film have come from a collaboration of tales cooked up between Linklater and his writing partners for this project, the film's stars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. "The three of us come to this realisation about the same time," he says. "usually five or six years after the last instalment. We have no ideas for a long time, then it's like, 'You know what? I'm kind of feeling something.' Like any three writers, things are both autobiographical and things you pick up from the world. It's a personal reflection from all three of us, for sure. But whatever it is from our own lives, it's going to be something different by the time it's in our movie."
*'Any film with a brain in it, any film that is vaguely adult, you're going to have trouble getting made. Every film I feel a bit like I'm being treated like it's my first'*
Despite two male writers and one female, Before Midnight, as with its predecessors, has what Hawke refers to as a "genderless" voice. "That was my goal on Before Sunrise," agrees Linklater. "I felt my previous film [Dazed And Confused] had been commandeered more by a male voice. There was such testosterone and that's where my head was at. But with these, we're really trying to be in a place where we don't favour one sex. It's a struggle, it's tricky to pull off, but the three of us are all very in touch. Ethan and I do have this feminist side, and I think Julie has a very strong male side, so that's the way it works: Ethan writes plenty of Julie's dialogue, Julie writes for Ethan, and I'm the swing vote."
After more than 20 years of writing and directing, Linklater's career is not easy to categorise. The same brain that created Before Sunrise also created School Of Rock, Slacker and Dazed And Confused. "I don't think anyone would like all of them," he laughs. "But on the other hand, there's got to be a film somewhere in my filmography that you can somehow relate to on some level. I was never striving for anything like consistency and I've never put myself in any category in film. I feel like I could attempt anything if the story was compelling enough. I don't go into anything trying to convey something I necessarily know. To me, that would be boring. I'm not trying to render something I have all tied up in a bow. Like a lot of people, what you're seeing is the process of figuring something out, figuring out how I feel about something."
While feeling his way along undoubtedly makes for a more interesting filming process, it's not a way of working that guarantees a big budget from financers. Linklater certainly has the ability to draw big names – Matthew McConaughey, a fellow Texan, starred in Dazed And Confused and, alongside Jack Black, signed up to his offbeat black comedy, Bernie, with little persuasion needed – but getting backing from studios isn't always as easy.
"Any film with a brain in it, any film that is vaguely adult, you're going to have trouble getting made," he says, candidly. "Every film I feel a bit like I'm being treated like it's my first. Some young executive is like, 'Oh we think this film could be more funny.' Well, it will be, I haven't even cast the film yet! Give me the talent, give me three weeks to rehearse, and the fucking scene will be funny! You're back at the well every time, having to convince people to trust you. I'm amazed some of my films ever got made, I know they wouldn't get made today. Bernie was a very odd-looking script, you couldn't tell from reading it what the film would be at all. But once I got the cast, I was like, 'OK, the film might suck, but we can sell the DVD.' You've just got to keep the budgets low, that's all."
It is perhaps not the dream of most film-makers, to operate on a small budget, but for Linklater, it works out well. He gets to make his films the way he wants, and as a result Celine and Jesse live on – albeit with a little more baggage.
*Before Midnight opens in the UK on Fri 21 Jun* Reported by guardian.co.uk 11 hours ago.