YBCA: NEW FILIPINO CINEMA 2013—The Evening Class Interview With Joel Shepard

Last year about this time, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) launched New Filipino Cinema to introduce American audiences to the startlingly creative yet relatively unknown work coming out of the Philippines. Here at The Evening Class, we reviewed several films in the 2012 line-up—Niño, Kano: An American and His Harem, Remington and the Curse of the Zombadings, Amok, and Boundary—replicated Philbert Ortiz Dy's essay, and interviewed Raya Martin and Carlo Obispo.

New Filipino Cinema was so successful that YBCA programmer Joel Shepard has returned with a second edition, co-sponsored by FACINE (Filipino Arts & Cinema, International) and Filipino American Arts Exposition. "Even if the rest of the world is still catching on," YBCA's website boasts, "the Philippines remains one of the most creative and exciting countries for independent cinema. 5 days, 16 films, 7,107 islands!"

In his follow-up essay for this year's edition, Philippine critic and New Filipino Cinema co-programmer Philbert Ortiz Dy qualifies the difficulty of trying to pinpoint a unifying theme in this year's selection of films. "Once again," Dy writes, "we are faced with a uniquely diverse set of movies that defy classification. Like the country itself, which is made up of thousands of little islands, each with its own culture, dialect, and people, our cinema often refuses to homogenize." New Filipino Cinema's quest "to document the soul of a country" reveals a character of violence negotiated through art. "Many of our films ... seem to meditate on living within a culture of conflict, telling the stories of people who are forced to adapt to the violence that is so present in their lives."

During my recent stint in San Francisco, I made a point of inviting Joel Shepard out for coffee so that we could profile this year's edition of New Filipino Cinema, opening tonight at YBCA.

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Michael Guillén: Joel, I was so pleased to receive notice that YBCA has followed through with a second edition of New Filipino Cinema. Before launching into that, let's recap a bit of what happened with last year's edition. Did it achieve the reach you imagined? From my perspective, the 2012 series was one of the best uses of diasporic channels to distribute a national product internationally that I'd witnessed in some time.

Joel Shepard: It's been quite a journey. I've made 7-8 trips to the Philippines now, researching Filipino Cinema, and pulling these programs together.

Guillén: What motivated your interest?

Shepard: I knew a little bit about Filipino Cinema, but mainly older films; I didn't know much about contemporary films. Then, six or seven years ago the Rotterdam Film Festival had a focus on the Philippines with a sidebar that had a particular view of contemporary Filipino Cinema. They focused on the avant-garde underground scene, very much based out of Manila, and a group of people who were all friends—Khavn De La Cruz, John Torres, Raya Martin—members of a younger, underground scene working with tiny budgets, who were making experimental and raw, immediate street filmmaking, and I had no idea all of this was going on. The Rotterdam sidebar was eye-opening. I decided I needed to know more and get deeper into Filipino Cinema, especially since the Bay Area has such a huge Filipino American community. It seemed a natural contribution for YBCA.

My first visit to the Philippines was to serve on a jury at a film festival called Cinemanila, which is actually the only international film festival in the Philippines. I learned there was way more going on with independent Filipino Cinema than the selection Rotterdam had shown—which were all great, important films—but, just one part of the whole scene. It was incredibly eye-opening to discover there was this independent film scene in the Philippines that is not hardly known at all outside of the Philippines. It's starting to get out there a little more but there's still a long ways to go.

The term "independent cinema" doesn't mean much anymore in America. It's been drained of meaning. "Indie film" has been largely co-opted by the studios. But it still means something in the Philippines where there are three major studios that put out all the commercial product and where everything else is independent.

Guillén: The financing is independent? None is government-subsidized?

Shepard: The Philippines have a unique system for how independent films get made. There are several film festivals in the Philippines who basically commission films through a grant-application process. The festivals fund a certain number of these films, which then end up being shown at the festival. Cinemaya and the Cinema One Originals Film Festival are both festivals composed of such commissioned films. We don't have anything quite like that in the States.

Guillén: Is that influence from Rotterdam, who I understand groom filmmakers to harvest premieres? Is the independent Filipino Cinema scene trying to make movies they think will interest festivals like Rotterdam?

Shepard: Their system pre-dates Rotterdam because it was basically the only way they could get movies made. The Cinema One Originals Film Festival is actually an offshoot of Cinema One, a television channel that's kind of like their HBO. They're producing these films because it provides content for their TV channel.

Guillén: It intrigues me that your research has discovered much more than what has been consensually understood as the national cinema of the Philippines. This confirms for me the slippery nature of using a term like "national cinema", which necessarily requires constant maintenance.

Shepard: I continue to be amazed at the quality of work being produced there and how little it is being seen outside of their own country. Again, a few films are spreading out into the international film festival circuit. I don't know if you noticed but at Cannes this year there are three Filipino films, one in main competition, and two in Un Certain Regard. That's the first time there's every been three Filipino films at Cannes at the same time. All three have come out of the indie world. So, though it's taken them a while, even Cannes is catching on.

Guillén: When you decided you wanted to create a program of New Filipino Cinema, what was involved in negotiating with YBCA? Did you seek a grant to finance your initial research trips? Did you have to have the whole program in place before you pitched it to them?

Shepard: Luckily, I'm pretty independent at YBCA in terms of where I place my focus. I'm allowed to be self-directed. I'm lucky that I can get obsessed about something and have the freedom to just go for it, as long as it fits into the institutional mission. I was able to adjust my budget to accommodate the additional travel required. I couldn't just have people send me DVDs to get a sense of the scene. I had to immerse myself in the culture and meet the filmmakers and go to the events. It would never have worked to just research on the internet and pull together a program that way.

Guillén: By comparison to your programming colleagues in the Bay Area, I consider yours to be one of the most curatorial sensibilities out there. Do you consider there to be a difference between programming and curating?

Shepard: That's a tricky question. I've always been a little bit uncomfortable with the term "curator", which seems to me to be a term that comes more from the visual arts of the museum and gallery worlds. I've never been sure exactly how it fits in to film. To be honest, it's always struck me as a little pretentious.

Guillén: I admire your modesty, but surely you're aware that your programs are singularly unique? Most notably, they have an edge to them. You often approach mature and erotic domains. You'd think in San Francisco that would be par for the course, but it actually seems to me that most programming in the Bay Area has become increasingly safe. There's not as much edgy content available.

Shepard: Less and less, yeah. It's changed over time. San Francisco's just not as edgy a place anymore, though that edginess is something I often revisit. As for the Filipino project, I should be clear that I co-programmed this series with Philbert Ortiz Dy. Right off the bat, I knew we needed to do this with somebody from the country. I'm not Filipino. I don't speak any of the Filipino languages. To make the series something deep, I felt it was important to partner with someone in the Philippines.

Guillén: Which lends credence. Philbert Ortiz Dy is one of Manila's main film critics as well?

Shepard: He is, yeah, and he's really sharp. He's somebody who can write about Iron Man all the way to some weird avant garde film with equal interest, intelligence, and passion. There aren't a lot of critics like that.

Guillén: He wrote the essay for last year's edition of New Filipino Cinema. Has he written a new one this year?

Shepard: Yeah, and it's very good. I wrote a short essay laying out the broad picture, then in his essay Philbert went deeper into the themes of this year's films.

Guillén: How did you two negotiate shaping the rhythm of the festival?

Shepard: We figured it out as we went along. We didn't draw up a contract or anything like that. We agreed on all the films. We both had to buy in to each film. I can't go to every major film festival that goes on there—not like I did in my first year when I made four visits to the Philippines—so I depend on him to preview films in advance for me and pass on what he thinks the most valuable.

Guillén: How is the Philippine film community reacting to the New Filipino Cinema series that you've introduced to the United States?

Shepard: They're supportive, happy and proud that it's happening. I was just there for a few days a couple of weeks ago on my way to a film festival in Korea and I was sitting at the breakfast buffet one morning reading The Enquirer—which is their daily newspaper—and opened it up to find an article covering the film series and the 16 Filipino films coming to San Francisco.

Guillén: Have you had any anecdotal response from the filmmakers featured in last year's edition to the extent of sensing any increased visibility for their participation?

Shepard: Having only had a year, I think it's going to take some time before the series is fully noticed. There certainly was an increased interest in the series nationally from other film programmers. I received a lot of inquiries: "Can we show these films here?" I imagine the next step for New Filipino Cinema is to organize some kind of national tour; but, it's complicated. Dealing with the Philippines presents unique problems and challenges that don't happen with other countries.

Guillén: [Laughs.] How ambassadorial!

