Before Sunrise (1995) unfolds over a single night in Vienna, beginning with two strangers, Jesse and Céline, meeting on a train and ending with a promise to return to each other. Two sequels, Before Sunset and Before Midnight, each separated by nine years, trace how Jesse and Céline’s lives continue to evolve over two decades in Europe. Affectionately referred to by its creators as “the lowest grossing trilogy of all time,” the Before series has since attracted a cult following of an Eurail-riding, Vienna-visiting audience in love with the interpretive art of good conversation.
But before Jesse and Céline were Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, they were Richard Linklater and Kim Krizan. Linklater and Krizan wrote Before Sunrise in sixteen days, inspired by their conversations with strangers and Krizan’s train travels. Two Saturdays ago, I spoke with Krizan and used the interview as an excuse to rewatch Before Sunrise for the fourth time.
Cross-legged in my common room at 1:00 a.m., I revisited not only Jesse and Céline, but every version of myself who had been lost and found in their story, drunk with vicarious, secondhand love. There was no need to suspend disbelief; even in interviews, I struggled to separate the actors from their characters. I felt not like an intruder, claustrophobic in their intimacy, but a non-being. The borders of my body dissolved into sweltering European summers, shimmering in the heat haze. The popcorn grew cold in the microwave. I finished the trilogy, just in time for sunrise.
***
Written in 1993 after she had completed her Master’s in English and Psychology at Texas State University, Before Sunrise was Krizan’s first screenplay. She spoke of the advantages of not knowing the “rules” before embarking on a creative task.
“If you overtrain too much in something like an art, you might lose contact with yourself and your own voice,” she said, citing Paul McCartney’s songwriting genius despite—or perhaps because of—his inability to read sheet music, and Louis Leakey’s belief in the untrained eyes of Goodall, Fossey, and Galdikas, who observed primates without rigid scientific preconceptions.
The creation of Before Sunrise, like all artistic expression and perception, arrived less as doctrine and more as intuition. The film enacts Krizan’s philosophy by defying conventions of cinematic storytelling: an unfired Chekhov’s gun (the play with the cow); the erosion of archetypal characters; and a conversation-driven plot—stripped of traditional conflict (save the finiteness of their time) and action (save all the wandering, dancing, and leaving). Before Sunrise captures the lure of possibility, the magic in the mundane, and the drama in everyday exchanges.
“A meaningful conversation is one in which you tell truths that even surprise you,” said Krizan. “And then your whole world expands a little bit.”
Krizan likens engaging in good conversation to perceiving a work of art. You may not remember the conversations you’ve had any more than the meals or books you’ve consumed, and yet—as Ralph Waldo Emerson writes—“they have made me.”
To achieve raw intimacy on the screen, Krizan and Linklater explored conversations they would normally have through the script. They took turns between typing and pacing to-and-fro, speaking to each other both on the page and during evening walks to the convenience store, where Linklater would purchase a Symphony bar and Krizan a Tab soft drink. The snacks that fuelled them may have gone out of fashion, but the legacy of their characters—extensions of young Krizan and Linklater themselves—remains timeless. “In a lot of ways, I was Céline,” she said, admitting that her friends see and feel her in the film.
Left to Right: Richard Linklater, Kim Krizan, Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy
In a deleted scene, Céline and Jesse reflect on a line by Thomas Mann: “I would rather participate in life than write a hundred stories.” Céline counters that a “life examined is a life experienced.” Writing, Krizan reflected, has made her a better participant and observer of life. Imagining herself as a spy, she would eavesdrop on conversations at the auto repair shop and stage small absurdities to report back to her diary. “I just think I can’t wait to have this experience so I can explain to my journal how nutty this was,” she said.
She admires the diary as a dynamic form of “exploration and preservation,” offering permission to “just write crap” and engage “the playful, childlike part of the soul” that doesn’t discriminate between “good” and “bad” art, according to Krizan.
