RS: One thing that ties your films together is that they seem to take place at one moment either before or after these defining thresholds of maturity. Tape, subUrbia, Dazed and Confused, Waking Life, School of Rock. Is this something you work towards, or a natural tendency?

Linklater: It must be just the way my mind works. My early ideas about film were that it could capture a certain realism of a time, that’s a thing film can do unlike other art forms, they can capture reality in that moment. What better time than some kind of pivotal moment in your life. I guess I always liked the idea of people who are in the process of discovering themselves. I think we check in with Julie and Ethan and find they’re still in that process. I think that process never ends, and I’ll gladly pull out a gun and shoot myself if I start making films in which I’ve found all my answers and I’m here to impart great knowledge or wisdom to others.

RS: What’s the difference between making Before Sunset in your forties, as opposed to Before Sunrise in your thirties?

Linklater: On those films, it’s an interesting mix because roughly I’m ten years older than them [Delpy and Hawke]. They’re inhabiting it at that moment and I’ve got a ten-year lag time. There I was in my early thirties, them in their early twenties, so I was looking back at a younger time and they’re in that moment.

RS: Before Sunset seems more like an exploration and experiment on the representation of time than a straightforward sequel. You’re looking at these actors as actors, as people, hearing them discuss the lines on their faces, almost like Michael Apted’s 7 Up documentaries.

Linklater: It’s rare you’re given the opportunity in narrative, given the limitations of film, to actually have the same characters, have existing footage of them nine years previous and be able to use that in your storytelling methodology. It’s a nice luxury, a nice element to deal with. Two people encountering each other after all that time, it was a lot of fun to play with the notion of this huge gap in time. This film is real time, 80 minutes of real time. Whereas the other one was 14-16 hours of what seems like real time. And that’s all separated by nine years of life. I think the big idea that makes Before Sunset even a possibility was the notion of making it in real time. It probably begged for a bigger epic structure and I thought about it over the years. Something more traditional, telling the story on different continents. But that never worked out, it never took hold. Maybe I was somewhat emboldened by the experience on Tape, experimenting with real time.

It was somewhere after Before Sunrise and SubUrbia, everyone started telling me I was telling stories within 24 hours or 12 hours, and I joked, someday I’ll make a movie that takes place in real time, like Bergman’s Winter Light is as long as the film itself. It seemed to me like the ultimate cinematic challenge. While it was very dramatic, Before Sunset is kind of the opposite. It’s not a traditional drama. It’s closer to just existing. It can’t help but have a little dramatic structure that we impose on it. But I really just wanted to capture two people existing. And let the context take care of itself. Time and cinema. Tarkovsky put it so eloquently in his book Sculpting in Time. He articulates it as well as anyone, cinema’s particular relation to time. I was always kind of moved by what he talked about. I guess my idea of storytelling drifts in that direction.

RS: You also have this generosity and fluidity of conversation you’d be hardpressed to find outside of Eric Rohmer, and what ultimately makes the Before Sunrise and Sunset films unique to American cinema. Are you influenced by him at all?

Linklater: As much as I am Godard, Truffaut, and a hundred other filmmakers. With the exception of his film The Green Ray or Summer, which is pretty wonderful, and more of a direct influence. I totally admire Rohmer. My comment to that is, thank you, I think he’s a master. But I don’t think he makes anything so simple. He’s like a mathematician, he’s very precise, his plots are more intricate, there’s more twists and turns, more flowing through them.

RS: The new film is also notable for its silences. The walk up the staircase, the following of Julie Delpy into the sunlight on the boat, while Ethan’s on the cell phone.

Linklater: It’s funny, I just saw that on the boat and thought we’re just gonna drift with Julie for a while. It’s kind of from his perspective, which is sort of the perspective of the movie: falling in love with Cèline again. Watching the wind hit her hair as she walks out the door. That was just a nice little moment, a subjective moment. The trip up the stairs was something else altogether. On one level, we’ve reached the end of the movie. And I think dramatically, personally, they’ve revealed all they’re going to reveal. We’ve hit our dramatic climax, if you’re going to structure the whole thing. And there’s another realm: He’s actually a married man, walking upstairs to her house. I remember, I told Ethan: “don’t forget, it’s one thing to run into an old friend at the bookstore, walk around, and go to a café. But now you’re walking upstairs to her apartment. I mean, this is the Walk of Shame, technically speaking.” We got this little apparatus so we could get it all in one shot, an elevator crane up in the stairwell.

RS: And the cat is so well-behaved.

Linklater: The cat was drugged. [laughs] But, yeah there’s a silence. Then you get to the last shot, that subjective angle where Jesse’s looking at Cèline dancing to the Nina Simone. They’ve quit talking at that point. We just kind of see her. That’s something I actually saw Julie do, early on, when we were outlining the whole project. Sitting in an apartment, listening to Nina Simone. She told that story, I was staring at her across the room, sitting on the couch, and I thought, Damn if that isn’t beautiful. If you’re falling in love with her that would be the final look. And that was the end of the movie. It’s good to know the absolute end of the movie before even writing it. It feels like we discovered it that day, but of course like everything, it’s much more planned out and though out.

RS: Did you always intend to come back to these characters after 1995?

Linklater: At the time I got them to do that scene in Waking Life, I knew it wasn’t going to inhibit anything about a sequel. They were disembodied people in a dream state at that point. But we had been talking about it, since a year after we got back from Vienna. It was sort of a joke, just something to play with. But over time it became very apparent that it was something worth doing, these characters were very real to us. Yet the idea of a sequel sounds so ugly…it has a negative connotation. We were all sort of afraid of the idea. We’d had this special time together, you don’t want to ruin the experience. So it’s a minefield, doing a sequel for something you love. But we’re all so glad we did it, it’s like confronting your fears. I think we escaped the typical negative connotations of the sequel, cause it’s so clearly done so many years later and it has no real economic motivation. I joke that we’re the lowest grossing film to ever spawn a sequel. No one wanted to even do this movie, it had to be to-the-bone cheap; shot it in 15 days.

RS: I really think that in these two performances, Delpy creates one of the most beautiful characters on film I can recall. How much is it a character and how much is it Julie?

Linklater: I think it’s very much a character. There’s some overlap in Julie’s personal life that parallels, sort of like Jesse. There’s a lot of elements of Cèline in Julie, or Julie in Cèline, but there are drawn-out qualities in Julie which movies don’t afford actors often to shape. I think Julie’s incredible. She’s one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met, so alive and intelligent and slightly wacky. Her particular challenge is that her cup so runneth over that maybe people haven’t used her as much. I don’t know why she hasn’t been used more. Julie conquers everything she does, she has an album out that’s great. I think she’s amazing. I just feel lucky to have worked with her…three times now.

RS: What can we expect from A Scanner Darkly?

Linklater: I’ve got three weeks left to shoot. I’m really trying to bring out the humor of the Philip K. Dick. It’s very dark, your ultimate paranoia, but it’s also really funny. So many Philip K. Dick adaptations grab the idea and run with it and go more traditional genre. But actually without being too overly reverent, I’m doing as much as I think you technically could to do a thorough, authentic adaptation of that story. The cast I brought to it I think is great for the characters. We’re having a good time. Who knows? The animation form is particularly interesting here. It wouldn’t have worked live-action to me, same way Waking Life wouldn’t have worked. In a parallel universe, Scanner Darkly could be live action, but I could never wrap my head around it.