Shepard: It's not simple.

Guillén: Is the entire series digital?

Shepard: Yes. It's pretty much all DCP. There's no film. But that's because no one is making film in the Philippines anymore. The only projects coming out on film are some of the broad, commercial films where prints are being struck because not all of the theaters have converted to digital yet; but, otherwise, in the independent world, no one is shooting on film.

Guillén: It's possible that—if the classification of a "national cinema" is to apply at all in the future—it won't be through commercial channels and might just have to be through digital independents.

Shepard: It's interesting. As much as I bemoan the loss of 35mm, I also have to acknowledge the democratization enabled by digital technology that allows people all over the world to make films that would have been impossible to make in years past. So there's good and bad.

Guillén: I imagine another advantage of a DCP series is the potential for organizing a national tour? In that respect, it's not such a bad thing?

Shepard: Yeah.

Guillén: I don't intend for you to cover the entire upcoming series for me, but I was wondering if you could give me three or four titles that you're especially excited about for one reason or another? Titles that you really want your San Franciscan audiences to see?

Shepard: The whole program, including shorts, is 16 films and—just so you'll have a sense of the series as a whole—we've really tried to make the program a comprehensive picture of the entire independent film scene. We cover the experimental, avant-garde world, as well as documentaries, more traditional dramatic narratives and shorts. I was very conscious of making sure we had a number of films directed by women, as well as films in different languages. Most people assume Tagalog is the language spoken in the Philippines, but that's just one of many languages. Tagalog is the language of the capitol region, but outside that region are dozens of other languages.

We also wanted the program to cover the whole geography of the islands. The Philippines are much more than just Manila. Of course, as the capitol, most film production takes place there; but, there are pockets of regional filmmaking going on as well, particularly in the South, which is historically known as a troubled region of the Philippines because of an ongoing Muslim war against the Philippine government. It's considered a dangerous area and Americans are warned not to travel there. That's mostly misleading information—it's safe to go there—and it was important for us to secure films from there. There's incredible independent work coming out of that region, which very few people are aware of.

We're starting the series with an older film Himala ("Miracle" in Tagalog) made in 1982. This was a choice we debated a lot because the program is called New Filipino Cinema. Himala is directed by Ishmael Bernal, who—though now deceased—remains one of the Philippines' greatest filmmakers. Himala is probably his greatest film; it's a masterpiece. It could be considered the Philippine equivalent to The Godfather or even Gone With the Wind, but it's completely unknown in the West. The rights to it are owned by ABS-CBN, a major television network in the Philippines, and they've restored the film. It was re-released at Christmas in the Philippines and it stars Nora Aunor, who's probably their biggest movie star. So we're opening the series with the U.S. premiere of this new digital restoration. This is exactly the kind of film that should be showing on the circuit at the Castro Theatre, along with Kubrick and Hitchcock and the standard repertory fare. So it's new not only in that it's a new digital restoration, but it's new in the fact that film restoration itself is a relatively new concept in the Philippines. In general, they haven't done a good job of taking good care of their film history; but, there are a lot of efforts now to change that.

Another highlight would be our closing film The Journey of Stars into the Dark Night (Ang Paglalakbay ng mga Bituin sa Gabing Madilim) by Arnel Mardoquio. He's one of the filmmakers from the South, Mindanao, that I was mentioning earlier. We showed his film Crossfire last year. His new film is also set during the uprising in the South but he takes a completely strange and unexpected point of view on this conflict. It's a truly surprising film and he's going to be at YBCA in person.

Guillén: Ah, I was going to ask if YBCA was hosting any talent.

Shepard: We have four people coming from Manila: three of the filmmakers, and an academic. So both the opening and closing films are pretty special to me. It's hard to choose because all of these films are like my babies. We've chosen them so carefully. We didn't have enough slots to show everything we wanted to show, there were that many good films, so everything's good in the series. You have to come and see everything!

Guillén: I'd still like you to single out at least one more.

Shepard: Okay. I'm a big fan of one of the documentaries we're showing, Tondo, Beloved: To What Are the Poor Born? (Tundong Magiliw: Pasaan isinisilang siyang mahirap?). Tondo is a neighborhood in Manila that has a bad reputation. It's one of metro Manila's poorest neighborhoods and is one of the most densely populated areas in the entire Earth, actually. This young woman Jewel Maranan made this documentary about the neighborhood. She lived with a family there for a number of years and has crafted an extremely intimate documentary about their daily existence. There isn't really a plot or anything like that. There's no editorializing. No directorial flourishes. I'm not sure if Jewel has ever seen this director's work, but her documentary reminds me a bit of Pedro Costa. It has a similar narcotic intimacy that fully immerses you in this place.

Guillén: Is there anyone in the United States who you would consider a Filipino cinema expert? Someone who's writing on the subject?

Shepard: There's very little. I had a meeting with Susan Oxtoby the other day and going over the program with her and she had never heard of any of these films and, as you know, she's one of the most knowledgable people in the world on film. Filipino Cinema is a blind spot for most people.

Guillén: Which your series clearly remedies; but, it makes me wonder why there's been such a blind spot? Are there historical contingencies between the Philippines and the U.S. that would have contributed to that?

Shepard: I'm not sure why this is; but, I feel like it's my duty to do something about it. Also, I think we owe the Philippines a little more than we're willing to acknowledge. They were our colony for 50 years and they're still very much dealing with the aftermath of that, and not always in an entirely positive way. Americans have a responsibility to understand more about the Philippines. That's my main reason for pulling together this film series.

Guillén: Let's return to the idea of distributing a national cinema through diasporic channels. How do you coordinate community outreach to your Filipino American constituency?

Shepard: There's a whole number of cultural leaders in the local community that I've gotten to know and who are giving their support. There's active Filipino American media in the Bay Area, including four newspapers, and a TV channel, a whole slew that—if you're not a member of the community—you wouldn't necessarily know about; but, it's big.

Guillén: Again, I know it's still too early to fully gauge reception for the series, but has there been any preliminary sense of how older Filipinos are relating to the new work you're showcasing in the Bay Area?

Shepard: It's complicated because there's a complicated relationship between Filipinos and Filipino Americans. They're not the same people. They're different communities. I don't necessarily think of Filipino Americans as being the main audience for New Filipino Cinema. They're an important audience, of course, and we want to do everything possible to reach them and get them interested but I want to reach beyond them too.

FILL THE VOID / LEMALE E HA'HALAL (2012)—The Evening Class Interview With Rama Burshstein and Hadas Yaron

Rama Burshstein was sitting at a wedding with a friend when a beautiful 17-year-old girl came to their table. She was wearing a lot of jewelry, which signified she'd recently been engaged. Burshtein's friend congratulated the girl, but in a weird almost mournful way, as if the young girl were going to a funeral and not her wedding. After the bride-to-be left their table, Burshtein's friend remarked, "You see her? She's about to marry her late sister's husband." That was "the end of it" for Burshstein, who became fascinated and pursued the young girl the entire evening, trying to understand why she had agreed to such an arrangement? Recently converted to the Hassidic faith, Burshstein had never heard of such a thing before; but, became intrigued enough to follow up with research. She met with 17 women, some girls, some already grandmothers, all married to their late sister's husband. By the end of her research, and with a more nuanced eye towards her culture, she came to accept that a young woman marrying her late sister's husband was a natural phenomenon, with hardly any of the drama she first imagined. Nonetheless, she drafted a treatment of the idea, even though she was not yet thinking about making a film.

Burshstein learned filmmaking at the Sam Spiegel School in Jerusalem. A few months after graduating, she became religious, and has been for 20 years. Though she didn't continue making feature films, she applied her skills to crafting films for her community, primarily films made by women for women (who ordinarily do not watch films). Paid for out of pocket, these films had to be generic enough—informational, educational, and with just the right balance of crying and laughter—to be something community women would come to see. Thus, they were hardly art films and had little to do with creative self-expression. They were, in fact, about making a living through providing entertainment. The experience taught Burshtein a lot about script writing, financing, camera work, directing and editing, all within a female-structured support system that met little resistance from the men.

But she felt mute. She felt women had no voice in Hassidic culture; a culture that was more than 3,000 years old, and which contained wisdom and beauty rarely shared from within. Any films made about the orthodox world were made by outsiders looking in, many were not researched thoroughly, and frequently were edited to misrepresent the community. She began to intuit meaning in the fact that she had learned a craft before becoming religious and became motivated to make a film that would reach past her community to the outside world, to give them an accurate view. Fond of saying her shoulders are too narrow to hold flags, Burshstein asserts her film was never meant to be political. She wanted to make a personal film, in the way the best stories told are personal. As a storyteller, she wanted to tell a story about her community set within her community. That's when she remembered the research she had done on the young girl marrying her deceased sister's husband.

