|
Elite Fan
Joined: Oct 2001
Posts: 39,200
|
New still 
Movie Review Before Midnight - Ethan Hawke Julie Delpy Before Midnight Movie - ELLE
Quote:
Before Midnight's Rare, Beautiful Message: Love Is Really, Really Hard
It's the best installment in Richard Linklater's romantic trilogy because it's the wisest.
Jason Bailey - May 24 2013, 7:46 AM ET
Richard Linklater's 1995 film Before Sunrise and its first sequel, 2004's Before Sunset, tell a pair of simple stories. In the first, a young American named Jesse (Ethan Hawke) strikes up on a conversation on a train with a pretty French girl named Celine (Julie Delpy). There's a spark, and on the spur of the moment, he makes a suggestion: that she get off the train with him and spend the night walking and talking in Vienna. Intrigued, she takes him up on the rather risky invitation, and over the course of that night, they fall into something resembling love. In the second film, the couple reconnects nine years later, as Jesse (now an unhappily married father) spends the last few hours of his European book tour—he wrote a novel based on their initial encounter—catching up with Celine in Paris. That film ends with the hint that he might make a choice as daring as hers at the beginning of the first: to "miss that plane," and hit the reset button on his entire existence.
In other words, the first two films were about the reckless impulsiveness of young romance. Ingeniously, the third film in the series, Before Midnight, is about the consequences of that impulsiveness.
A word of warning: If you've somehow managed to avoid learning where Jesse and Celine have landed, by all means, preserve that surprise. The 2004 film managed to keep the narrative specifics under wraps, but that was a different time in movie marketing, and since the trailers and promotional materials for this one aren't keeping the secret, it's apparently up for discussion. So here's what's what: Jesse did, in fact, miss that plane. He and his wife split, he and Celine have cohabitated but not wed, and they have a pair of twin girls together. They live in Paris, so Jesse doesn't see his son from his previous marriage as much as he'd like, and as the film begins, he's putting the boy on a plane for the States at the end of a family vacation in Greece.
During that goodbye, his son mentions that a proposed visit is a bad idea, "because Mom hates you so much." Linklater's camera follows Jesse back to the car tentatively; Celine and his daughters wait there, but it's a sad trudge, and the contrast to the previous pictures is evident immediately. This life with Celine was, for years, all that he wanted, and the primary preoccupation of his imagination. But now it's a reality, and reality is messier than the flights of fantasy in fiction.
That realization becomes clearer as the particulars of Jesse and Celine's situation reveal themselves. As his son indicated, relations with Jesse's ex-wife are strained; "Why do you think she still hates me so much?" Celine asks. The infrequent visits of the long-distance relationship with his son are getting to Jesse ("I just don't think I can keep doing this"), and he asks her to consider moving to Chicago, so he can be "more present" in his son's life. Celine resists. And it is this bit of tension—a question of geography, not of love or lust—that calls their entire relationship into doubt over the course of Before Midnight's long evening.
The centerpiece of that evening, and of the film, is an encounter in a hotel room, played out in 30 minutes of real time. Their Greek friends have booked the room for the couple and are taking care of their twins, so that they can have a night to themselves, and with simple plotting and stage direction, the scene masterfully examines how a couple can blow a sure thing for themselves. The foreplay is comfortable and homey, but the tension is too thick and knocks them off-course; they start pushing buttons, killing the mood, making the conscious decision not to let things slide. (Even with the dialogue muted, you can track their miscommunication by the wildly divergent removal and retrieval of clothing items.) Much of the scene plays, as these films often do, in long takes, which gives the audience little relief from the all-out, everything-on-the-table viciousness of their fighting. Early on, Celine says "I'm kidding and I'm not, all right," but by the time they get to that hotel, she's not kidding anymore.
It's unnerving and difficult to watch these two avatars for idealistic young love going at each other with such venom—it's like seeing Romeo and Juliet battle. But by grappling with the reality that must eventually invade even the most starry-eyed of romances, Before Midnight becomes the finest, most grown-up film yet in the series. A character says that Jesse's third novel is "a better book—it's so much more ambitious," and that holds for the films as well, because the first two films are about possibility, and the third is about reality.
