Before They Memorized It, They Lived It

A few years ago, Ethan Hawke was packing up an apartment when he found his old shooting script for Before Sunrise. Tucked between its pages was a letter he'd forgotten he still had — handwritten, from Richard Linklater, given to him sometime during the shoot in Vienna. He was twenty-three. The letter told him not to worry. It said something like: I know this has been uncomfortable, because I'm asking you to hand over pieces of your real life. But you're safe here.

He kept it for decades without meaning to. It just stayed in the script, the way small things do.

To understand why a director would feel the need to write that note, you have to understand what he was actually asking of his two lead actors. Before Sunrise reads, on the page, like a couple of strangers falling for each other over one long night in a foreign city. What it actually is, according to Linklater himself, is an experiment in getting two young performers to stop performing. He didn't want lines delivered. He wanted the script to pass through the actor and come out the other side as something that belonged to them. So in rehearsal, he had Hawke and Julie Delpy fold their own histories into Jesse and Céline — their real breakups, their real insecurities about love, the specific ways they'd each been hurt or hopeful. Nothing in the finished film is improvised, both actors have said, almost stubbornly, in interview after interview. But an enormous amount of it started as something they lived, before it became something they memorized.

That's a strange thing to ask of two actors barely out of their twenties, on a low-budget film with a twenty-five-day shoot and no studio safety net underneath it. It's one thing to play a character. It's another to hand a director your actual disappointments and watch him write them into someone else's mouth. Linklater knew exactly what he was asking, which is presumably why he put it in writing.

And it shows up on screen in ways that are easy to feel and hard to name. The pauses that don't quite resolve. The moment Jesse admits he thought everything he said sounded stupid, which lands less like a scripted confession and more like something a person actually remembers being ashamed of. The whole film runs on a kind of nakedness that no amount of clever dialogue can fake on its own — it has to be let in by the people saying the words. Linklater had lived a version of that nakedness himself; the whole project began with one real night he spent walking around Philadelphia with a woman named Amy Lehrhaupt, a night that ended the way the film's does, with two people parting and not quite promising anything. He wasn't asking his actors to fake something he'd made up. He was asking them to trust him with something close to what he'd actually felt, so it could feel that true for someone else.

That's the quiet trade at the center of Before Sunrise: a director who needed his cast to be unguarded, and two actors young enough to still be a little frightened of that, and a handwritten note that tried to hold the space open for them to do it anyway.

Hawke has talked about that letter since, gently, almost surprised by how much it still means to him — that in the middle of asking for so much, his director stopped and told him he was safe. Thirty years on, the film is still what people reach for when they want to remember what it felt like to talk to someone all night and mean every word. It's worth remembering that the people who made it had to mean it first, off camera, to each other, before any of us ever got to believe it on screen.