Linklater's third film reaches new heights
Director departs from 'Slacker' past
By Lael Loewenstein
Daily Bruin Staff
Richard Linklater can have his cake and eat it too.
Linklater, the 33-year-old director of the cult hits Slacker, Dazed and Confused and the new feature Before Sunrise, is in the rare position of being able to make quirky, original, noncommercial films with backing from Hollywood. And so far, he has no complaints.
"You hear all these horrible stories about Hollywood, but I don't yet qualify to do Hollywood bashing because I've had pretty good experiences as far as getting my films made," says Linklater.
His latest film is an extended dialogue between two strangers (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy) who meet on a train, spend the day in Vienna together, and fall in love. Sort of a My Dinner with Andre on the Danube, Before Sunrise is a departure from his previous work, which focused on youth culture in America.
"I liked the idea of setting in in Europe because this kind of film is divorced from American pop culture," he says. "I didn't want to make a movie where they're walking around talking about 'Brady Bunch' reruns. It had to be something deeper than that."
But there are stylistic similarities to his other films as well. "I made a movie before with a hundred people talking nonstop, this is two people," he says, comparing Slacker to Before Sunrise .
One thing you won't see in the dialogue-driven Before Sunrise is a sex scene.
"The movie just wasn't about sex. (Love scenes) kind of bore me," he says. But he doesn't shirk from the subject entirely. "The day I do make a movie about sex it will be all about that."
Instead, Before Sunrise "about two people who say yes to an opportunity. Society tells you be paranoid and suspicious and say no, but I wanted to depict two people who took this leap of faith with each other and grew as a result."
The idea came to him five years ago after he had a comparable experience.
"I was having a night kind of similar to this. It was in Philadelphia not in Europe, and I thought, this could be a movie, the way two people meet and they have a lot of extra energy," he recalls. "She wasn't as good looking as Julie though. But it's the movies."
"I think this has happened to a lot of people in various ways," he adds. "We all meet people that we have some kind of connection with, and it's just a matter of how far you take that."
The idea to shoot in Vienna in the fall of 1993 came to Linklater when he was at a festival promoting Dazed and Confused.
"It seemed like a discovery for me. It wasn't the typical European Paris, Venice, Rome and yet I really liked the city. It had that kind of classical kind of backdrop which I thought would work for the movie." he says
Fortunately, Castle Rock, which financed the film, was supportive from the start.
"It was really wonderful that they weren't obsessed with what the movie wasn't. I think a lot of studios would say, 'We need to add things. This isn't enough, just two people talking.'"
Working with "the two people talking" (Delpy and Hawke) was a real collaboration, Linklater recalls.
"We all worked really closely together, we rehearsed for over three weeks, and Julie and Ethan contributed enormously to the script. We were really tough on each other as far as what was honest, what wasn't, what worked, what didn't. It was very much a process."
That process may have been enhanced because Linklater took the unusual step of shooting in chronological order.
"The first thing you see is the first thing we shot, the last thing you see is the last thing we shot, and every night we'd keep working on it, keep talking about it."
As a result, Delpy recalls that "working with Rick was one of the best experiences of my life." That is a considerable compliment coming from an actress who has worked with Europe's finest directors, including Krysztof Kieslowski, Jean-Luc Godard, Agnieska Holland, and Volker Schlondorff.
Part of what makes Linklater's film unique is that it feels like a compilation of scenes that are cut out of other movies.
"I think that's a tendency in the more modern cinema," he says. "I think Pulp Fiction does that in a way, it's like all the details, all the little bullshit you never see in movies, like the practical reality of disposing of bodies and cleaning cars. It's new fertile ground that hasn't been used in cinema, all that stuff they've been cutting out or skipping over for 50 years."
Linklater is busy promoting the film, having just returned from the Sundance Film Festival. He hasn't yet started on his next project, but when he does it will be a very different feature, based on a true story about a Texas bank robbery in the 1920s. It is something he has been planning for a while.
"I don't start writing until I've had at least a five-year gestation period to think about the project. If I'm still fascinated by it, if I'm still in love with the characters, the subject, that tells me something," he says. "Maybe I'm naive, but I think if it means something to me it will mean something to other people."