With the blessing of her rabbi, and the support of her community, Burshstein began negotiations to make her first feature film Fill the Void (Lemale e ha'halal, 2012). It took a year to cast the film. Not because people weren't talented; but, because she didn't know what she wanted. It was important to her to cast the film from within her community, using non-actors, for fear that the performances would prove unbelievable otherwise; but, that ended up not being feasible because the characters proved too complicated for non-actors to perform. So she decided to audition actors, even though it was sometimes hard for her to believe they could accurately represent orthodox Jews. For example, the actor who played the male lead Yochay (Yiftach Klein) was already a recognized star in Israel, and had played such diverse roles as a pimp, a cop and a homosexual. Who would believe he was orthodox? The film's female lead Shira (Hadas Yaron) came to the project towards the end of Burshstein's year after auditioning everyone possible in Israel. Yaron walked into the room, "with love," and Burshstein knew immediately it was her. Yaron was Shira.

I met with both Rama Burshstein and Hadas Yaron in San Francisco's Fairmont Hotel during the 56th edition of the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF) where Fill the Void was featured in the festival's New Directors sidebar. My thanks to Karen Larsen for arranging same. Fill the Void opens theatrically in the Bay Area come Friday, June 7.

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Michael Guillén: First and foremost, congratulations on such an intimate, authentic film that has bravely crossed cultural barriers to achieve an international audience. A remarkable achievement.

Rama Burshtein: Thank you.

Guillén: At last night's Q&A after the SFIFF screening of Fill the Void, you were asked about your use of soft focus and its importance to the film's overall visual design. It was an interesting question to end your Q&A, but today I wanted to pick up from there because you mentioned that the soft and indirect focus was structured into your narrative script. By example, you brought up the brilliantly comic scene where the old woman interrupts Shira's conference with the rabbi to gain assistance with her oven. Can you speak to that comic timing—which I understood as a clear inflection of the humor within Jewish culture—and which you captured so well within that scene?

Burshstein: I can speak about the powerful thing that drew me into Judaism: the comic and the sorrowful working at once. Drama and comedy happen at the same time. Before I even joined the religion, a friend of mine who was religious had to marry off her son in the evening and her mother had died that morning. She buried her mother at 12:30 and at 7:00 she held the wedding and she was able to maneuver her conflicting feelings. I asked her, "How can you do that?" Ever since then I have asked the same question about Judaism. How can it be two things working at once?

The comic relief was about relief, yes, but it was more than that. You're drawn into a drama and interested in it, in what's going on and how it will end, and that's the time to break that focus because such is life. Life is never a movie that plays all the way out; there's always something interrupting. The rabbi, being responsible to his duties, knows that secret. He goes with whatever is floating. He doesn't say, "No, this is not important because this other thing is more important." Being a rabbi, a wise man, means asking, "Who says this is more important than the other? Who says?" So he leaves the conference with Shira to help the old women out with her oven. I didn't mean it to be so comic.

Guillén: But it was quite hilarious, perhaps because such "interruptions" are in and of themselves hilarious for being unexpected?

Burshstein: When the film screened in Los Angeles, someone came up to me and said that the only time she cried was during that scene because she felt the loneliness of the old lady. So everyone is watching this weird film differently. Yes, the scene was shot and edited to provide comic relief, but what I truly meant was that everything works together. For example, the wedding scene has everything in it: joy, excitement, and fear, and sorrow. It's all mixed up together. She's crying, so for a minute you think she doesn't want to get married. But then she's excited. Being honest is about allowing everything to happen, as it does in life. It wouldn't be true if she wasn't scared, excited, and sorrowful over the loss of a sister. For me this is the power of Fill the Void: everything happens together.

Guillén: Would you say that you're approaching this inclusivity of contrasting emotions from a cultural understanding? Or from a feminine viewpoint?

Burshstein: It's a cultural understanding. I had to learn this about my culture. I was brought up in a liberal family and taught to make clear distinctions—"I am a woman. Now I am happy. Now I am sad."—but, when I converted to orthodox Judaism, I had to learn that feminism within Judaism is about watching and observing and being able to hold what is witnessed without an immediate need to express it. Once I learned how to do that, new things happened. I'm still learning this. It's not my natural way of dealing with life.

Guillén: The comic strength in that scene, as well as the film's ambiguous ending, speaks to your directorial skill with timing. The ambiguity of the final scene has to do with, as you've said, the inclusion of so many different and contrasting emotions, but its strength lies in how you edited it and the moment when you chose to cut to black. Your timing is impeccable. The look on Shira's face begs interpretation and that scene's ambiguity becomes seductive. I didn't want you to stop the film there. I wanted to know more about what happened to these characters with whom I'd become so invested.

Burshstein: First of all because it's between me and God, I have to be honest and admit that the cut itself was made by Asaf Sudri, my cinematographer. I had cut the scene a little bit further and he came to me and said, "No, this is the place where we have to cut." So I have to give him the credit for the brilliance of that edit.

Guillén: Did he explain to you why he felt it would be better to cut right at that moment?

Burshstein: He was able to be more precise than I was. I looked for that moment, I looked for what he did, but I wasn't able to find it myself. He should receive all the credit for that choice. He suggested that the audience receive only a glimpse of what was about to happen, but they shouldn't be there when it happened. He made the cut and I saw how perfect it was and I asked myself, "Why didn't I see that?" Regarding that moment, some people feel it is erotic....

Guillén: It is! That's how I saw it.

Burshstein: But other people focus on how scared she is. They sense that Shira regrets the whole thing and wishes she could start over in the supermarket, having some say about the boy she wants to marry. Some people have focused on the difference in their ages, with Yochay being older than her, and it upsets them that he is going to be with her. Some people feel the romance. It's weird. Everyone reads it differently because all the emotions are there and they can choose whichever one they want to hold onto. It depends on who you are. From what you're saying, I can tell that you can see a lot of emotions at once; but, others can only go with one emotion at a time. They'll see the fear, or the regret, go only with the sorrow, or only with the romance. Everyone chooses their own lens to watch the film.

Guillén: I was startled last night by the question from the man who felt Fill the Void was all about duty and not about love. I wanted to turn around and ask him, "Did you just see this movie? Where were you?" You're clearly more patient with audience reception than I am, aware that the movie is being read in so many different ways. But perhaps that is what is widening your audience? The fact that the film is able to be read in so many diverse ways? You mentioned last night that before making this film you had made films within your community by women for women; but, you knew this film would reach past your community? You wanted that, right?

Burshstein: From the beginning I knew this film was not meant for the community. It never was.

Guillén: And yet from what I understand, it's been a blessed project from the very beginning. The community went with it and there were not a lot of issues about your making it. What has that been like for you? Did you anticipate such support from your community? Did you anticipate that the film would do as well as it's done and achieve the international reach it's achieved? Was it what you expected?

Burshstein: If you knew what I expected....

Guillén: What did you expect?

Burshstein: [Laughing] Nothing! My expectations were so low. I remember when the film was shown at Venice and I began to notice how the audience was reacting, I turned to Hadas and asked her, "Are you ready for this film to change your life? Maybe you're going to become a star?" First of all, I never expected to even make this film; but, then suddenly it was done. But as the director and the editor, it was really hard to achieve the precise energy of the film. I couldn't see if it was going to work or not. So I had low expectations of how it would be received by its audience.

Guillén: So the film's reception was a revelation for you?

Burshstein: It's not a question of revelation because it wasn't about my making a "successful" film. My reaction was more about, "I can't believe that people relate to this film." I was surprised. I couldn't believe that this simple tale, this love story where very little actually happens, where very little that is familiar happens, where the boy and girl don't touch, they don't kiss, and yet somehow this was so shocking to audiences.

Guillén: I consider Fill the Void to be one of the most eloquent expressions of the necessary restraint of desire. Because the Hassidic culture is completely foreign to me, as the film started I was concerned about whether or not I would be able to relate to it. But it didn't take very long before I began to sense that something was happening in this movie that was uniquely authentic, and fascinating for being so suggestive and erotic. And when I say "erotic", I don't mean sexual. I mean it in a classic sense, of eros being that which holds the world together. It's like atoms being attracted to each other to create molecules. What you have expressed about your culture through your film is the loving and erotic strength embedded in your faith. And I must commend you for communicating that so well to a secular audience.

