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发帖数: 558 | 1 FORREST WICKMAN
If you stick around through the closing credits of Before Midnight, the
latest film in the trilogy that also includes Before Sunrise and Before
Sunset, you’ll see that the movie is dedicated to someone whose name even
the most die-hard fans have never heard before: Amy Lehrhaupt. Almost 25
years ago, Lehrhaupt met a young man named Richard Linklater and spent a
night with him that he never forgot. Their encounter inspired Linklater to
conceive and direct Before Sunrise, the first film in the series. She never
saw it, though; unbeknownst to Linklater, by the time that movie came out,
Lehrhaupt was dead.
Linklater never mentioned Lehrhaupt by name in the press before promoting
Before Midnight—Ethan Hawke has said that the director was uncomfortable
mentioning her until “extremely recently”—but he has long made brief
references to their encounter. From a number of interviews he’s done over
the years, we can now piece together the complete story of how Lehrhaupt
helped inspire the series.
Linklater met Lehrhaupt in fall 1989, when he was visiting his sister in
Philadelphia. He was 29 and had just finished shooting Slacker, and was
staying there for one night while passing through on the way home from New
York. Lehrhaupt was several years younger, about 20. They met in a toy shop,
and ended up spending the whole night together, “from midnight until six
in the morning,” “walking around, flirting, doing things you would never
do now.” As in Before Sunrise, most of what they did was talk, “about art,
science, film, the gamut.” Did they kiss? Yes. Did they have sex? The
Times went so far as to ask Linklater in a recent interview, but he said he
wants to “leave a little mystery.”
Even in the midst of that romantic night, the filmmaker in Linklater couldn
’t help but consider its cinematic possibilities. In a 2004 interview with
the New York Times, he remembered “walking around [thinking], ‘If I could
just capture this feeling I’m having right now,’ instead of actually
having that feeling.” On a recent episode of the podcast The Q&A with Jeff
Goldsmith, he recalled mentioning the movie idea to Lehrhaupt that night:
Even as that experience was going on … I was like, “I’m gonna make a film
about this.” And she was like, “What ‘this’? What’re you talking about
?” And I was like, “Just this. This feeling. This thing that’s going on
between us.”
But as the night came to an end, the paths of Linklater and Lehrhaupt began
to diverge from the fictional storyline of Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (
Julie Delpy). In fact, on The Q&A, Linklater revealed that the ending of
Before Sunrise was in part a response to what happened with him and
Lehrhaupt. Unlike Jesse and Céline, who agree to reconvene in six months,
the real-life young lovers exchanged numbers and tried to keep in touch
while they were away. They called each other a few times, but it was “that
long distance thing” that did them in. “It sort of did the fizzle,” he
says, “So in the first movie that was a thing, the idea that they would
intellectually kind of get beyond that and say ‘Well, we’re on different
continents. What are the odds that it’s gonna work. Let’s just commit to
this night.’ ”
Linklater soon became involved with another woman, who “swept into [his]
life ... and took over for about a year or so,” and he and Lehrhaupt never
talked again. He did think that maybe “she would show up at a Before
Sunrise screening or something.” In Before Sunset, Céline shows up at
a reading of Jesse’s book This Time, which is based on their night
together. “It would be so weird,” he said, in 2004. But she never did.
Linklater didn’t know then that Lehrhaupt had died in a motorcycle accident
on May 9, 1994, before she reached her 25th birthday. Before Sunrise
started filming a few weeks later. Linklater only learned of her death three
years ago, when a friend of Lehrhaupt’s, who knew about the encounter, put
it together and sent him a letter. “It was very sad,” Linklater told the
Times. Ethan Hawke was similarly devastated when he heard it, though he
reminded Linklater that if he hadn’t met her, then he never would have made
these movies or met some of the people who worked on them with him. “Who
knows how we reverberate through each other’s lives,” Linklater reflected
in another interview, “But she’s an inspiration on this.”
In this way, Linklater did find another way to make that feeling, that “
thing in the air” they once had between them, last: He turned it into
cinema. |
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