In Before Sunrise, Celine closes her eyes and takes a leap with Jesse; at the end of Before Sunset, Jesse returns the favor. But acts of reckless abandon have consequences, and in Before Midnight, the couple must deal with those consequences. Yet—and this is the genius of the picture, and the grandness of its achievement—the film demonstrates that a relationship strong enough to withstand the fallout of those actions is infinitely more impressive than the entirely harmonious one of romantic imagination. Before Sunrise imagined romantic love as yours for the taking. Before Sunset saw it as something that might slip from one's grasp. Before Midnight looks it straight in the eye and calls it out as hard ****ing work. "It's not perfect," as Jesse says. "But it's real."
|
Before Midnight's Rare, Beautiful Message: Love Is Really, Really Hard - Jason Bailey - The Atlantic
Quote:
Joel Stein Talks with the Director and Stars of Before Midnight
By Joel Stein - May 23, 2013
I sat down with director Richard Linklater and actors Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke to talk about their new movie, Before Midnight, which follows their two characters from Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004). The three also co-wrote Midnight and Sunset. For a very thoughtful, touching essay on the film that ran in the magazine (and is accessible to subscribers), click here.
TIME: In the first film, Before Sunrise, there’s a moment when they first kiss…
JULIE DELPY: Tongue, tonsil, tongue, tonsil…
RICHARD LINKLATER: That was my direction: tongue, tonsil, tongue, tonsil
ETHAN HAWKE: It was one of my worst experiences on a film set. It’s sunset on that beautiful Ferris wheel and we’re supposed to be having this beatific experience. We do this kiss scene, and as soon as Rick goes “Cut,” Julie’s like, “Ewww! He kisses like an adolescent!”
That’s a line in the movie.
HAWKE: We work everything in, buddy.
That’s a particularly painful thing to work in.
HAWKE: It’s not interesting if it’s not painful.
LINKLATER: Ethan is brave that way.
At the beginning of Before Midnight, I made an audible gasp when we find out that Jesse and Celine are still together. After I saw the movie, I was like, “Of course they are; how would they make a movie otherwise?” But was there a discussion about it?
HAWKE: I think the gasp is—it’s two films of wanting these people to be together and they’re not together. It’s weird that Before Sunset is this incredibly romantic film—people cite it as a romantic film—and we never kiss. Who makes a romance where the two characters never even kiss?
LINKLATER: As soon as Before Sunset fades out, the audience gets to fill in. They can go to town with what happens next. That was a good place for us to stop.
HAWKE: A good place for the third one to begin was with the ramifications. When you follow your passion, there are consequences. And the consequences are Hank, Jesse’s son—he’s the one who suffers from Jesse following his heart.
But you could have made the other choice: Jesse could have gone back to his life with his wife and son. Were you all on the same page?
DELPY: We felt like we couldn’t make a third one where they meet again by accident and flirt again. Either they went for it in their 30s, or they didn’t and there’s no film.
HAWKE: If we had had an essential disagreement like you’re talking about, the movie probably wouldn’t have happened. Like we would meet sometimes and somebody would say, “I see Jesse as a war correspondent in Afghanistan.” And the others were like, “That movie isn’t going to get written because you lost your two writing partners.”
So sometimes one of you would have an idea the other two would shoot down?
HAWKE: Some of my best **** was nixed by these morons.
LINKLATER: The first film, we spent a lot of time being polite and trying not to hurt people’s feelings. At this point we have such a shorthand.
DELPY: We don’t get offended.
HAWKE: All three of us have other outlets. So if Julie comes with this awesome scene she wrote, and Rick and I are, like, we don’t like it—
DELPY: —I use it in something else. There’s a line that didn’t make it into [my film] 2 Days in New York that made it into this one, about being inspired and not being able to express yourself because you’re too busy taking care of your kids.
HAWKE: There’s a moment in Before Midnight where Jesse clocks another girls’ ass as she walks by. And when we broke for lunch, this Steadicam operator was upset. He said, “I don’t think Jesse would do that. I just believe in their love more.” I said, “Look, you’re in some romantic box. Part of the idea of making this movie is to make something that’s truly romantic, which means being human. And if Jesse doesn’t find that girl’s ass attractive, he has other problems.”
DELPY: But not everybody’s a pig like you.
HAWKE: My wife was glad we included that, because it’s not some idealized version of a man.
LINKLATER: Your wife is like, “If you can hit that, go ahead.”
Where else did you think these characters might be now?
LINKLATER: Early on, we had this idea of making the movie just a Wednesday in their lives.
HAWKE: We see them shopping, picking up the kids from school.
DELPY: Then at night they meet.
LINKLATER: Then we thought, “That’s kind of grueling.”
HAWKE: The first two films are so much fun; we didn’t want to lose that escape feeling. We didn’t want it to be a movie about how being 40 sucks.
