Before trilogy

Before Sunrise was inspired by a woman whom writer/director Richard Linklater met in a toy shop in Philadelphia in 1989.[1] They walked around the city together, conversing deep into the night. Originally in the screenplay, who the two people were and the city they spend time in was vague. Linklater realized that because the film is so much a dialogue between a man and a woman, it was important to have a strong woman co-writer. He chose Kim Krizan, who had small roles in his two previous films Slacker and Dazed and Confused.[1] According to Linklater, he "loved the way her mind worked – a constant stream of confident and intelligent ideas".[2]

Linklater and Krizan talked about the concept of the film and the characters for a long time.[2] He wanted to explore the "relationship side of life and discover two people who had complete anonymity and try to find out who they really were".[3] He decided to put Jesse and Céline in a foreign country because "when you're traveling, you're much more open to experiences outside your usual realm".[3] He and Krizan worked on an outline. They wrote the actual screenplay in 11 days.[2]

Linklater spent nine months casting the film because he saw so many people but had trouble finding the right actors for the roles of Jesse and Céline.[4] When Linklater first considered casting Hawke, he thought that the actor was too young for the part.[5] Linklater saw Hawke at a play in New York City and reconsidered after talking to the actor. For Céline, Linklater met Julie Delpy and liked her personality. After they did a final reading, Linklater knew that Delpy and Hawke were right for the roles.[5] Once Delpy and Hawke agreed to do the film, they went to Austin and talked with Linklater and Krizan for a few days.[2] In 2016, Delpy told Creative Screenwriting, "Ethan and I basically re-wrote all of it. There was an original screenplay, but it wasn't very romantic, believe it or not. It was just a lot of talking, rather than romance. Richard hired us because he knew we were writing and he wanted us to bring that romance to the film. We brought those romantic ideas and that's how I wrote something that actually got made, without really getting credit for it. But, if I had written Before Sunrise and been credited, then I doubt it would have been financed.".[6] Though Delpy and Hawke were not credited with writing this film, they received credit for co-writing the sequels.

After the filming of Before Sunrise, Linklater, Hawke, and Delpy discussed making a sequel. Linklater considered a version to be filmed in four locations and with a much larger budget. When his proposal did not secure funding, he scaled back the concept of the movie.[7] In a 2010 interview, Hawke said that the three had worked on several potential scripts over the years. As time passed and they did not secure funding, they adapted elements of the earlier scripts for Before Sunrise in their final draft of Before Sunset.[8]

Linklater described the process of completing the final version of the film as:

We sat in a room and worked together in about a two- or three-day period, worked out a very detailed outline of the whole film in this sort of real-time environment. And then, over the next year or so, we just started e-mailing each other and faxing. I was sort of a conduit – they would send me monologues and dialogues and scenes and ideas, and I was editing, compiling and writing. And that's how we came up with a script.[7]

Hawke said, "It's not like anybody was begging us to make a second film. We obviously did it because we wanted to."[9]

The movie was filmed entirely on location in Paris. It opens inside the Shakespeare and Company bookstore on the Left Bank. Other locations include their walking through the Marais district of the 4th arrondissement, Le Pure Café in the 11th arrondissement, the Promenade Plantée park in the 12th arrondissement, on board a bateau mouche from Quai de la Tournelle to Quai Henri IV, the interior of a taxi, and finally "Céline's apartment." Described in the film as located at 10 rue des Petites-Écuries, it was filmed in Cour de l'Étoile d'Or off rue du Faubourg St-Antoine.

The movie was filmed in 15 days, on a budget of about US$2 million.[7][10] The film is noted for its use of the Steadicam for tracking shots and its use of long takes; the longest of the Steadicam takes lasts about 11 minutes.[10] As the summer was one of the hottest on record, the cast and crew suffered along with the city residents, as temperatures exceeded 100 degrees F (38 °C) for most of the production.

The film is notable for essentially taking place in real time, i.e. the time elapsed in the story is the run time of the film. In the fast-changing temperate Paris climate, this created challenges for the cinematographer Lee Daniel to match the color and intensity of the skies and ambient light from scene to scene. The scenes were mostly shot in sequence, as they were still developing the screenplay. Producer Anne Walker-McBay worked with less time and less money than she had on Before Sunrise, but still brought the film in on time and on budget. The sequel was released nine years after Before Sunrise, the same amount of time that has lapsed in the plot since the events of the first film.

The film was released in the wake of Hawke's divorce from Uma Thurman. Some commentators drew parallels between Hawke's personal life and the character of Jesse in the film.[11] Additional comment has noted that both Hawke and Delpy incorporated elements of their own lives into the screenplay.[10][12] Delpy wrote two of the songs featured in the film, and a third by her was included in the closing credits and movie soundtrack.

Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke, and Julie Delpy had all discussed doing a sequel to Before Sunset (or the third in a trilogy). In November 2011, Hawke said that he, Delpy and Linklater

"have been talking a lot in the last six months. All three of us have been having similar feelings, that we're kind of ready to revisit those characters. There's nine years between the first two movies and, if we made the film next summer, it would be nine years again, so we started thinking that would be a good thing to do. So we're going to try and write it this year."[13][14]

In June 2012, Hawke confirmed that the sequel to Before Sunset would be filmed that summer.[15] Soon after, Delpy denied filming would take place that year.[16] But by August 2012, numerous reports emerged from Messenia, Greece, that the film was being shot there.[17]

The completion of filming the sequel, titled Before Midnight, was announced on September 5, 2012.[18] Linklater said that, after ten weeks of writing and rehearsing, the film was made in fifteen days for less than $3 million.[19] He intended to take it to a film festival in early 2013.[20]

Despite being retroactively billed as a trilogy, the series may extend to future films, with Linklater, Hawke and Delpy suggesting that it could follow Celine and Jesse into old age.[45]

Hawke told IndieWire in March 2020 that he has discussed a potential fourth Before film with Linklater and Delpy, adding that if it happens it would likely not follow the previous sequels' precedent of a nine-year gap between movies. "If the first three were all nine years apart, the fourth would not follow that trajectory," he said. "Linklater would want a different path, either a short film set four years after Midnight or a feature two decades in the future. We think about it. Those are the three best experiences of my life: Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight. They are a part of me. So the idea of revisiting it, I would have to believe that we could make something as good.... We enjoy working together and being together, but we have to make sure we have something to say."[46]