Burshstein: I love you. I do. You've said it so beautifully that it makes me want to cry. Thank you, first of all. Really. I was always interested in the relationship between men and women. All I care about is people and their intimacy. For me, this is it, the secret and the enigma of all that, the chemistry. Judaism told me a great secret: passion is only for something you lack. You could never be passionate if you have it. The secret of passion is not having it. When you have it, you can be experiencing all sorts of wonderful things, even love, but it's not passion. As a secular person I didn't have an answer for why passion would go out of my life as swiftly as it came in.

I made this film going forward with the power of restraint that insures passion will be there all the time, and it's erotic as you say, but also sexual in a refined way. There are two sexual feelings and they are very different from each other. One happens here [she touches her heart] and then it goes down. But when it happens here [again, she touches her heart] and goes down, it is stronger when it goes down. That's what I was working with when I made this film. People feel it. Some people have told me they can't breathe watching the film; they're so into it.

Guillén: I like how Manohla Dargis described in her New York Times review that Fill the Void was sexy but chaste.

Burshstein: What do you mean by "chaste"?

Guillén: The sense of reservation, the sense of propriety, and the sense of not acting upon desire when it is not appropriate, and yet how sexy that all is. It's shown best in your film in the scene where Yochay comes perilously close to Shira and intimates what they could have had together. That scene is almost suffocating—the intensity of the desire sucks the air out of the room—and I found myself anticipating, "Are they going to touch? They can't touch."

Burshstein: [Laughing] You became the rabbi of the film!

Guillén: Hadas, was there something in particular about the story that made you want to play the role of Shira?

Hadas Yaron: It's a love story, which is always attractive to do. I guess it was because it takes place in such a certain community and a way of living a set of rules that added something much more intense to this love story; something you don't get to see a lot.

Guillén: Rama mentioned earlier that when the film screened at Venice she turned to you and asked you if you were ready to have it change your life? You then won the Best Actress award at Venice. The film has had a tremendous impact and you have achieved incredible visibility with this role. I saw an interview with Rama where she worried that everything was coming at you too fast and that you might become distracted from your studies. How do you see yourself positioned within your success?

Yaron: I don't know. Even though it's been a few months, I'm still letting it sink in. After I got that award, I did feel the need to go study. I had never studied in any kind of formal acting studio or drama school. I'd done maybe one workshop. While we were traveling with the film on the festival circuit, I just didn't know how to take it. It's weird when you do something for the first time, and you're not confident with what you do, and then someone tells you, "You're that good." You start questioning that. I'm still in that process with myself. I look in the mirror and it's like, "Really?" So I'm starting to do as many workshops as I can just to feel that I'm getting to know myself more as a person and as an actress. It's all been very strange, but I'm lucky to have the experience, and we'll see what happens.

Burshstein: Haddas is amazing as a person. She's not self-centered. She's humble and she's beautiful and she will succeed because of her nobility.

Guillén: How was your on-set interaction? How did you work with each other to create the character of Shira?

Yaron: Rama and I had a lot of conversations about how Judaism works so that I would understand. Because I didn't know anything about this world. You have to know how it works technically to understand what goes underneath. When I asked Rama for home work on how to work with this character, Rama just told me, "Read the script and see that you're getting it, that you're feeling it, and that you know what you feel in each and every scene."

Guillén: One of my favorite scenes is the accordion scene where we see Shira collapse into her uncertainty with music becoming the only way she can express her sorrow, however inappropriately in front of a group of children.

Yaron: I thought of my father working on that scene. My father always told me that—whenever the world became too noisy—he had a button that he could turn off to make it silent. I tried to do that with this scene. Shira doesn't have the vocabulary to tell herself what she's feeling.

Burshstein: She doesn't have it in words, but she's an artist. She's a true artist, because it's not about wanting to play to a packed audience at Carnegie Hall, it's about expressing herself through her music, which to me is higher than Carnegie Hall, in a bigger way, in bigger terms.

Guillén: This is the value of Fill the Void, and why I suspect audiences are relating to it so much, because it suggests a different way to approach desire and ambition. Here in the West we presume things have to be done in a certain way; but, your film suggests something else, another way. That there can be restraint. That there can be uncertainty. That final scene where Shira is preparing for her wedding is truly ambitious. As an actress, Hadas, you displayed a wide palette of emotions. How did the two of you work together to depict that conflict of emotions?

Yaron: All that I remember is that, first of all, it felt very real that day and I remember praying.

Burshstein: But you have to go back, especially when you went to go see a real Hassidic wedding. It was a strong experience for you.

Yaron: It was.

Burshstein: Mostly because the guy was crying all the time.

Yaron: Yeah, more than the woman.

Guillén: Is that what inspired Yochay's tearful approach to Shira during the wedding ceremony? How can anyone say there is no love in this film after seeing his eyes in this scene?

Yaron: That's true. When I saw the girl at the wedding, I was looking at her and thinking, "Okay, I'm going to be there." But when the boy—and he was a big boy—walked in, he was all red and crying. I was shocked.

Burshstein: It was important for me to express that a wedding for an Orthodox Jew is not just a ceremony; it's about a true moment where two souls unite. This is so strong for people in the Hassidic world. They've been educated in this moment. Usually when you go to a Hassidic wedding, it's so emotional that you can cry the whole time without even knowing the bride and groom personally. The connection is so strong. For me it was important that we show that strength and have the audience feel it.

To raise money, I made a four-minute documentary of a friend's wedding that focused on the bride waiting for the groom to come. She's crying and she's blessing. At one point she lifts her head after crying and her eyes are blackened with streaked mascara. In that moment she didn't care how she looked. She was into something so much deeper than that. Hadas and I talked about that footage a lot and it helped her prepare for that final wedding scene. Then there was this miracle where Hadas woke up that day, came to do the scene, and she was into it in a way that she said, "Tell me where to pray." She sat for three or four hours in that chair praying. I gave her the insights but she did the work.

After we shot the whole film, one nice thing that happened was that Yiftach Klein—who had been living with a girl for 15 years and had three children—finally married her with a rabbi. He went for it. He felt it. He felt the strength of it and he felt the need to do it.

Guillén: This touches upon what was asked of you last night regarding the tension between love and duty. Here in the West, love is something you try out. But you were clear that love for you meant commitment, a quality vital to your culture. Afterwards, I was arguing with someone about your response. They said, "I can't imagine not having had sex with the person I'm going to marry." And I said, "But this isn't just about sex. This is about an attunement." It strikes me that in your culture it is about being in tune with something larger? You don't need to try it out; you just need to be in tune with it. Is that a fair assessment?

Burshstein: It's fair enough. But I also understood what he was really saying; that it's scary to commit on that level. I'll speak freely, having sex with someone is about that specific time you're having sex with someone. But having sex is a lifetime thing. Sometimes it's nothing and it doesn't work. Sometimes it's beautiful. The way it works doesn't necessarily have to be beautiful and then it doesn't work. Sometimes it doesn't work in the beginning and it becomes beautiful. When you commit, it's not about now. That commitment is to the road, and that road has so many things that nobody's leaving. Nobody's going. Nobody's wondering, "Oh, will he call me tomorrow after we've had bad sex?" No. You have bad sex and then you work on it until you have good sex. Commitment revives love, but not in just a romantic way. Commitment doesn't let love go. You work at it. You understand it. You make it better.

Imagine you're stranded on an island until the day you die and no one is ever going to rescue you, and you're there with someone. It doesn't matter who that someone is. They will be lover and friend for your life, you and him, that's it. Even the genders don't really matter—you could be homosexual: a man with a man, a woman with a woman—or a man with a woman, but that's the person you have to work with. And it will work, right? Because that's the power of commitment. But I can understand the fear of commitment.

Guillén: As the closing credits roll, it's all in Hebrew except for the Sundance reference. Can you speak to your involvement with the Sundance Screenwriter Lab?

Burshstein: I didn't even know about the Sundance Screenwriter Lab and—if I'd known anything about it—I probably wouldn't have submitted my script, because only three out of every five thousand get chosen. But they came unofficially to Israel and the director of the film fund introduced seven new directors and they said they'd heard about my script and wanted to read it. I sent it to them, they read it, and then they invited me to the lab. Everyone was very excited about the opportunity but I didn't go because it was held on Saturday, which is a day when we don't work, and—even though they were into not letting me do much at that time—I felt that I had just finished the film and I was already playing around with my religion. I felt it was a test.

But the beautiful thing was that a month later they called me again and said, "You won't believe it but we're coming to Israel for the first time to bring the lab to you." They booked a four-day lab during the week so it didn't conflict with Saturday, and they invited two other Israeli female directors to attend. It was an amazing gesture of friendship. We've remained close friends, much how I imagine we would be close friends if you lived near me. It's so nice to meet people from your own tree.

