The Before Trilogy

“These movies changed my life. Literally, The Before Trilogy, Richard Linklater. They're just great, but I sat down with my partner and watched all three movies with her years ago, and we finished them while on vacation in Central America and had like a life-changing discussion about our relationship after watching Before Midnight. And just kind of like renegotiating our relationship because like seeing this mirror in front of us of just like where we were headed and like what it's like to domesticate someone you love blew my mind. Just a big Linklater fan. What's your favorite of the three? Oh, my favorite, honestly, I think Midnight. But it's not my favorite movie, it's just the one that changed my life, is it like fucking cold-showered me. And it was so, it's so brutal. I also did a film festival of this movie last year where I got up, watched Before Sunrise before the sun rose, and then we watched Before Sunset right before dinner, and then we waited till midnight and watched Before Midnight. This is, you put this on yourself? Yes, yeah, yeah, this is like on vacation with my friend Felicia. Shout out to Felicia.”

“Not the whole Before Trilogy, but the final one. Sharon Horgan and I were writing the first season of the show Catastrophe, and my wife said, “Let’s watch Before Midnight.” And so she puts it on and watching I’m like, “Oh my God.” As soon as it was over, I called Sharon, I was like, “Put down your quill. We have to retool everything because the ultimate work of art about a marriage has just been made, and if we think that we’re gonna play in that arena, then we got to study this playbook.” Before Midnight is such a spectacular, horribly accurate picture of a marriage. It made me love being married even more than I already did. Even though people who aren’t married would watch this and be like, “That looks awful.” But don’t… You’re not supposed to be happy. Being married isn’t about– No one’s happy, whether single or married. It’s not about that. But the whole world that can be contained in a marriage is accurately captured in this masterpiece by Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. I revere the three of them individually. Put ’em together? I mean…”

“Oh gee, that's... I don't remember that one. Oh, you probably have some copies of that, don't you? Come on, yeah, I'm thinking of buying some. Maybe you might want to take that. Would you, would you like to say something about the front of it and the back of it, or both of those sides? Do you have a favorite side of it? You know what, staggering genius works whatever way you show it. Oh, so even like, even like here? Thank you. No, it's a... That's my favorite. No, I'm taking that.”

“This is going to be a box-set kind of day for me. I have to do this. This is probably going to be a little obvious for you who have seen a lot of my small, intimate films, but this is The Before Trilogy by Richard Linklater. Why this is so special for me in particular is, when I was 18 years old, senior in high school, I had seen Slacker because Jay went to college in Austin, I had been to all the midnight screenings of Dazed and Confused, and this movie came out, I was living in New Orleans, and they weren’t showing it anywhere. I had to drive all the way to Baton Rouge to catch the movie. I had my own little Before moment. I stayed up all night with my friend who was a freshman in college at LSU, after we watched the movie, we talked about it all and I drove home as the sun was coming up. And I’ve been obsessed with these movies ever since. And if you watch movies like Blue Jay and our upcoming movie, Their Town, you will see the deep, obvious influence there.”

“And I’ve also got this down because, when we were doing White Lotus, a lot of us rewatched these. So, I always related to the first one the most. And then it was quite a big moment when I realized I now relate to the second one more and I’ve grown up, and there’ll be a day that the third one will resonate with me more, and it just feels like it’s a trilogy that you grow with. So I’ll take The Before Trilogy with me home.”

“I kind of want a bunch of movies that I just haven't seen, which are not interesting to talk about, like The Before Trilogy. I've never actually seen. That's where they walk and they talk and they like each other a lot, right?”

“The Before Trilogy. You know sometimes when a film is a poisonous mirror and you look at it and you’re like, “No!” It is a bisexual text. I don’t feel like I need to elaborate on that. That should be… The reasons why that’s true, I think, are evident if you’ve seen this stuff.”

“The Before Trilogy. Before Sunrise, of course, is my favorite. And what Richard Linklater captured in Before Sunrise is so hard to do. You’re just watching two people walk and talk for an entire film, and you’re not bored, you’re so in it, because everyone knows what it feels like to have that feeling– I mean, I hope everyone gets to experience what that feeling is like, but to have that feeling of falling in love in real time and sharing intimate moments with a complete stranger, but you have that sense of familiarity where you feel like you’ve known them your whole life. I really feel that from this film, that there’s this beautiful chemistry between these two souls who are just being drawn to each other. This movie is just so, so beautiful and captures the nuance of falling in love perfectly.”

“Oh, yeah, The Before Trilogy. I love these movies so much. I remember when the first one came out, Before Sunrise, it was 1995 and I went to see it by myself and loved it. And Ethan Hawke was so important to me in that era because I was just getting started in LA, trying to audition for stuff, and Ethan Hawke was just, like, becoming a giant star and was really good and really... I just started trying to emulate him because I was searching for an identity and not knowing– I was doing background work and then trying to get guest spots, and Ethan Hawke was– it was like, "That's what I want to do." But now looking at them, and them as a trilogy, it's timeless, and we've kind of moved through... Through the decades with these three people, and I would love to see another one. I hope they do another at some point. This is a really important trilogy.”

“All right, oh, here we go, The Before Trilogy. I have not seen the third one yet, and I only watched the first two in the last few months. It’s nuts to watch something that you feel like you’ve seen and have always wanted and then it’s existed, then you catch up with it. That’s what these first two movies felt like. And these would have come out when I was working at Blockbuster Video, and this is something that I would have gravitated towards. I love the movie Leaving Las Vegas, and this is in that… genre, if you will. Just two people, just great dialogue, great performances, and you get to be a fly on the wall and you kind of, like, romantically hope to seek out one of those… one of those moments in life. There’s a great line in the book Leaving Las Vegas: “the unspoken anticipation of conversations yet to be had.” This… The first two of these movies are living example of those things. I mean, this is getting heavy.”

“The Before Trilogy. I adore all of these films made by Richard Linklater. But Before Midnight stayed with me the most because there was something about the representation of just a real marriage. And the argument at the end, which I’ve tried to recreate in other shows of mine, actually, but never could. But that argument that they have in that little hotel room, that starts off as lovemaking and just becomes the most violently brutal argument you could have as a married couple, is just an extraordinary thing. And it was quite an inspiration for Catastrophe when Rob and I were writing it.”