Forget me not

Forget me not
What if the lovers of cult film Before Sunrise ran into each other again nine years later? Ethan Hawke tells Geoffrey Macnab why he agreed to the sequel

* Geoffrey Macnab
* The Guardian,
* Friday June 18 2004

'Why weren't you there in Vienna? Our lives would have been so different ... " This is a line from Richard Linklater's new film Before Sunset and it sounds like a piece of cornball dialogue from a Max Ophuls melodrama. It only makes sense if you understand the backstory: nine years earlier, Jesse, a young American travelling around Europe, and Celine, a French student, met by chance on a train and spent a magical night in the Austrian capital. They didn't exchange phone numbers, but promised instead that they would both turn up in Vienna in six months' time. Thus ended Linklater's 1995 film, Before Sunrise (1995).

Somehow, that reunion never took place. Nearly a decade passes before the lovers meet again in a Paris bookshop in Before Sunset. Jesse (Ethan Hawke) is now a moderately successful American writer, travelling through Europe to promote his new novel (about his tryst with Celine). He is unhappily married but devoted to his young child: "I feel like I'm running a small nursery with someone I used to date." Celine (Julie Delpy) is a political activist: a strong, independent woman with a confused emotional life. The couple have only an hour or so (the movie plays in neo-real time) before Jesse has to catch his flight back to America. The film is essentially a 90-minute dialogue between the two characters as they tour Paris. All the time, the clock is ticking down and there is a chauffeur-driven taxi waiting to whisk Jesse to the airport.

The parallels between Jesse and Hawke are evident. Like the character he plays in the film, Hawke is a writer and parent trying to balance his responsibilities with his hankering for the freewheeling artist life. "It's hard to be the bohemian of your dreams and the parent of your dreams," he says. "When I was younger, I found that image of Baudelaire so romantic."

Unlike Baudelaire, Hawke hasn't had to deal with poverty, or indeed many setbacks at all. At 14 he appeared in Joe Dante's Explorers (1985), a tale about an alien-obsessed kid in which he co-starred with River Phoenix. The film flopped, but his third feature, Dead Poets Society (1989), established him as one of the most sought-after young actors in Hollywood.

"I never had stardom in a huge way," Hawke insists. "I don't know how people like Julia Roberts deal with it. One day she was just an aspiring actress. The next day, she was a huge international movie star. I never had that. Dead Poets Society was a big hit, but Robin Williams was the lead and I was just one of the kids. Things have happened at a nice slow pace for me. It has never been my goal to be as famous as possible."

Now aged 33, Hawke is the slacker turned polymath. He has published two novels (The Hottest State and Ash Wednesday); directed a film (Chelsea Walls); starred opposite Angelina Jolie in a Hollywood blockbuster, Taking Lives (his "first full-blown popcorn movie") and played Hamlet on screen. He has just come to the end of the Broadway run of Henry IV, in which he played Hotspur opposite Michael Hayden's Prince Hal and Kevin Kline's Falstaff.

The papers are full of stories about his recent break-up with Uma Thurman, but he doesn't seem too disconcerted. He calls the prying "a luxury tax" that anyone in the public eye must learn to pay. "If I didn't want to be in the tabloids, I could stop acting," he says.

Before Sunset is likely to intensify the gossip, if only because the project seems so personal. Hawke and Delpy co-wrote the screenplay with Richard Link-later. Given Hawke's alleged womanising, some of Celine's little quips about her ex-lover ("I know you've stuck it in so many places it's about to fall off") can't help but seem barbed and ironic.

"The way you make a movie like this interesting is to blur the line between performer and character," Hawke says. "You don't have any plot to hide behind. The way Rick directs, he doesn't show off. You have to present some authenticity. I think the movie is at its most successful when it does that, when you can see the acting and directing as little as possible."

Early on in the film, there are flashbacks to Before Sunrise. Delpy hasn't changed much in the intervening years, but Hawke looks very different: leaner and more careworn. "At the time I was doing the (first) movie, I felt so mature, but now I think, God, I was just a kid." This is not the typical sequel in which the studio tries to cash in on an earlier success. Though a cult favourite, Before Sunrise was hardly a big box-office hit. Before Sunset was shot on the cheap in 15 days. "It's not like anybody was begging us to make a second film," Hawke says. "We obviously did it because we wanted to."

In its own, small-scale way, the new film is beautifully crafted. The editing is unobtrusive. The dialogue seems spontaneous, though Hawke, Delpy and Linklater spent months refining and reworking it. In Linklater's earlier, animated film, Waking Life (in which Celine and Jesse also featured), the discussions about love and death often verged on the portentous. Here, Linklater's touch is much lighter. There are no big emotional set pieces or plot revelations. Instead, the film-makers try to capture the pathos and humour in seemingly throwaway moments. As Hawke puts it: "We always think that the best moments of our lives are going to be these dramatic things, but really, sometimes, a nice breakfast with a good friend is the most fun you'll ever have."

Hawke hasn't ruled out directing a film version of one of his novels. He may also take a part in Delpy's new film about Countess Bathory, a serial killer who liked to bathe in the blood of virgins. He is also trying to raise finance for Keith Gordon's murder mystery, Billy Dead.

As he contemplates his options, he can't help grumbling about the uncertainty of his profession. "You can never plan more than six or seven months in advance. That's what I hate about being an actor: having your life pulled around by all these other different forces."

Still, he relished making Before Sunset. One of the pleasures of the film, he acknowledges, is its ambiguity. Depending on your point of view, this is either a dewy-eyed romantic tale about two former lovers or a story about an unhappily married man looking to have sex with an old girlfriend.

What would Hawke do if he were in the same situation as Jesse? "It depends on what your wife would say," he retorts. "You've got to live, man, you've got to do what you need to do. Some day you'll be dead. It depends on how bad you want to sleep with the woman."

· Before Sunset is released on July 23.