Guillén: What a kind thing to say. Thank you. Can you speak a bit about who you were before you became religious and how it's changed your feeling of yourself as a woman?

Burshstein: Okay. That's a very good question. I was very naughty before I became religious and I stayed naughty. Nothing really changed. You stay the same. Being religious is not about not being you; it's about you on a way, on a path. So everything's the same. But femininity and womanhood is different. The difference is not who you are; it's the way you see femininity. I grew up in a very open house, home, family and I was educated. I was expressing myself and fulfilling myself and not holding myself. Being feminine in the orthodox way is to hold something inside, to be able—which I find very hard—not to express yourself all the time. When you force yourself to that which is really hard, then you start finding a new power that you didn't know you had within you. I love that power. So this is me, before and after.

BEFORE MIDNIGHT (2013)—SFIFF56 Closing Night Q&A With Richard Linklater & Julie Delpy

Photo courtesy of Pamela Gentile, San Francisco Film Society.

With Richard Linklater's Before Midnight (2013) opening theatrically this weekend, here at The Evening Class we offer a triple toast. First, Ryan Lattanzio's interview with Richard Linklater and Julie Delpy; second, a transcript of their on-stage conversation with Mike Jones at the 56th San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF); and following, a transcript of the Q&A after the SFIFF Closing Night screening of Before Midnight.  Naturally, all three entries are not for the spoiler-wary!!

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Introducing Before Midnight—the third in a series of films preceded by Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2009)—Richard Linklater expressed thanks to San Francisco Film Society Executive Director Ted Hope and programmer Rachel Rosen for choosing Before Midnight as the festival's closing night film, and added how special it was to take part in Ted Hope's first festival for the Film Society. "San Francisco, you're lucky to have him," Linklater declared, wishing Hope many more festivals. He apologized that Ethan Hawke couldn't make the screening (busy finishing up a film in Australia), but he was happy that Julie Delpy could join in the evening's festivities. Delpy thanked the crowd for their warm, enthusiastic reception and invited them to stick around for a Q&A session afterwards. She promised to answer almost every question.

After the film, Rosen started off the questioning by noting that nine years ago Linklater pulled off the incredible feat of making a sequel that lived up in every way to its predecessor and asked if Linklater could speak to the risk of making the third movie?

Linklater reiterated his remarks from the evening before at his on-stage conversation with Mike Jones, that making Before Sunset was much scarier and felt much more of a risk than making Before Midnight, which was a difficult film to make but less scary in a way; but, that being said, making Before Midnight happened in the same way as making Before Sunset. As with Before Sunset, there was a six-year period of no serious ideas and no serious consideration about making a third film, merely joking about it, and then somewhere along the way they realized that Celine and Jesse were still living characters who had something to say about their current situation in life. Jokingly, Linklater remarked, "We're currently on hiatus for six years."

Photo courtesy of Tommy Lau, San Francisco Film Society

Delpy offered that it was the writing that made Before Midnight more difficult than Before Sunrise in choosing to depict a more domestic side of Celine and Jesse's relationship and the very real issues arising between them, which were no longer "cute and flirty, as you might have noticed." Notwithstanding, Linklater asserted that they still wanted the narrative to be romantic. It's not that Before Midnight is anti-romantic. It just hedges the definition of "romantic" and shifts it around a bit. Celine and Jesse are still talking, still communicating and making each other laugh, and they're still sleeping together, which is pretty good for being over 40.

When they became serious about writing Before Midnight, Rosen asked if there were narrative elements that they instantly knew would carry over from the previous films? In particular, she was thinking of Celine's line in Before Sunset where she said, "Maybe we only get along because we walk around in cities in the same season." Did they know automatically that they wouldn't be setting the third film in a city with a warm climate? Or was the narrative up for grabs?

Delpy answered that early on, though not right away, they decided not to set the story in a city and instead to show them on holiday. Once they "found Greece", it took the story to a different level. Linklater added that they had outlined the story and were pretty far down the road in their conception of what the film would be, but the last little bit was finding the location, which ended up being Greece. The location helped define the film.

Rosen asked them to talk about the big dinner scene in Before Midnight, which she considered a significant departure from the first two films for being more populated with multiple conversational perspectives.

Photo courtesy of Tommy Lau, San Francisco Film Society

Linklater explained that they decided early on that they couldn't do the same thing with Before Midnight that they'd done with the previous films in the sense of structuring the story around a chance encounter. They knew the narrative had to be age-appropriate, as that quality of chance encounters happens less and less as one grows older. To see them in their lives meant placing them among all these other people. Delpy added that it was important to show Celine and Jesse at this stage in life compared to the younger couple at the dinner table to consider the possibilities of what it might have been like for them to meet each other today with all the new technologies available. Similarly, it was important to contrast their relationship against the older couple who had both lost their spouses. Linklater stated it was fun to show how your feelings about your own relationship in your social self is very different than your private self and how you can say things in a social setting that comment upon the private sphere through passive-aggressive jokes; jokes that aren't really jokes.

Admitting that acting is mysterious to her, Rosen enquired how difficult it was to achieve the natural, "non-acting" style adopted by Delpy and Hawke?

The goal of the films, Delpy answered, the bridge across the films, was to purposely give the acting in the films the feel of not acting, to elicit the sense of listening to two people actually talking. That was the acting style appropriate to the films. There are many different types of acting, from basically wearing old age make-up, to imitating historical characters, but the goal in the Before films was distinct. They achieved that first through the lengthy process of writing and coming up with words that they knew they would eventually have to say as actors, and then they rehearsed and rehearsed until the words sounded natural. Coming from a musical background, Delpy remembered and used her training as a child playing clarinet or bleeding from her fingers playing violin. Basically, she expressed, acting is like learning a musical instrument in that it requires repetition and tons of rehearsal so that you can finally just step up and do it without thinking. Nonetheless, the shoot was painful and both she and Hawke were filled with constant anxiety.

"She's still traumatized by it," Linklater apologized, but he knew their abilities and pushed them to do long, extended takes. Eventually, Delpy joked, Linklater would want them to do an entire movie in one take. But she was aware of the opportunity he had given them as actors to challenge themselves. He directed them in such a way that it allowed them to meet the challenge, giving them the freedom to go for it, but providing a safety net for them at the same time. In other words, as a director Linklater trusted his actors, which can't always be said about other directors, and the trust was there from the very first film, which was amazing and unusual.

Photo courtesy of Tommy Lau, San Francisco Film Society

All those degrees of difficulty—acting natural, long takes—reminded Rosen of The Five Obstructions (2003) and how placing constraints can help artists open up creatively. She asked if they were conscious of doing that?

Linklater admitted that it did seem like every film of his, not only the Before series, had some kind of insurmountable challenge to overcome. If a film doesn't naturally have a cross to bear, he creates it, because it makes everyone work really hard.

At that juncture, Rosen opened up the questioning to the audience. A fellow in the front row was struck by the hotel scene in Before Midnight, which—up to then in the series—was the most physically intimate Celine and Jesse had been and brought their relationship to a whole new level. He wanted to know how Linklater accomplished that?

"Are you talking about Julie's breasts?!" Linklater retorted. He joked they had been trying to get them in all of the films and that he told her it was now or never. In order to get to that new level, Delpy explained, the nudity served a certain realism they were striving to capture. Primarily it was to depict a moment that could have happened that doesn't happen. She exposes her breasts but then she hides them. The intensity of that moment wouldn't have been communicated had she been wearing a bra. "Could we have gotten a PG-13 rating if you'd been wearing a bra?" Linklater wondered. "We blew it," Delpy laughed. The hotel scene, Linklater finessed, was actually a lot of scenes. It was a love scene that lasted nearly 30 minutes and was its own mini-movie. It was a fun scene to face and they accepted the challenge of depicting how arguments actually build between people who love each other but harbor glossed-over resentments.

Photo courtesy of Tommy Lau, San Francisco Film Society

The Before series, Linklater added, offer great areas for declaration because this is the way people really speak. The dinner scene, especially, was a great place to share opinions, and to change subjects, and these films open themselves up to demonstrate that and contain a lot of different concerns at once that a more traditional film can't. Most films are tightly-structured short stories where everything advances the plot, such that the characters have no chance to drift away. But this is what they allowed themselves in these films and it opened up the opportunity to explore what was on their minds. Their working process is such that they're often approaching the film from where they're at in that moment in their real lives and trying to get things into the movie that reflect their own lives.