Did you see Judd Apatow’s This is 40?
LINKLATER: Yeah. It’s good. It’s very soulful. It’s rare in Hollywood that anyone even gets that opportunity, that someone uses his clout to say something.
You do, too.
LINKLATER: I should hope for our budget that I can do whatever the hell I want.
Plus Apatow needed jokes.
LINKLATER: But they’re both comedies in a way.
DELPY: It’s pretty funny, the fight in our film.
What’s the funny part of the fight?
HAWKE: People laugh a lot. It’s nervous laughter.
DELPY: “How dare he say that?”
HAWKE: It’s funny the way Scenes from a Marriage is funny. Scenes from a Marriage is hysterical but it’s devastating.
So Before Midnight isn’t just a day in the life?
HAWKE: There are days of our lives that are more substantive than other days.
LINKLATER: It’s often by physical circumstances. The emotions of dropping off Hank. The end of a vacation. Summer is over—there a certain tone to that. Your friends have imposed a little vacation on you. It’s like an Obama date night. “You’re going to have a great time!”
HAWKE: I wanted the fight not to have a clear bad guy. Wouldn’t it be interesting to see a movie with two well-meaning people who love each other and they still fight? Okay, he cheated: he’s bad. She cheated: she’s bad. He’s an alcoholic: he’s bad. Life just never feels that way when you’re in it.
DELPY: This idea that the man cheats and the woman isn’t cheating is totally bull****.
LINKLATER: Our audience might appreciate the honesty. Jesse and Celine are in the statistical norms — 72 percent of women have had some kind of dalliance in their marriage and 70 percent of men. You would think it would be more men, but women are just so smooth about it, you find out ten years later. With men, you find out the next morning, because we’re so clumsy. During the Clinton administration they said that very few marriages in our culture could survive a Whitewater investigation. If you could sink $6 million into detective work for every relationship, you’re going to dig up a blowjob somewhere.
What about when he says, “You’re ****ing nuts.” How hurtful is that?
DELPY: What would be hurtful is “You’re ****ing boring, I have nothing to say to you.” But you’re crazy? Seriously, would you mind being called crazy? It’s kind of exciting.
HAWKE: Jesse is on the ball enough to know that he’s in love with a dynamic, powerful woman and he’s willing to take the good with the bad.
There are points in marriages where the things you once found charming and cute inevitably become annoying.
HAWKE: What Celine found so charming about Jesse’s little theories—now she’s rolling her eyes when he talks about his books. I have a really good friend who is one of the funniest people in the world and wife just sits there while the whole table is roaring.
LINKLATER: The fact that they eat together, they talk to one another, they make each other laugh, they still seem to want to sleep together—that’s about as good as you’re going to do at a certain point.
Do you like your characters? Would you want to hang out with them?
LINKLATER: Certainly. They’re a fun couple to have at dinner.
DELPY: I don’t know if I’d like her.
HAWKE: That’s not true.
LINKLATER: Of course you would like her.
HAWKE: You’d find her very attractive.
LINKLATER: You’d want to have sex with her.
DELPY: I’d make out with her?
HAWKE: This is how ideas get developed. Just sitting around bull****ting, and somebody makes a joke and we say, “Actually, that’s a good idea.”
DELPY: It’s fun to recreate those nine years. That’s the work we do.
HAWKE: That love scene we have is way more intimate than anything I’d be able to achieve with somebody else. You can’t fake the fact that you’ve actually known someone for 18 years.
DELPY: I can fake it.
|
Joel Stein Talks with the Director and Stars of Before Midnight | TIME.com
Quote:
Script: Deleted Scene Unearthed From 'Before Midnight'
By Nick Blake | May 23, 2013 | 2:00 PM
This week sees the release of the third installment of Richard Linklater's now-legendary "Before" series (Can we call it the "Before" series? Tell you what, we're calling it the "Before" series), where Ethan Hawke's Jesse and Julie Delpy's Celine intimately discuss the complex nuances of life and love, employing every vast, desolate corner of the English language in the process.
