Before Sunrise, Sunset and Midnight with Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke

Actors Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, and director Richard Linklater first worked together in 1995 to create the film “Before Sunrise” following the love story of Jesse and Celine.   They followed up  nine years later with “Before Sunset.”  Eighteen years after the original film debuted, they are back together again in “Before Midnight.”  Hawke, Delpy and Linklater recently stopped by the SiriusXM studios to sit down with Ron Bennington to talk about the newest film in the trilogy.  Excerpts from the interview appear below. You can hear the interview in its entirety exclusively on SiriusXM satellite radio.

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Ron Bennington:  Eighteen years into this project now, it’s pretty amazing, it’s a pretty amazing thing to be able to pull off.

Ethan Hawke:  Yeah, I don’t think any of us would have predicted that we’d be here eighteen years later, making a third film.

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Ethan Hawke, Richard Linklater And Julie Delpy Talk About The Fragility Of Relationships

Ron Bennington:  But what seems so strange is how natural it is to follow this story because, I guess in a weird way, this is our lives; this is our story,  everybody’s story. 

Ethan Hawke:  We’ve been lucky to portray these two really interesting people at age 23, 32, and now 41.  Your life is very different at those three stages of life, we kind of depicted what I think is a common experience.

Richard Linklater:  And particularly romantic love is different.  There are ways in which life is the same, but people’s relationship to romance goes through huge evolutions in a person’s life.  Those are big jumps those ages.

Ron Bennington:  I remember when I was a kid and people were like, “Well, you’ve got to work at relationships,” and I was like “NO, I don’t want to do that.” 

Ethan Hawke:  “I’ll work at other things”

Richard Linklater:  “Relationships should be fun.”

Ron Bennington:  But, what you really love about these films, particularly this one, is as much as you know these people love each other and you know they care about each other, but it could also turn into a fine powder in just a heartbeat.

Richard Linklater:  I think a lot of people feel hat way

Julie Delpy:  The first two films were about short encounters, romantic encounters, which is always more glamorous.  In a way, it wasn’t easy to write or do as a film, but it is something that has been done before.  Getting into, the “meat,” of the…

Richard Linklater:  …the domestic.

Julie Delpy:  The domestic part of it is very scary.  There are very few movies about that.  There are movies about breaking up, divorce, but there aren’t many movies about how you sustain this romantic love and still love each other after a certain number of years.  How do you manage relationships?

Ron Bennington:  Or should you?  Why are all of us so committed to other people being married?  Sometimes you’ll go to a place and, “Oh, we’ve been married forty years,” and everyone will clap, but, is that better?

Ethan Hawke:  That’s a fascinating question, I think that is the real question.  A lot of people who are single feel that there is something wrong with their life.  As if we see all these amazing examples of longterm relationships like, “Everybody else is in a happy relationship,” and it’s not true.   Most of us, if we thought of a relationship of our friends that you would really trade places with, if you’re lucky you can think of two people where you’re, “I wouldn’t mind a relationship like that.” But even people who’ve been together forty years, if you really get inside the minutia of their relationship, usually you don’t want it.  Usually it involves some kind of  compromise that you find reprehensible.  It’s like we don’t sit around bemoaning our whole life that we’re not Michael Jordan, but some people get to have romantic love and a lifelong way and it’s a beautiful thing worth applauding, but a lot of people don’t.  I think we get made to feel badly that we don’t have it and that frustrates me.

Julie Delpy:  And sometimes when you ask questions to older people who have been together for a long time, you find out there were a lot of things that happened in this relationship; ups and downs, terrible moments, and separation.  And sometimes the woman had to give up everything, or the man had to give up so much or…

Richard Linklater:  They went through bad phases.

Julie Delpy:  Or it’s been very, very difficult.  It lasted, but… I would say most relationships, I know a few that wasn’t crazy difficult, but most relationships they went through periods of difficult times.

Ethan Hawke:  And it goes against what we think we want.  I mean, the reason the room breaks into applause is because people think they want that.  They think there is another half to them that could be made whole.

Julie Delpy:  Or maybe the applaud because they think, “Wow, you did it.”  Like, it’s so hard.  Like, “How did you do it?”  To me the applause is, “Wow…”

Ethan Hawke:  “… you forgave each other” (laughing)

Richard Linklater:  It could also be, you’ve compromised your life away.  Who knows?

Ron Bennington:  It doesn’t mean growth all the time, because you could just be like, “I go to the other side of the house, I don’t deal with them, we don’t talk much, we just share this thing.”  It’s not like having a job for forty years is better than if you had eight jobs.  Maybe there is more growth to doing other things.  

Ethan Hawke:  Maybe it should be that if somebody says, “Hey we just celebrated our fortieth anniversary and I just, in all honesty, had the biggest orgasm of my life, just now.”  Then you go… (applauding). (All laughing).