But all ideas are fully vetted between the three of them. If he has something he's trying to get into the movie but he gets two blank stares from Delpy and Hawke, then it's out. Which happens more often than not, Delpy confirmed. The film as a final creative product is the distilled version of the work process they have endeavored for years where they've discarded many ideas and pushed each other to make the narrative more interesting and deep. They give as much as they can and the movies are fun to return to as testaments of their process.

Aware that they had talked at length about their work process, I nonetheless wanted to know how they arrived at the narrative element of the twin girls, which was something I was not expecting out of the story; but, which delighted me.

Linklater answered that—with eight kids between he, Delpy and Hawke at this point—they talked a lot about what kind of children Celine and Jesse would have in their forties. They settled upon twins early in the process and that might have come from the fact that Linklater himself has identical twin girls (who were pissed at him for not casting them). They were lovely to watch running around. They were like miniature Julie Delpys. They also enhanced the paradisical fantasy of being on holiday in Greece. Celine and Jesse have gotten so much of what they probably wanted from the world. If they could have gone back nine years, they would have gladly signed on for this life, easily—this is a good scenario for them—and yet, they're still negotiating the world as humans always do. There's trouble in paradise.

A young woman asked how Linklater achieved emotional violence within words and if he could address the gendered conflict between Celine and Jesse? She felt that Jesse was not such a bad guy.

Linklater liked the idea of violence within words and jokingly compared it to his interaction with Delpy. What struck him was how, after an argument, you always think about what you could have said better. Delpy agreed that it was fun to write the argument because who hasn't had an argument with someone they live with? You go places in an argument that you sometimes later regret an hour later but you're speaking out of anger. No one can exasperate you and take you to that place more than a person you love.

But as for Jesse not being such a bad guy, Delpy defended her character Celine by saying how offended she was by Jesse's comment early in the film regarding his son. She knows what he's actually getting at. She's manipulative, yes, but so is he in his own way. They're two master manipulators going at each other.

Following up on that, another young woman asked about Celine's emotional resistance to Jesse? It seemed to her that Celine's reaction was out of proportion to what Jesse was trying to offer. It seemed he was really trying and she was resisting all his efforts. Why was she so angry at him?

Delpy again defended her character. Celine said it straightforward to Jesse: if she didn't fight back, she was going to end up being a subservient wife and mother living in a suburb of Chicago. Celine is an argumentative and strong person who won't let anyone else destroy—not only her life—but their lives together. She's aware that moving to Chicago would destroy their relationship. It's probably not the first time that she and Jesse have fought over this issue of Jesse's decision to stay with her in Paris. Delpy affirmed: "She didn't force him to. It was his decision." That got a noticeable rise out of her audience (and, for me, provided the evening's most telling moment of the audience's reaction to the storyline; they were clearly on Jesse's side).

Photo courtesy of Tommy Lau, San Francisco Film Society

The final question came from a man who admitted that—after watching all three films—he no longer considered My Dinner With Andre the talkiest film in the world. But he wondered if Linklater had any reservations about deciding to be so conversational? If he worried about his audience accepting it?

Linklater responded, "When you're making a construct, like a film, there is an audience in the back of your mind. That's a director's job to a large degree to see it from an audience's perspective. That's what we're doing." The audience that he has imagined for the film is abstracted through his hope that they will appreciate the film's heightened honesty. Delpy was bemused by the notion that it's a taboo area of representation to show couples who have been together more than 10 years working through their problems. Which was not only what they wanted to show, Linklater furthered, they also wanted to show the triumph of Celine and Jesse sticking it out, of trying to find each other in their current situation, not being satisfied with the past but trying to find ways to communicate into the future.

BEFORE MIDNIGHT (2013)—An Onstage Conversation With Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy & Mike Jones

Noting that the 15-day length of the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF) is longer than the average film festival, programmer Rachel Rosen posed that ordinarily she would be feeling a little sad about the festival coming to an end if it weren't for her being so excited about the festival's closing night entry: Richard Linklater's Before Midnight (2013) [official site], with Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke reprising their roles from the two earlier entries in Linklater's trilogy (Before Sunrise, 1995; Before Sunset, 2009).

Asserting that Before Midnight would prove to "still be a terrific experience to see" even without benefit of watching the two previous films, Rosen embraced the opportunity to introduce an onstage conversation with director Linklater and co-writer and star Julie Delpy on the evening before their closing night screening, so as to endeavor a more in-depth look at the Before series.

Previous documentaries like Michael Apted's Up series have shown how film captures the passage of time. Another notable example might be François Truffaut's Antoine Doinel cycle, whereby a character (and actor fetiche Jean-Pierre Léaud) mature before our eyes; a fetish Truffaut shared with Tsai Ming-liang (whose cinematic fondling of Lee Kang-sheng likewise measured the passage of time over a familiar body). "And, of course," Rosen added, "there have been Hollywood franchises with multiple parts that may or may not show character development and may or may not have the same actors playing those characters." But for Rosen, Linklater's Before trilogy remains unprecedented in its portrayal of fictional characters over time.

Rosen then introduced moderator Mike Jones, former editor for Indiewire and Variety, and currently a screenwriter with Pixar. Jones decided to frame his on-stage conversation with Linklater and Delpy by screening a series of clips from Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, which he offered as anticipatory gifts to prepare ourselves for viewing Before Midnight on closing night. Linklater confirmed the clips would be useful since—without really giving anything away—there are no flashback sequences in Before Midnight that revisit the earlier films.

The first clip showed Jesse inviting Celine off the train to spend the night with him wandering Vienna. Linklater recalled he had been inspired by meeting a young woman in the '80s with whom he spent a selfsame night, walking and talking, undeniably attracted. He had already made a couple of films but knew he wanted to make a film about what "that thing in the air" was between him and this young woman on that night back in 1989. The idea gestated for five years until production began on Before Sunrise.

"What was the thing in the air?" Jones asked.

"You know," Linklater grinned sheepishly. "We're lucky to have that in our lives and it happens more when you're young, unattached and able." Add to fleeting desire the element of youthful travel—Linklater was visiting his sister in Philadelphia—and being on the road with nothing he had to do. He was in a toy store and this girl began flirting with him and—because he wasn't in his home town—he felt emboldened to approach her and invite her to hang out with him once she got off work. She agreed and they spent the whole night together until he had to leave the following morning. He recalled Philly as being a good walking city.

From there, he took a trip to Berlin with his first film. He had never left the U.S. before and it was his first time to experience a city in another country, which is where the idea for Before Sunrise fully took hold with the addition of this international element. Admittedly, his experience was not so unique, many people have experienced the same thing when encountering their first European cities, but the idea for the movie was to make it minimal, about two people falling in love with each other, or however one might define whatever is going on between two people when there's such a strong attraction.

Before Sunrise arrived to Julie Delpy as a screenplay, for which she auditioned. Linklater drafted the script in 11 days with a female friend who had been in a couple of movies and whose opinion he trusted. The goal was to keep the collaboration balanced between gendered perpsectives. He felt his previous film Dazed and Confused had been overrun with testosterone. Despite there being a script, Linklater's endgame was to find a strong actress to help maintain a feminine presence and a strong actor to work alongside her and to have the two of them help him flesh out the script by bringing themselves fully to it. Looking back, casting these two roles and hooking up with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy was an important moment in his creative life.

Delpy recalled liking Linklater's audition script. It was intellectual with characters talking a lot and expressing their thoughts. Even though she didn't agree 100% with what they were thinking, she liked the idea of two people expressing themselves over the course of one night. Once they began working together, her frustrations as a writer surfaced to help shape the script. Each of them took some part of the original script and either threw it out or workshopped it over the course of their three weeks in Vienna. "I fired the writer," Linklater joked, "even though I was the writer." The script was a jumping off point for the three of them to get to know each other well.  For example, with the scene on the train, Ethan asked Julie what kind of guy she would go for that could entice her off a train? Ethan had to work really hard because Julie admitted it would be hard for a guy to pick her up on a train, particularly because she's naturally freaked out by men in general.

The second clip from Before Sunrise was of Celine and Jesse pretending they're talking to each other on the phone. Although Before Sunrise appears improvised, it's actually a tight script that they all worked on as writers, cognizant of the architecture of the storytelling. They had a placeholder for a scene where the relationship between Celine and Jesse was meant to go to a whole new level and where each would express something personal about what they were feeling. So what would that be? That's where working in chronological sequence served a purpose. How could they know what that would be in the first week of working together? But by the time they got to that placeholder, Julie recalled a phone game she used to play with a guy who—though not necessarily her boyfriend—was a guy she was aiming to keep, impress and seduce. She suggested that they play the scene with Celine pretending to be on the phone with a girl friend talking about Jesse. It would be a good way to say what she felt indirectly, which was perfect and appropriate for them at that moment, expressed through a touch of shyness. "It doesn't always work," Delpy quipped, "but it worked in the film."