This playfulness animates the conversations in Before Sunrise. I ask her about one of my favorite scenes, where Jesse and Céline pretend to call their friends as a way of confessing their first impressions and feelings for each other. “I like to feel his eyes on me when I look away,” Céline admits to a Jesse playing the role of her hometown friend. As they improvise within each other’s imagination, the late-night diner booth—with its indifferent European customer service and clamorous chatter—evolves into a world of their own.
Playacting echoes across the trilogy. At the end of Before Sunset, the second film of the trilogy, Céline slips into an impression of Nina Simone before delivering one of the trilogy’s most enduring lines. In Before Midnight, the now middle-aged couple return to playful role-play as a way of navigating conflict and finding their way back to each other. Krizan considers this form of mini-theatre intrinsic to how people relate to each other: by allowing us to say what we couldn’t in real life, playacting often allows for more truth than forthright confession.
“The direct way would be to just go to one another and say, the world is this. But how would we even take that in?” Krizan told me. “Maybe it’s easier to enter it more emotionally and playfully through a story…to bridge the space between people across time and space.”
Perhaps all art is a dramatized, heightened form of playacting—the closest we’ll ever come to telepathy—through which we, however briefly, inhabit one another’s minds. It follows, then, that art is at once ephemeral and eternal. Krizan described screenwriting as a kind of baton toss: her creations carried a consciousness of their own, moving through portals of her identity before entering the world. From there, they are taken up by the actors and audiences who bring themselves into the story, perceiving, (mis)interpreting, and rewriting it.
“It’s such a relief to get out of the mind and be an energy, you know, just energy. I think that I’ve experienced that as a writer,” she said, quoting the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe: “When I’m behind a camera I forget I exist.”
With this awareness, she spoke about her hesitation about writing Before Sunset. “It’s very easy to ruin sequels,” she said, adding that she felt wary of marring the enchanted dépaysement of two twenty-somethings losing themselves in a new city and in each other. Now, after nine more years of living—burdened with responsibility, vows, and regrets—Jesse and Céline must confront each other in the present while reconciling the shattered fantasies they held of one another. The following sequels mark a departure from the ephemeral purity of the original, which Krizan describes as simply “just a moment in time.”
Yet, to paraphrase Joan Didion, “every moment is all there is.” And so in a subversion of the relationship between art and its perceiver, I watched Jesse and Céline age across two decades as I remained—still twenty, still cross-legged in my common room—seemingly immune to time, love, and change.
***
“It’s like I’m in your dream and you’re in mine,” Céline said, leaning over the ledge overlooking the Vienna Opera House.
As the muse of Billy Joel’s 1977 ballad, the birthplace of Klimt’s The Kiss and Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 7,” and the backdrop to Before Sunrise’s out-of-time dreamscape, Vienna lives in my mind as a place where nothing and everything I’ve ever wanted can happen at once. I told Krizan that I almost don’t want to visit the city; Jesse and Céline won’t be there.
But their story was not originally meant to unfold in Vienna.
“The conversation could have happened anywhere,” Krizan said, revealing that they had originally planned to set it in San Antonio, Texas, before acquiring funding in Europe.
Jesse and Céline are not just born out of Vienna’s beauty, but of the playful spontaneity, agency, and desire for connection that exists in us all. Only this time, instead of staying strangers who shared nothing more than a fragment of small talk, a flicker of eye contact, or the fleeting awareness of each other, they chose to seize the moment.
Think of this film as a time machine. Jump ahead ten, twenty years: a life settles, routines harden, friends dwindle, and you begin to wonder about the unridden Eurails, unvisited Viennas, unknown strangers of your past. Before Sunrise offers an alternative reality that could’ve been yours, a brief return to the moment before regret took root. For we are often only one conversation away from the mind, memories, and reality of another. To borrow Céline’s words: “If there’s any kind of magic in this world, it must be in the attempt of understanding someone, sharing something. I know, it’s almost impossible to succeed, but…who cares, really? The answer must be in the attempt.”
So rewatch Before Sunrise. Write some crap. Love a stranger.
