"I've been acting since I was 13 years old, so I love playing around with different genres of movies...It keeps my profession fresh for me," Ethan Hawke told me on the red carpet at the Tribeca Film Festival.
After Midnight, anyone? The Richard Linklater-directed Before Midnight doesn't premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival until 6 pm. on Monday, but an hour before curtain time the filmmaker hinted that a fourth film in a sequence that began with Before Sunrise in 1995 and Before Sunset in 2004, was not out of the question.
Linklater joined the co-stars of the latest installment of his realistic romance, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, at the Tribeca Talks Directors series, and one of the final questions asked of the director was whether the third film was intended to tie up the romance between the American Jesse (Hawke) and the French Céline (Delpy) 18 years after they met on a train traveling to Vienna.
In the third film, Jesse and Celine are not just together they have two daughters in tow as they vacation and bicker in romantic Greece. Watch the trailer and then I'll get to Linklater's response:
Ode to a Grecian Yearn
Linklater answered the festival goer's question by responding that Before Midnight was about capturing "that moment" in Céline and Jesse's lives. "It wasn't a summation. It's definitely not a final vibe," he said, before adding his own twist on a spoiler: "They're both still alive at the end of the movie...There might be another one. Who knows?" But, he concluded that he and his cast didn't have to think about it for at least another five years or so.
This could be good news for fans of the film series, which has a die-hard following thanks to its warts-and-all approach to romance and relationships. If the film is as good as the early buzz indicates, the sequel could be inevitable and not take nine years to come out. Oddly enough, although a nine-year time span separates the first and second and then the second and third movies, Linklater told festival goers that Before Midnight was scheduled to shoot this coming summer but production was moved up when the three collaborators realized that they each had openings in their schedules last summer. The symmetrical nine-year space between the movies "was kind of a coincidence," Linklater said.
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I've never been a huge fan of Richard Linklater's Before Sunset and Before Sunrise for exactly the reason that so many people adore it: the self-absorbed dialogue and debates about life and love that take place between Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) are so authentic that I'd much prefer to engage in them myself rather than watch two actors do it for me. (I do self-absorption magnificently, if I do say so myself.)
I couldn't have guessed back in 1995 that Richard Linklater's charming Before Sunrise would spark one of the most beloved trilogies of the next few decades, but anticipation has been so high for the latest chapter in Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine's (Julie Delpy) arrested romance that it was only natural we'd be longing for more after 2004's Before Sunset. Shot in secret, the third film in the series, Before Midnight, premiered last night at Sundance to rave reviews and today brings a few new photos that'll have you pining even harder for whenever it's delivered to theaters.
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Apparently Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke, and Julie Delpy went ahead and filmed Before Midnight, their sequel to Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, without telling anyone about it. But there's something about the loose intimacy of Céline and Jesse's ambling, every now and again relationship that makes the idea of the trio making their next movie in secret so fitting. Hit the jump for the first image of Hawke and Delpy in the Greece-set Before Midnight, which will court buyers this week at Toronto.
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