The sad origins of Richard Linklater’s ‘Before’ trilogy
In Richard Linklater‘s Before trilogy, the intricacies of human emotions and the vicissitudes of relationships are explored with poignancy and honesty. Beginning in 1995, the relationship between Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) highlights the fleeting nature of time, which they must battle to catch up with.
In Before Sunrise, the pair meet on a train and instantly connect, spontaneously deciding to spend the night walking around Vienna together. The film captures the effervescent feeling of meeting someone for the first time, and the characters imbue a hopeful energy, albeit with an undercurrent of nervousness. Subtle gestures such as looking at each other and being unsure when to look away (as evidenced in the record store scene) create a palpable tension between the two. In essence, the film is one of the most romantic pieces of cinema, made so through an emphasis on the intimacies of conversation and language.
The film owes its debt to Eric Rohmer, the French filmmaker behind works such as My Night At Maud’s and The Green Ray, who prioritised speech over action. Just as his characters would walk and talk, philosophising ideas on life and romance, Jesse and Celine do the same. Linklater co-wrote the script with Kim Krizan, which took 11 days. His aim for the film was to explore the “relationship side of life and discover two people who had complete anonymity and try to find out who they really were.”
However, once Hawke and Delpy were recruited, the pair “basically re-wrote all of it”, according to the latter. She stated that Linklater’s script “wasn’t very romantic, believe it or not. […] Richard hired us because he knew we were writing, and he wanted us to bring that romance to the film.” Although much of the dialogue and events came from the main actors, Linklater’s original premise came from a personal experience akin to that of Jesse and Celine.
In 1989, Linklater met a woman called Amy Lehrhaupt in a Philadelphia toy shop whilst visiting his family. He said: “We ended up spending the night walking around, flirting, doing things you would never do now. I was at that stage in life where I was open, so we just walked and got to know each other.” In contrast to Jesse and Celine, who failed to keep in touch and only reunited nine years later, Linklater and Lehrhaupt attempted to keep a long-distance relationship. However, distance proved too tricky, and the pair lost contact.
During their night together, Linklater told Lehrhaupt he would put their story onto the big screen one day. “Even as that experience was going on … I was like, ‘I’m gonna make a film about this.’ And she was like, ‘What ‘this’? What’re you talking about?’ And I was like, ‘Just this. This feeling. This thing that’s going on between us.'”
Before Sunrise spawned Before Sunset in 2004, where Jesse and Celine reunite in Paris and spend the evening together. During promotional interviews for the sequel, Linklater expressed his desire for Lehrhaupt to appear at one of the film’s screenings, but she never did. The director found out why in 2010 when a woman contacted him after connecting the dots between Before Sunrise and an experience a friend had told her of a night she spent with a stranger.
A few weeks before shooting began for Before Sunrise in 1994, Lehrhaupt was killed in a motorcycle accident. She never knew that her night with Linklater would be adapted into a film and how adored the series would become by fans worldwide. When the director learned of her passing, he said, “Who knows how we reverberate through each other’s lives.”
The Before trilogy culminated in 2013’s Before Midnight, which explores the middle-aged couple’s strained relationship and eventual reconciliation. At the end of the credits, there is a dedication to Amy Lehrhaupt.
