Before Sunrise
Short description
Before Sunrise follows two young travellers who meet by chance on a train between Budapest and Vienna. Jesse is an American on his way home after travelling through Europe; Céline is a French student heading back to Paris. When the train reaches Vienna, he talks her into getting off with him and spending the hours before his morning flight walking the city together. Over the course of one night they talk about their lives, their hopes and their ideas, and a closeness develops between them, shadowed by the knowledge that they will have to part at dawn.
Richard Linklater directed and wrote the screenplay with Kim Krizan, and Anne Walker-McBay produced. It was Linklater's third film as director, arriving between Dazed and Confused and SubUrbia. Ethan Hawke plays Jesse and Julie Delpy plays Céline, with Andrea Eckert and Hanno Pöschl as a married couple on the train. Thirty performers are credited. Made for about 3 million dollars, it took roughly 23 million worldwide, a strong return on a modest production.
On IMDb it holds 8.1 out of 10 from around 375,000 votes, and on TMDB 8 out of 10 from a much smaller base of about 4,900. A critics' rating of 8.5 out of 10 across 51 reviews places it slightly above the audience scores. The film runs 101 minutes and is a drama and romance set largely outdoors in Vienna.
What's left behind the scenes
- During filming in the second half of the film, a plot sag occurred. The characters had been communicating continuously for several hours, and their relationship to each other needed to be fixed for the audience. They tried various methods, but they all seemed contrived one way or another. Then Julie Delpy remembered how she and a friend sometimes played "telephone," using it to discuss very personal things. That's how this scene came about.
- Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke rewrote a significant portion of the script themselves. Later, in one interview, the actress expressed regret that she and Hawke were never listed as co-authors of the screenplay.
- Casting took Richard Linklater nine months; he simply couldn't find actors for the lead roles of Jesse and Celine.
- The books that Celine and Jesse read on the train were an anthology of Georges Bataille for Celine and the autobiography of Klaus Kinski for Jesse.
- When Richard Linklater decided to cast Ethan Hawke in the lead role, he initially thought the actor was too young, but then he saw him on stage in New York, spoke with Hawke, and changed his mind.
- Writing the screenplay took only eleven days.
- Jesse and Celine also appear in one of the scenes of the film "Waking Life."
- The idea for the film originated from past experiences of the screenwriters Richard Linklater and Kim Krizan. Linklater once wandered around Philadelphia all night with Amy, whom he had only met that evening. As for Krizan, she once took a train trip to Europe and, on her way to Paris, met a Norwegian man with whom she walked around the city until morning.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