In a NextMovie exclusive (meaning, we went through Linklater's trash), we've stumbled upon a deleted scene from the script of "Before Midnight" that was unfortunately rendered a wee bit dated since Linklater first wrote it sometime between 2005 and 2007. It becomes increasingly obvious why the scene didn't make the final cut of the film.
|
Deleted Scene Unearthed From 'Before Midnight' | NextMovie
Quote:
Interview: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delphy and Richard Linklater Talk About 'Before Midnight'
Posted by Melissa Molina on May 23rd, 2013
Richard Linklater has been on the independent film scene for decades, notable for such 90′s highlights as Slacker and Dazed and Confused. But as great as those films are, his trilogy of Before movies is his career triumph. It’s started with Before Sunrise, which followed what happened one night between an American traveler (Ethan Hawke) and a beautiful French woman Celine (Julie Delpy). The story picked up nine years later in Before Sunset, as the two came together after nearly a decade to talk about what that night meant for them. Nine years later, Richard Linklater and company bring us Before Midnight, which could be the concluding tale to this romantic trilogy.
When Before Sunrise was made it was set to simply be one film and that would be it. But over time the filmmaker and actors found themselves caught up in the world of Jesse and Celine a lot longer than they anticipated. The marriage of the filmmaker and actors (all three wrote the sequels together) and Linklater’s direction has worked perfectly throughout the years, and continues to do so again as we follow the couple in their 40s dealing with another set of problems tests the strength of their relationship. Hawke and Delpy have lived within these characters for so many years it only makes sense that we hear more about the inner workings of Jesse and Celine through them and the filmmaker Richard Linklater in our interview below.
What did you relate to the most about Celine and where she is now in her 40s? What aspect of her emotional story resonate to you the most?
Julie Delpy: About Celine, I really wanted to make sure that she was a strong woman, she’s looking towards the future, she’s not someone who dwells in the past, and she’s a very active person. She could seem at times very vindictive and she’s not going to let someone tell her what to do or how it should be done. She also believes that if they do move to Chicago, it will destroy their relationship. It’s not just about the work, and she’s completely convinced of that. She’s probably, personally I think she’s right. I think she makes sense. To me it was very important that she’s not the wife of the writer. She’s her own person and that’s very important for me to depict that character as so. It’s the same for Richard and Ethan to make sure that it’s not just the wife, otherwise it’s out of balance. Then it’s a film about a guy who has a nice French girlfriend, French wife. It was very important to make sure it is balanced. That’s our goal actually, that when we write this it’s neither macho or feminist or man-hating. She doesn’t hate men. It’s like we find the right balance between the two.
Over the span of 18 years, how has the characters and the stories changed you guys as performers or actors?
Ethan Hawke: I’d like to say I learned how to speak on camera on Before Sunrise. As a young actor, you kind of get asked to pose or affect an emotion, but Richard wanted Julie and I to talk and to be present in front of the camera, to not act. This adventure in not-acting started then, and it’s–
Julie Delpy: I was thinking about that, because it’s really hard actually. You really are rarely asked to do that as actors, maybe once in a film, doing a big monologue to tell a story. You might have it once every 10 films, but usually it’s like dialogue, dialogue, one word, one word, but here it’s big chunks. You should see the script. It can sound really boring if we’re not super duper natural at saying it. It sounds like we’re telling the story to someone we care for, so that’s the real challenge of these films. That’s been the challenge of actors every time. As writers we worked on the screenplay of the first film, but it was really how to learn to really talk on camera without being boring, and that’s the hardest thing. To tell a story on camera without sounding boring is the hardest thing. I’ve experienced it on other films and it’s really, really hard. So it’s finding the right tone to do it.
Richard Linklater: I don’t know if we evolved that much. I think the way we work over these films is very similar to the dynamic between us. We’re a band whose still performing in a very similar manner. We’re the Ramones or something. The way we sat in Vienna, 19 years ago is the way we’re inter-dynamic. The way we push each other and pull out.
Did you ever feel like you were going too far or you had to stop and cry it out in between takes during the more pivotal scenes of the movie?
Richard Linklater: Your question about do we ever go too far, usually in the script phase we think we’ve gone too far, that’s usually in a spot we should explore. What people think is too far is usually not that far.
Julie Delpy: What’s funny is, to me, is when you drew those scenes that lean on emotions, I feel that actors– I mean it’s pleasurable for an actor to cry, to suffer. It’s a pleasant thing for an actor. That’s what we trained for. We trained to do it. When you see someone on camera crying and being hurt, they actually enjoy it. This is our training. [laughs] Actually what’s most painful is the simple things, that’s the hardest thing to find as an actor. Believe it or not, the walk in that beautiful village that we were at, is actually more draining as an actor than… It is draining as an actor to do scenes where you’re emotional and stuff, but there’s a certain pleasure to it. I can’t explain, or maybe I’m weird.
