Before Sunrise

Richard Linklater’s film puts Jesse and Celine off a train in Vienna and walks them through a single night. The origin was a real night. In 1989 Linklater met Amy Lehrhaupt in a Philadelphia toy shop and they walked the city from midnight until six. She died in a motorcycle crash on 9 May 1994, and he learned of it only years later. Linklater wrote the script with Kim Krizan in eleven days, and early drafts set it in Texas rather than Austria. Who wrote the talk is still disputed: Delpy told Creative Screenwriting in 2016 that she and Ethan Hawke rewrote nearly all of it; Krizan rejected that in 2019. The credit reads Linklater and Krizan. The poem heard in the film was commissioned from the poet David Jewell. The song in the listening booth is Kath Bloom’s, whose records Linklater knew through the director Caveh Zahedi; the film found her an audience and in 1999 she released her first album in over ten years. Linklater took the Silver Bear for best director at Berlin in 1995. A good fit if you can accept that the scene people remember best is the one in the listening booth where neither speaks. Not for you if you are waiting for an obstacle; the only deadline is the morning train.