For something to end up in the film, it needed to be vetted by all three of them. By the time the idea reached the screen, it had been through all of their systems. Each of them could provide lots of suggested material that didn't make it into the film because the other two—or even one—didn't get it. As a director, Linklater explained, if the actors don't understand the scene, it's not going to work. As an actor, if the director doesn't get it or understand or think it's important to the film, again the performance won't work. They fell into the rhythm of that workshop process early on. So often in collaboration, people try not to hurt each other's feelings and remain polite, but they had a shorthand that worked between the three of them.

The flip side, Linklater furthered, is that they were just talking, free associating, digressing into crazy stories, which every now and then the other two found interesting. Sometimes Delpy would be joking around, trying to entertain them, and she would say something that the other two would like and they'd say, "That should be in the movie!" and she'd be, "Really? No way!" A lot of the workshop process involved supporting each other while pushing each other at the same time. Delpy likened it to digging in a coal mine and finding diamonds "or something that looked like diamonds."

Linklater noted that the workshop process had also evolved over the making of the three films. With the first film, Hawke and Delpy were on the page and taking the script as actors and whatever reworking or rewriting that took place was, in essence, melding with what was on the page and how they were trying to make it work. With the subsequent two films, Hawke and Delpy were involved as writers from the beginning of each project. It was never as simple as Delpy contributing only to Celine's character, or Hawke to Jesse's. They all three wrote for all the characters, even with their contributions to the first film.

Delpy recalled a scene in Before Sunset where Jesse tells Celine she will become a great mother. A friend of Delpy's found the line condescending and wondered how Delpy allowed the line to remain in the film? She had to tell her friend, "I wrote it for him. What are you talking about?" Often, the rudest lines levied against a character were written by the actor playing the character, so it wasn't like they were exacting insults at each other; rather, they were acknowledging the worst things others had been said about them. Delpy admitted it was weird but fun to write insults against her character Celine through Jesse's mouth. Linklater advised that Hawke was good at that himself, being a brutally honest writer who goes all the way with an idea, irregardless of how he comes off. He has no vanity with that.

The third clip from Before Sunrise involved Celine and Jesse discussing commitment and the fleeting divinity that exists between individuals. Having recently rewatched the clip, Mike Jones felt that Celine and Jesse are characters who continually fight against romance, even when it arrives in front of them. Characterizing Jesse as "a cynical 23-year-old boy, whose parents have divorced, and who's just broken up with a girl in Madrid", Jones queried whether Linklater and Delpy purposely configured romance as an obstacle for their characters to overcome?

Linklater qualified that their's was a self-conscious, self-aware romance. They're just old enough and aware enough to have had significant life experience by the age of 23. When you get to be too old, you look back and think of Celine and Jesse as just kids; but, that's yes and no. What age are you when you first get your heart broken? Pretty young. At 23, they've already been through enough. Even as actors, Delpy and Hawke had been through a lot by that time. All three of them were, in fact, both romantic, realistic and cynical at the same time.

Jones asked if romanticism and realism were meant to go together? Especially in the third film Before Midnight, they seemed to conflict, especially when discussed during the dinner scene. It's a conflicted subject, Linklater assessed, in everyone's life. It has historical precedent going back hundreds of years. Writers have written for centuries about the unhappiness of love and have warned against putting too much into something as unstable as passion or romance. It's impossible to possess another person.

Delpy suggested that—until Walt Disney showed up—most people associated romance with falling in love with someone and then killing yourself. After Disney, romance became thought of as something that ended up happy everafter; but, she argued, that's a relatively new conception of romance. Romance is a weak genre overall, Linklater rationalized, but they found themselves in it and decided to at least be as realistic about it as possible.

The romance as genre is further complicated, Delpy insisted, by being primarily anti-feminist. It depresses her that most narrative arcs for women in romances involve meeting a guy, struggling with him, and then marrying him as the main goal of the relationship. Romances were better in the '40s, she offered, with actresses like Katherine Hepburn, and they deteriorated in the '80s. Jones pursued Delpy's opinion on the romances of Nora Ephron and Nancy Meyers, which he considered written from the female point of view? "But don't women always want to get married at the end of those movies?" Delpy countered. "Not that I'm against marriage—I am for it, but for the gays only."

The fourth (and final) clip from Before Sunrise depicted Celine's decision that she and Jesse should not have sex, particularly since they would be parting in the morning and might never see each other again, which prompts Jesse to suggest that they should meet each other again in six months. Jones noted how Jesse would say something and then Celine would dig it out a little bit more. In both Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, Jesse is always trying to say the right thing, which Celine always tries to dig out. Delpy sees Celine as playful and probably smarter than Jesse. Women might be discrete in how they flirt but they know what they want as much as men, which she felt the clip aptly illustrated. In Before Midnight particularly, Jones observed, Jesse says something inadvertent that Celine digs at until it reveals a truth about his personality. He wondered how that developed from the earlier films?

"When we write," Delpy responded, "we analyze every word we write, and why we're saying them, and what's the motive behind them. There's not a word in the films that is an accident because the way we work is that we will pick at it until we drive ourselves crazy with the writing and the workshop and the rehearsal afterwards. Of course we watched the first two films before writing the third one, just as we watched the first film before writing the second one. We brainstorm on every detail of what the characters say and why they say it and what we can take from it."

Jones asked Linklater about the cinematography for the trilogy, the look of the films, and if there was any source material he had looked at beforehand? Linklater admitted that looking at the films of others is something a filmmaker does early on as he's developing his style; but, at this juncture, he doesn't do that anymore. Though they did watch Vincente Minnelli's The Clock (1945) with Judy Garland and Robert Walker when they were in Vienna shooting the first film. It was a difficult film to track down, he had never seen it though he knew what it was about—Robert Walker meets Judy Garland on leave in 1945 New York and they have a night together—so he wanted to see it, but not so much to guide the look of Before Sunrise. He just wanted to check out "the vibe" of the film. The three of them sat down to watch a 16mm print of the film that he rented and the film stayed with them that entire summer while they were shooting. He kept wondering what it was about The Clock that made it eternal and made it relevant to the present day? That motivated them to keep their eye on the eternal and not be tethered to a specific moment or time. They asked themselves: what will last? What goes on between people that is eternal? Even though aspects of The Clock—the listening booths for example—were anachronistic, long vanished by the mid-'90s.

Jones asked if it was a struggle to maintain the sense of timelessness throughout the arc of the three films? Linklater didn't feel so. It was part of what they were aiming to do. And as for the look of the film, he approached each film as he does all his films, wanting it to be realistic, naturalistic, "almost an elegant documentary." Nothing too fancy, with long shots, and extended takes that prompt the audience to feel the film is real. In the clip of the scene on the tram, for example, that was a seven-minute sequence as they went around Vienna and that helped set up the stylistic element of uninterrupted sequences, which accounts for why audiences probably felt the films were improvised. But technically it's nearly impossible to improvise such an extended take, it has to be thoughtfully scripted out and planned, but it's a testament to Delpy's and Hawke's talent that they made it seem so naturalistic.

In the first clip from Before Sunset Celine and Jesse discuss how they've changed since first meeting nine years past. Celine "digs" out of Jesse that he considered her "a fatty." Jones wanted to know what inspired Linklater to return to this material after nine years?

It was scary, Linklater admitted. To make the second film required a big leap of faith. The way Before Sunrise ended begged the question of whether Celine and Jesse ever saw each other again and if they actually met up six months later; but, no one was clamoring for a sequel. There was no pressure for a second film, no one wanted it, except the three of them. The joke between them was that it was the lowest-grossing film to ever spawn a sequel. What made the prospect of a second film scary was that making Before Sunrise was a special time creatively for all three of them and they risked screwing up what was special about that time and the first film if they messed up the second.

But in 1999 Linklater got Delpy and Hawke together again for a few days to work on a scene for Waking Life (2001). That's when, arguably, being in character from Before Sunrise —or at least some version of the character—prompted them to consider making a sequel. That's when they realized that Celine and Jesse were still alive. Working on the scene for Waking Life made Delpy remember how great it had been to work with Linklater and Hawke and how much fun they had filming Before Sunrise. They realized that it wasn't just a one-time thing and that they could create together again. The scene from Waking Life gave them the taste of that.

