Richard Linklater's BEFORE Trilogy [Teaser]
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Rebecca, much like Jesse and Celine, we have no agenda. We have no notes, no itinerary. We're just going to wander together through this experience. We're going to wander together through the three films in the before trilogy that I hope someday is quadrilogy, pentology, whenever in the future we can talk about the end. Our shared admiration for...

these actors, this sensibility, and I think to not a small part of it, the worldview that these movies express and explore and wrestle with. Yeah. And I think we've said in the past, either on the pod or just to each other, these movies are the most literary fiction of movies. Yes.

Just people walking around talking about life. Well, we'll get to our first experiences in here. Let's do a broader take about what we like about these. We can maybe do favorite lines or moments. I think what you said, people walk around talking. There's this quote in Uncut Gems where Adam Sandler is, you know, he's betting on stuff and trying to get diamonds. And like, he's in this crazy world where everything is a little bit dangerous and seems frankly, like he's got some kind of condition.

And he says at some point, the action is the juice.

And for me, the dialogue is the juice. Dialogue is action. And this is true for me in most of my movie and TV viewing. A little less true for books, but because the sentence can substitute for dialogue. But the dialogue is the juice. That's where I live. That's what I look for. This is a very like if the way to your heart is through your brain, these are the movies for you. And I guess quickly for folks, just in case you haven't seen them. Thank you.

Before Sunrise is 1995. These are both Ethan Hawke and Julie, or all three of them were Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. They are in their early 20s in this one. They're on a train in Europe. He is supposed to catch a flight the next morning and he doesn't have a place to stay that night. So his plan is just to wander around Vienna all night before he goes and catches his train. They meet on the train because a German couple are fighting and they do that thing you do sometimes where like,

strangers are being weird in public. And so you make eye contact with somebody of like, we see in the same thing and they strike up a conversation and he asks her to go wander the streets of Vienna with him overnight. And they do kind of fall in love with each other.

before sunset picks up nine years later, he has written a book inspired by this experience. And he's on tour at Shakespeare and company in Paris, baby, where she lives and she has seen coverage of it. They haven't spoken since. And she shows up at his reading and they wander the streets of Paris for the day. And then before midnight spoiler, they've been married for several years and are entering middle age and

and things are kind of rocky. Where are they going to live? His son is back in the States. Their kids together with them in Europe. How's the relationship? Are we going to stay together? Is it going to work? Yeah, we can get in a bunch of it too. Let's start with our first experience, especially before Sunrise, the first one, which came out in 1995. At an auspicious age, I think for both of us, probably in our self-formation, I had just been in Europe once.

two summers before as part of an eighth grade trip. And so it feels very familiar, the fashion, the style, the ethos, very familiar.

The like spaghetti strap baby doll dress with the plaid shirt tied around the waist. Like, come on, 1995. Hawks Chuck T's hold up pretty well, but like that sort of pleatherish jacket over loose jeans, not so much. The goatee and the mock turtleneck. Well, the goatee is forever for Ethan Hawke, and that's okay. He just sort of pasted that thing on there in the early 90s, been riding it for 30 years. Yeah.

And as a bookish kid interested in the world and fashioned themselves, well not fashioned themselves, wanted to see the world and see its bigness and strangeness. This is an extremely seductive idea for most people, but I think I was especially subject to it. You know, it's not, it's not,

It's a little, it's a Gen Z when Harry met Sally or a Gen X when Harry met Sally is not the worst way to put it with more of a literary twist because they're sitting around falling in love each other by talking through a city. But it has a little more intellectual pretension, I think is an okay way of putting it. These are people, young people trying out ideas and learning and trying to figure out how their idealism can interact with the reality of the world and their own feelings and flaws and the feelings and flaws of another person.

And Vienna's amazing. Europe's beautiful shot, correct? Beautiful. And there's this intensity because like when Harry met Sally...

I think it's an interesting comp, but it's spread out over what, 10 years of their friendship that it takes them to get together. And Ethan Hawke and Julie Delphi have this, you know, Jesse and Celine have this like one night, they have like eight hours at a time to really try to express like a potent version of who I am and get a sense of a potent version of who you are. And it's,

like to work in that chemistry and you can see like it's awkward at first in the way that talking to someone you don't know is awkward at first where you're trying to like, you can see them trying to read each other and trying to gauge like the next move to make in the conversation to try to make the impression on the other that they want to make.

I don't remember the first time I saw this, which I think is a true mark of like, that's how formative it was. This has just been in my DNA forever. I didn't start watching it a lot. Like, you know, I don't think I had access to like a DVD of it until I was in college. And if I had watched it repeatedly as a younger person, this would have been like a very important text. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it's so it was an indie movie, like it made 22 ish million. I didn't do any of my research before watching because I didn't want to be sullied by anything there. So I went back and looked like it did quite well, given its budget. And so so all of them did. But these aren't huge movies.

I think like a lot of things in this era, it made its bones on tape. Now we would say it made its bones on streaming, I guess. There are things that happen this way. Yeah. Because you probably didn't if you were especially like you were, what, 12? Is that how old you were? I was 13 in 95. You weren't flying down to the art house to pick out this movie. You know, you weren't going to go down there. I'm sure I saw it because someone rented it from the blockbuster. I cannot remember the first time I saw this. I don't think I saw it in the theater. I don't.

I don't think that I did. Michelle and I may have seen it in high school in the theater. I feel like I would have remembered the experience of watching with her in the theater, to be very honest. I feel like you would too, because you'd be like, seeing this movie on a date is high stakes, man. Yeah, it's a little bit like, you know, there is real no equivalent there. Because it has a deep romanticism in it, even as, especially the later movies are more grounded in

The hurly-burly truth of the world. The truth of the world is here insofar as they know already, for example, that they don't want to just write letters and go off because they have had some experience of, they have a sense that this is magic. And to do something normal with this magic moment will only normalize it. So they're trying to harness that. That's maybe my favorite thing about this movie. And you kind of teased it on the regular show yesterday that this is yours. No, it's the second one, right? Of the three. Yeah.

The second one is also mine, but the thing I love about... I mean, come on. Oh, I love that. I'm not saying, you know, this is 1A, 1B. But yeah, the thing that I love about this is these people moving between like the very mundane sort of getting to know you conversations, the big philosophical like dorm room sorts of what does it all mean conversations, and then the meta moments where they pop out just enough to look at each other and have a conversation of like...

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