AFTER 'SUNRISE'
Actress-writer Julie Delpy on revisiting an on-screen romance in Richard Linklater's atypical sequel
By Andy Klein
Richard Linklater's Before Sunset (opening July 2) is a sequel, but it didn't get made for the aesthetically dubious reasons that drive most sequels, good and bad. That is, it was not economically mandated like a Shrek 2 (good) or a Matrix Reloaded (bad). Linklater's 1995 Before Sunrise was a modestly budgeted, modestly successful film, for which many viewers have maintained a fondness through the years. It was a simple story about Jesse (Ethan Hawke), a young American traveler, and the French Celine (Julie Delpy), who meet on a train, fall for each other, and spend one long, memorable, talkative night together before he is due to fly home. At the end, they promise to meet again in six months at the same spot.
"We did this one mostly because people were always asking the question, what happens six months later? Does it happen?" Delpy explains. "After the first film, we all [Delpy, Hawke, and Linklater] stayed in touch, and we always talked about a sequel, but not 100 percent seriously."
In 1999, Delpy and Hawke reprised the roles of Celine and Jesse for a brief scene that was later computer-rotoscoped into Linklater's animated feature Waking Life. (The scene doesn't really fit together with the world of Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, since it's part of someone else's dream ... or something like that.) "When we were working together again on Waking Life, we all enjoyed it so much that Rick decided we should do the sequel."
Since Before Sunset is about Celine and Jesse meeting again in Paris nine years later for the first time following their initial romance, it's not a spoiler to say that, obviously, one or both of them failed to keep the date they had made.
I asked Delpy whether, during the shooting of the first film, she thought the characters would show up; her answer, with its multiple revisions and qualifications, made it charmingly clear that she has ... mixed ... feelings about it. "Well, it really depends whether you're a cynic or a romantic. I'm a cynic, so I thought they would never meet again ... or that she would show up but he wouldn't. I believe in romantic love, but I don't believe other people do. Well, actually, I've lost my interest in romantic love ... but ... it's not that simple. I have, and I haven't. I don't even understand the concept anymore. I guess I am a romantic ... but not really anymore. I'm kind of a half-romantic.
"But I can still write about it. The proof is that I can create a character who is a romantic."
It's not very often that actors revisit their characters almost a decade later. "We watched the first film before we shot the new one and before we started writing the new one - which was essential, both so we wouldn't repeat ourselves and so we would be the same characters," she says. "It was much more complex to build the characters for the second film: There was much more to write about since, when you're in your 30s, you're pretty much set on one track."
The actors had contributed a lot to the script for the first film. "Basically, there was an original script, written by Rick and Kim Krizan, and I think Ethan and I changed about 70 percent of the dialogue with Rick," says Delpy. For the second film, actors and directors worked together from the start, and Delpy and Hawke receive writing credits. (The movie also has Delpy singing three songs she had already written for a CD, released a year earlier.) Linklater had written a script, but, Delpy says, "He finally decided to forget it entirely and start from scratch with us." Because the pair had written a lot of dialogue for the first film, the director felt he could trust them.
"It wasn't a very usual process for writing a film," Deply notes. "We all met in 2002, in March or April, and wrote the structure of the script from beginning to end. Then I went away, and in June I wrote a first draft, which was about 40 pages, and I sent it to the guys, and they liked it. Ethan sent me monologues, and Rick sent me little bits of scenes. I sent Rick something like 13 pages of me being angry at consumer society, parts of which he took and put in the film. He even included bits of a letter I wrote a few years ago to George Bush - an angry 15-page letter.
"Finally we got together in Paris and worked intensely for a few days," she continues. "And then, right before the shoot, for like two weeks, we did another entire rewrite of the script. And that was what we shot."
Inevitably, I had to wonder whether Celine and Julie were one and the same. "Of course there's a bit of me in the character, because I wanted to capture women of my generation who are hardworking, and passionate at their work, but still are emotional and full of vulnerability," she says. "In that sense, I relate to her 100 percent, but at the same time ... it's not autobiographical ... . It represents a lot of women I know, more than just me. Actually, I based Celine on two or three friends of mine more than on myself."
Will there be a third chapter? "We'll see," she says. "I don't know if there will be another film or if we'll leave it there. It depends on whether people like it or not. I mean, we don't want to impose these characters on people over and over. If people want to see them again, then we'll know. But, if they don't, we're not going to push it on them."Published: 05/27/2004
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