Before SunriseBefore Sunset, and Before Midnight; an epic story of love, both romatically idealized and painfully realized, by director Richard Linklater and stars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. Collectively, they’re now referred to as the Before trilogy. But these movies are beloved. Fans care about Hawke’s Jesse and Delpy’s Celine. They want to know what happens to them as a couple. They’d love a fourth film. Will Linklater, Delpy, and Hawke give them one?

Hawke was interviewed in The Independent, and had an interesting response to this question. Before you get too excited (actually that could be the title of the fourth movie, Before You Get Too Excited), he doesn’t definitively say it’s going to happen. But he says the team does plan to discuss it. According to Hawke, he, Delpy, and Linklater are “not allowed to think about [a sequel] until five years after” any Before movie. Five years after Sunrise, they met and made Waking Life (one segment of which features Hawke and Delpy as Jesse and Celine). Five years after Sunset they met and decided to make Midnight. After the mandatory five year waiting period, they will “talk about it and see where we wind up.”

Math time! Right now it’s 2017; Before Midnight was released in 2013. So if their schedule holds and my use of Google’s calculator page is correct, they should be meeting sometime next year to figure this all out.

Linklater also admits that he’s not sure if a fourth film really makes sense, since the existing movies do work so well together as a trilogy:

I would have said after the second there was definitely going to be a third one but I do feel complete in that the first one starts with the older couple arguing on the train and by the end of the third one we’ve become that couple. If it were to continue it would change shape. It would be something else. Julie, Rick and I might work together again, we might revisit those characters but it’ll need a new burst of energy. I don’t know what it is.

I would love to see Be4 Dark, or whatever it would be called. But a new movie from Linklater, Hawke, and Delpy of any kind is great news too.

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