Richard Linklater:  Yeah, it’s like, “We haven’t had sex in twelve years, and you know…”

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Ethan Hawke, Richard Linklater And Julie Delpy Talk About Where “Before Midnight” Picks Up

Ron Bennington:  The other thing that I love about the film that obviously you can’t plan on when you are younger and you fall in love, but through their lives they have fucked up and you carry this with you.  You’ve made mistakes and either your character is never going to get over the fact that there is somebody else that you were committed to, your child, who you’re not giving that thing that you know you could have.

Ethan Hawke:  You talked about the beginning of the movie and I think that we all felt this way, that it was important to start the third film looking in the eyes of the repercussions of the end of the second film.  Because, when the second film ends, pretty much everyone watches that movie and wants Jesse to kiss Celine, everyone wants that to go forward.  And we say to our children, and to ourselves, “follow your bliss, follow your heart, follow your love,” but there are ramifications if you do that.  One of the big ramifications for Jesse is his relationship with his son.

Ron Bennington:  And we screw that up no matter how well we do.  

Ethan Hawke:  Exactly, he would have screwed that up if he stayed in that marriage, too.  But, life involves screwing up, it just does.

Richard Linklater:  Yeah, there is no way to get through and not be in a little pain and cause a little pain.

Julie Delpy:  The goal is to screw up as little as possible.

Ethan Hawke:  And to create as little friction against your life.

Ron Bennington:  But, we’re never sure.  

Julie Delpy:  Every decision you make has consequences.

Ethan Hawke And Richard Linklater Talk About The Ramifications Of Making Or Not Making Decisions

Ron Bennington:  And even every non-decision you make has consequences.  Things that you did not go for:  whether you should push the kid into playing the piano, or not pushed him into playing the piano?

Richard Linklater:  Yeah, it’s really complex, isn’t it.  Every day you’re making a decision like that.

Julie Delpy: Or maybe you need to force the kid a little bit. How do you manage that?

Ethan Hawke:  The life of an actor is a strange thing, it’s a really good example of that.  We’re forced into making decisions, life changing decisions, three or four times a year.  I’m always deciding what film to do, what not to do.  And things that you don’t do have longterm repercussions, things you do do… I mean, people are still asking us about a movie we made eighteen years ago.  I remember when I was trying to decide whether to do “Before Sunrise”, I was sitting with some real “Hollywood types” and I said, “I’m thinking about doing this movie with Richard Linklater.”  And they were like, “Oh…” and I said, “What you don’t like him?”  And they said, “Well ‘Slacker’ was a stunt, “Dazed and Confused” was a bomb, don’t work with him.”  I remember saying to them, “Did you see “Dazed and Confused”?  Did you see “Slacker”?” and they were like, “No.”  But people are just such jerks.  They are so opinionated, and they want everyone to fail.

Richard Linklater:  It just comes down to, if you hear opinions, if you’re one of those that listens to everyone around you and do what they said, then you get the life you deserve.  Which is usually not very interesting. But, if you have your own vision of what you want and pursue that…

Ron Bennington:  Here is something that you three have, which is odd, this has in a way become like a life’s work, but separately from your other work.  So you get to go back to this project, if you decide to again or not.  But, very few people have that thing where you can say, “Yeah, I might have done this, but I also have worked on this piece.”

Richard Linklater:  It’s evolved into a really fascinating life project for us, almost two decades.  We were meeting, we figured out, almost twenty years ago this fall, we were all getting to know each other for the first time.  Meeting and talking about this movie, for twenty years we’ve known each other.  You can’t predict the future, but it has it’s own cumulative power, I guess.

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Ethan Hawke And Julie Delpy Talk About What Will Happen With Their “Before” Characters

Ron Bennington:  Even at the end we don’t honestly know whether these guys are going to make it or not.  I suppose that you guys have no idea for sure.

Ethan Hawke:  It’s the same way we are with all of our relationships.  Relationships can be very fragile and relationships can end over the wrong thing being said on the wrong day.  I think it’s mysterious for all of us.

Julie Delpy:  Sometimes it’s good for relationships to end.

Ethan Hawke:  Exactly, just what we were saying when we started this interview.

Julie Delpy:  I mean, maybe not all relationships are meant to last.

Ethan Hawke:  They have to evolve.  They are always changing.

Ron Bennington:  Well, isn’t that the thing?  Here’s the two complaints that we have about each other:  it’s either ‘you haven’t changed,’ or ‘you’ve changed.’  These are the two big mistakes that you can make.  “What do you mean?  I’m the same guy that drank this much when you met me and I was always the loud guy at the bar. What??”

Richard Linklater:  Women often get a guy as a project. (laughing)  Guys are like, “Hey everything is great, she accepts me.”

Julie Delpy:  Not all women.

Ethan Hawke:  Julie has taken us on as a project.  We’re her life project.

Julie Delphy:  They haven’t evolved much, but, we’re trying.

(read more on page 2)

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