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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
"Before Sunset" takes place in Paris, which means that you and your cinematographer, Lee Daniel, are working with some of the most gorgeous settings in the world. But as beautiful as these backgrounds are, they're still all of a piece with the characters. Jesse and Celine's faces, and everything that's going on between them -- that's always front and center.
Lee and I have made several films together. We used to be roommates; we go back a long way. You just develop a shorthand with people. I've worked with a lot of people, but Lee shot the first one -- I thought he'd be the right guy to do this. You come in with a visual design based on the characters and the locations and stuff, and you just try to set a tone for what you want.
In terms of this movie's visual design, I wanted it to seem like an eloquent documentary. I wanted the visual style to be analogous to [Julie and Ethan's] acting styles: Intricate, hard to pull off, and yet unnoticeable, hopefully. These long, intricate Steadicam shots -- I wanted it to seem like a documentary, like we're just following these people, but I wanted the filmmaking to draw absolutely no attention to itself. And with the natural lighting -- to just feel as if that's how you'd see it if you were there. No crane shots, no 360-degree moves -- the most elaborate moves are the drift we do when she's on the boat, for instance. I remember walking on the boat, seeing that myself, thinking, That will be a poetic moment, with him looking at her.
"Before Sunset" is 80 minutes long, and it's structured in real time. When I first started watching it, the dialogue between Celine and Jesse seemed so natural, I wondered if some of it had been improvised. And I realized that the real-time structure of the picture would demand that all of the dialogue be meticulously planned out. But I totally fell for it; I was completely in the moment.
Obviously, that was the goal.
You wrote the script with Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke. There's no way you could have made it up as you went along.
I read that somewhere -- that we wrote the script together based on improvisations. Who projected that onto it? None of us has ever said that.
I've never done that. I don't think it's interesting. I think you could make movies like that -- I know some people do. But if you're improvising and you don't know what you're doing on the content side, I don't think your formal control can be the same. So I have never done that. Art is so much about structural timing.
That's why we spent weeks -- first a year writing, then weeks rehearsing and rewriting. If the actors are preoccupied with what they're going to say, they can't worry about that little gesture, or that look. If you're improvising, that's all you can be doing. It's hard to get a physicality going, too.
Julie and Ethan had to know it so well, it was frightening. And everything had to work in seven-minute, eight-minute chunks. To have the dialogue not play out like it was literature or theater, we had to [really think about how people talk]. In our natural dialogue, we're doing subtle segues to smooth edges. But what's really going on is people are trying to communicate their own thoughts, as much as they can or are interested in. It makes for a certain disjointedness. So if you really listen to the way people talk, that's what's there -- it's not flowing literature.
