Trivia / Before Trilogy

• Career Resurrection: Richard Linklater's career had been in the toilet for several years prior to making Before Midnight. Between the success of that film and the following year's Boyhood, it looks like his career may be back on track.
• The Cast Showoff: Julie Delpy is an accomplished solo musician. She not only plays guitar and sings, but she wrote the song that Celine plays for Jesse, "A Waltz for a Night", as well as two others that appear elsewhere in the film.
• Channel Hop: All three films, which went from Columbia Pictures (Sunrise) to Warner Independent Pictures (Sunset; the latter’s first release), then back to Sony under Sony Pictures Classics (Midnight).
• Follow the Leader: Follows in the footsteps of My Dinner with Andre.
• In Memoriam: Dedicated to a woman Richard Linklater had once met and spent an evening with called Amy Lehrhaupt, who inspired the original Before Sunrise. Although she actually died in 1994 while the first film was in production Linklater did not find out from her family that she had died until 2009.
• Reality Subtext: The first film was born from the night Richard Linklater spent with a woman named Amy in Philadelphia. Unlike Jesse and Celine, they exchanged contact info and tried the long distance relationship, but things fizzled out, so the ending of Before Sunrise became Linklater's idealised version of events. Linklater admitted later that he hoped Amy would see the film and get in contact, but that never happened. A decade later, that idealised notion became part of Before Sunset, in which Jesse wrote a novel about the events of the previous film and Celine read it and got in contact (also, Jesse's book apparently had an idealized ending from his and Celine's night, where the characters met up again after the events of the story as planned, while Jesse turned up at the station and Celine had not). It wasn't until 2009 that Linklater learned Amy had passed away fifteen years earlier, and thus never saw the original film.
• Real Time Time Skip: Before Sunrise and its sequels, Before Sunset and Before Midnight, were released respectively in 1995, 2004, and 2013, and nine years passed between each of them both in-universe and in real life. The sequels explore how Jesse and Celine have changed as people and how their relationship has changed over the years since they first met in Before Sunrise.
• Sequel Gap: Nine years between the first and second films. Another nine years between the second and third films.
• Written by Cast Member: All three movies — although Hawke and Delpy were not credited for the first, as in that case they merely re-wrote the already-completed script to shore up the romantic elements. For the second and third films, Hawke, Delpy, and Linklater all co-wrote the script from the ground up, and are credited accordingly.

---