When you're young, Delpy added, you think you're going to encounter other creative opportunities like what they experienced working together on Before Sunrise, you expect them, and then you come to realize that you don't have great collaborative experiences with everyone you work with and that it's probably something that happens with very few people in your life. Getting older provided the perspective of how rare the relationship between the three of them actually was and how enjoyable it continued to be whenever they worked together.

Part of their collaboration was to purposely set obstacles for themselves creatively. They decided to do Before Sunset in real time, like a play, so nothing could be cut out. By contrast, Before Sunrise was a more conventional film that—though transpiring over one night—allowed for a lot of time. There was a scene or two they were able to cut out. Fairly early on as they conceived of the films, they elected to shoot chronologically, partly because of a joke Delpy had made about making a sex film in real time.  Hawke and Linklater had already made another film in real time (Tape, 2001) and found the challenge stimulating. In fact, Tape originated as an unproduced play that they read and wondered if they could adapt to a film. In a certain sense they had to paint themselves into a corner in order to make the sense of real time work.

Delpy and Hawke came on early to Before Sunset, first as writers working on the script. Linklater recalled the three of them sitting around Delpy's apartment in Paris writing the script. But then came that huge moment when they started to film and Delpy and Hawke had to actually enact all the lines they'd written. Exclaimed Linklater: "I never saw two actors work that hard. What they had to do was really tough. I was making the movie, but they were having to perform it."

Another challenge they gave themselves was limited time because they shot it in the late afternoon. So much of it they would rehearse first and then they would have a two-hour window to shoot maybe seven pages. They would do seven takes and that would be the movie. "The pressure was on. It was kind of like a sprint." But their creative process on working with real time in Before Sunset emboldened them stylistically for Before Midnight. The texts became longer and they could push themselves even further. Linklater concluded that in every film he sets goals for himself that are nearly impossible to pull off and seem endlessly insurmountable.

The second clip from Before Sunset staged Jesse's regret that Celine had not returned to Vienna after six months, wondering how different their lives might have been had she done so. Jones asked how different it had been for Delpy to approach Before Sunset as a writer, not just an actor, and how she went about creating the back story for what had happened to Celine over nine years?

That was her work with the second and third films, Delpy asserted, to think about what had happened to Celine over nine years: what she'd been through, what she achieved, what she did, what her relationships were like, how she broke up with her last boyfriend, everything. "Even if it doesn't end up on screen," Linklater explained, "they have to know it as characters."

Jones asked if Delpy had domain over her character, could she come into the writing process and say, "This is what my character has done over the past nine years" and have it be accepted? No, she answered, everything was discussed, everything was agreed upon. She never imposed anything. If they didn't like an idea, it wouldn't stick. This was the work they undertook for a couple of years before they actually began filming so that everything would be in place by the time they reached the set. That lengthy gestation period is what remains unique in their creative collaboration.

For example, with Before Midnight they had a big idea they worked with for nearly six months before finally dropping it from the film. But having worked with it helped them in a certain way. They learned a lot from working with that big idea and lived a back story, even if it wasn't what they ended up using in the movie. Jones asked Linklater if he could be specific about that big idea and Linklater said that, though Before Midnight ended up being set on holiday, originally they had considered choosing one day in the domestic life of Celine and Jesse. That was good for figuring out many of the domestic details between them that they could then carry into their holiday, wearing them so to speak. They ultimately decided that domestic life in real time would be boring and depressing. Who would want to watch them standing in line for 20 minutes waiting to pick up their kids?

Their workshop process likewise helped them decide whether or not they wanted to show unattractive or unlikeable qualities in Celine and Jesse that might upset audiences familiar with their characters; but, they wanted to express what they found honest and real in their own lives that isn't often seen on the big screen. Over the 19 years that the three of them have worked on this trilogy, they now have eight kids between them, which serves as fodder for the writing. So much of their time together is spent discussing how their personal lives are going for them and, naturally, this carries over into the writing.

The third clip from Before Sunset reveals how Celine's conflicted love for Jesse has kept her from committing to any other man in her life and how angry she has been at not being able to forget him. They argue in a taxi, which prefigures the arguments in store in Before Midnight. Jones asked how they built up to that argument?

Linklater answered that it started with the outline of the movie. As with Before Sunrise where the relationship between Celine and Jesse reaches a new level, in Before Sunset their relationship is "popping". They've come together, they've learned a lot about each other, and—because of what they've learned and now know—their relationship has to, again, achieve another level. The argument in the taxi, which is the second to last scene in the movie, is a make or break moment for both of them.

Delpy remembered the construction of the arc of that scene. Since Before Sunset was set over an hour and a half, it didn't quite have the three-act structure of most ordinary narratives; but, it did have structure. "Structures are universal," Delpy emphasized. Up to that point Celine has been playing and pretending that it wasn't a big deal that she hadn't shown up to meet Jesse in Vienna. She was pretending that she wasn't quite as hurt as him, that she was not as emotionally attached as him, but then she reveals her true feelings, which was essential to the arc of the scene. He's making steps towards her, she's playful, and a moment has to come when the energy bursts, and that moment for them was in the cab. But it was important to also include a sense of humor so that she wouldn't come off as a raving maniac. "It's become my specialty to flip out in cars," Delpy quipped.

After that moment they both know that Celine is in love with Jesse and has been for years; but, it angers Celine to admit this to herself. She's angry because it didn't work out between them the way it should have. Jesse's been expressing his regret all along but Celine has resisted him, imposing rationality over her feelings. She's the rational one between them. Her job requires her to be rational. She's not creative like Jesse. She's not a writer and can't romanticize the past like Jesse has. She's shut down that part of herself, which surfaces when she sees him again and he expresses his love for her over the years. It's a messy situation for both of them, Linklater added, Celine's in a relationship with someone, Jesse has a kid, is married, and lives on another continent, so nothing is easy between them.

Jones pointed out that Jesse implied to Celine that he wrote his book about their encounter in order to be in a French book store where she might show up. Yes, he implied that, Linklater agreed, but qualified that this was a time before texting, before all the many ways to communicate available now. It's almost laughable in Before Sunrise how they don't exchange information as people would easily do today. Instead, he has to throw the book out as a signal to her. Jesse's book, however, was of course his romanticized perspective of events from his point of view; but, from Celine's point of view, Jesse's book is problematic and raises issues between them. In Celine's defense, Delpy proposed that being involved with someone who writes is not necessarily a fun thing in general (which she could swear on, being a writer herself). Things that are said to a writer can end up in a story so you have to watch everything you say. To be involved with a writer, you have to make your peace with that, or not.

The final clip from Before Sunset was the film's closing sequence where Celine sings along with Nina Simone's recording of "Just In Time." Jones admitted that this was a scene he watched again and again, amazed at how they pulled it off. Linklater distinguished that—in contrast to the way Before Sunrise ends—the ending of Before Sunset begs the question of what happens after that fadeout, so much so that audiences repeatedly asked him about when he would make the third film. He considered the scene a perfect example of their collaborative workshop process. Very early in the outlining stage for Before Sunset, Nina Simone had died and they were hanging out, not even working on the script actually, and Delpy started talking about how she had seen Simone twice in concert, whereas Linklater never had. She basically did for Linklater what Celine did for Jesse and—as she was doing it—Linklater knew it would be the end to the second movie.

There's a beautiful ambiguity to that final scene, but one which Linklater insisted they had to earn, and which they earned when Celine says to Jesse: "Baby, you're going to miss that plane." The vibe for that line to work had to be appropriate. It was structured as ambiguous—which would have worked—but, in order for Celine to say that, a lot had to happen before then, not the least of which was Jesse's slow, silent ascent up the staircase to Celine's apartment, knowing something was going to happen with her even though he was a married man.

Jones pointed out that the silent ascent that opens the final scene of Before Sunset paralleled the silent scene in the record booth from Before Sunrise. He wanted to know how Linklater paced those silences against the wall of dialogue between these two characters? Again, Linklater explained that the pacing aimed to be emotionally authentic. It wasn't something that was overthought.

Jones asked Delpy what she carried over from the Before trilogy into her own directing? The two processes are quite different, she explained, because on her own films she writes alone or—when she has written with others—she's been more the boss. She wants her films to be distinct from Linklater's Before series, which falls into more of a romantic vein than she would ordinarily pursue. What she has learned from working with Linklater, however, is to be more open to collaboration, to listen to others, and to not be dictatorial on set. She's also learned to adjust expectations on her work. Originally, she never wrote romantic comedies and her scripts went nowhere, no one wanted to finance them, so it felt like she was banging her head against a wall. She had to learn to be trickier about securing financing.