Richard Linklater: It’s funny too. Not that Jesse and Celine think it’s funny, but as writers we know it’s–
Ethan Hawke: What’s fun is what’s challenging. We dove into it. We were locked in that room for a long time and we came out with that scene. The whole film had been filming to that. We filmed that part in sequence, for us it was challenging? Yeah, but we were so glad to be there.
Celine is one of the most honest women we’ve seen in film and she’s so real in terms of how she’s developed and aged and grown. Have you reflected on that, that there aren’t many women like Celine in cinema?
Julie Delpy: It’s always been my issue since I’ve been very young. I’ve seen movies and stuff and I see complex women. But I remember as a kid growing up, I’d be like, “Okay, I see complex women in like Bergman films. I see it in some plays.” There’s very few. Usually, it’s like one dimension if any. Two dimensions is a miracle. It’s really hard to find characters that are written in a way that is truthful, multi-dimensional. She’s not good, she’s not bad. She can be a bitch, she can be adorable. You have that in male characters a lot. You have extremely complex, extremely conflicted characters and stuff. There’s been characters like that too a lot for example in the cinema in the ‘70s. The US was wonderful. In the ‘60s, it was wonderful. Then it kind of died in the ‘80s when the woman became one-dimensional again. Something happened. I don’t know what it is. Anyway, for me it’s essential. For us too because we really work together. It’s not me writing just Celine. I write tons of lines for Jesse. We all write for each other. But basically, to make sure the character is really multi-dimensional and really real, and not some kind of cut-out cardboard of a fantasy or something like that. I would never let that happen anyway, with me in that room. And they wouldn’t let me do that anyway.
When you were casting the original roles, what made you cast Ethan and Julie? And for Ethan and Julie, what did you see in these roles that you wanted to audition for them?
Ethan Hawke: We had other actors there, seeing how they looked together. I remember seeing we had other actors. We were kind of mixing and matching and doing scenes, working together a little bit.
Julie Delpy: I auditioned with another guy and you auditioned with another girl. How was it? I never asked you. [laughs]
Ethan Hawke: Sometimes on my darkest days, I think about it. [laughs]
Julie Delpy: I never asked you that. Would you have liked her better?
Ethan Hawke: That’s a trick question. There’s a funny thing though that I just remembered is that there was a day early, mid-development of Before Sunrise, where Rick told us we would get to choose our characters’ names, you said our creation myth. I’d never done that. It was this long thing of like, “Well, what should the character be named?” It’s a funny ownership you get to have of your own character. Having more experience in film now, I can’t believe that Rick asked us to be a part of that, these two young people. I mean, it’s such a dangerous thing to do. It’s such a difficult thing to do.
What relationship advice can we give to or get from Jesse and Celine?
Ethan Hawke: The fun of this is you’re just seeing them warts and all. That’s all we can do or all we’ve tried to do is try to put three-dimensional, real human beings on screen and put them in a relationship with each other and watch them age 20 years. You can take from that whatever you can. He was a prick when he said that. That’s the dream. We don’t have any advice. All we’re doing is try to play out some reality. And the hope is that by doing that, somebody else can use their wisdom and enjoy it. I don’t know — make sense out of it or not.
Julie Delpy: I don’t know. Relationships are so complex, so in relation to who you are. It’s so specific. We explore one kind of relationship with two kinds of people and that’s it. There’s a million things that are common to — it’s impossible. It’s endless. In a way, it is amazing because I think human beings have endless things to tell because there’s endless complexity to each of us as individuals.
Ethan Hawke: And that’s what was cool about the location of Greece. Greece is this place where love stories, they’ve been told for thousands of years. And they always feel new.
Julie Delpy: I think for my character I really wanted to make her a fighter because I felt that so many people in a relationship give up and then they build more resentment that if they were fighting it at the moment, they should be fighting it. I think that’s what destroys relationships is when the woman or the man will say, “Okay, fine. Let’s do it like that.” Then, they are never happy. I think that’s the end of a relationship is when someone gives up the fight that they really believe is what makes them happy, makes the relationship work, etc. The 20-year-old that was gasping every time I opened my mouth, she doesn’t know yet that’s the secret of making a relationship work because she doesn’t know yet, which is fine. Or maybe she knows and she thinks it’s another. I don’t know. You know what? The truth is there’s no rules on how to make a relationship work.
|
Interview: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delphy and Richard Linklater Talk About ‘Before Midnight’
ethan hawke, julie delpy, and richard linklater, nyc premiere of "before midnight," tribeca film festival, 4/22/13 - a set on Flickr |
