This June 16 is a very special date, especially for Richard Linklaterhe director and creator of ‘Before Sunrise’ (1994), which was released in theaters 30 years ago (a year later in Spain). A film that is much more than that, that tells the love story of Jesse and Céline.
A love story recreated by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, who put themselves in the shoes of Jesse and Céline, and in turn, a young Linklater and Amy Lehrhaupt. Because yes, the story of two young people who boarded a train that left from Budapest and traveled to Vienna, engaged in a conversation that lasted more than 20 years, was the fruit of an experience of the director himself.
A story that even had two sequels, ‘Before Sunset’ (2004) and ‘Before Nightfall’ (2013)but that started with the meeting of two young people, an American and a French woman, who had just met, and who ended up talking and walking, while falling in love, during an afternoon and a night in Vienna.
The story behind the movie
Richard Linklater wanted to bring one of his own experiences to the big screen, the “brief encounter” he had with a woman named Amy Lehrhauptwhom he met while visiting his sister in Philadelphia back in 1989, when he was 29 years old.
He flirted with her in a toy store, leading him to leave her a note in which he said that “I’m going to be in the city alone tonight, in case you want to do something later.” So, they spent several hours talking about different topics. I was delighted with the live performance. That was precisely what led him to say: “I’m going to make a movie about this. About this feeling, about what is taking place between us.”
Together they spent the night walking, from midnight until after six in the morning. A time about which Linklater has not given much information, pointing out that they talked, that they had romantic moments, and that there may have been a kiss. An experience that Jesse and Céline were not lucky enough to experience, as they did not even exchange numbers and addresses (unlike reality).
Linklater and Lehrhaupt kept in touch for a few months through letters, but they never saw each other again.. As time passed, the director met the woman who then became his wife, Christina Harrison, with whom he had three children, including Lorelei Linklater, who participated in the ‘Boyhood’ film.
She stopped sending him letters. He disappeared. And that longing that Linklater felt made him recreate what the meeting would be like a decade later thanks to the second film. There, both Hawke and Delpy had to bring their own touch to the film, as the actress stressed to ‘The Guardian’ on the 25th anniversary of the first film: “The original script of the film, believe it or not, was empty. of romanticism, although Richard Linklater would have based it on a woman with whom he spent a night walking through Philadelphia. It was a great starting point, but it was even more cerebral and with more dialogue.”
And it is that Richard Linklater wanted to reconnect with Amy in some way because she was no longer answering his letters or calls.. Thinking that she had moved, the director wanted to be clearer, to make her pay even more attention to the message hidden in the film, and therefore, despite the fact that everything took place in Europe, made Jesse and Céline listen, like them, to Kath Bloom’s ‘Come Here’ in a vinyl store.
The director always thought about the possibility of meeting Amy again. He waited a long time, and never said that the films were the result of her encounter with him, until he mentioned it to ‘The Times’, and just three years before releasing ‘Before Nightfall’, received a letter from a friend of Amy Lehrhaupt who knew of their encounter. A letter in which he learned that Amy had died in May 1994 in a motorcycle accident, before turning 25 and just at the time when the director was filming the first film. “It couldn’t have been sadder,” he confessed to the aforementioned medium.
So, Linklater decided that Amy Lehrhaupt’s man would appear in the credits of ‘Before Nightfall’ with a special thank you “because we never know the impact we can have on the lives of others.”.
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