A Scanner Darkly

“What does a scanner see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does it see into me? Into us? Clearly or darkly? I hope it sees clearly because I can’t any longer see into myself.” – Bob Arctor

Over the years, many films have been made based on the science fiction novels by Philip K. Dick – some good (Blade Runner and Minority Report), but mostly bad (Paycheck and Next). However, they all share a common trait: they only remotely resemble their source material. David Cronenberg recounted a story about how he began adapting the short story, “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” for a Hollywood studio and when he handed in his screenplay, an executive complained that it was too faithful to the source material. They wanted something like Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) for Arnold Schwarzenegger. Cronenberg wasn’t interested in doing that and left the project, which became Total Recall (1990). This explains why none of Dick’s material has been accurately translated into film until A Scanner Darkly (2006).

It was adapted by filmmaker Richard Linklater, not the first person you’d think of when it comes to science fiction but he had two things going for him: he was a fan of the book and he was willing to make it independently, keeping the budget low enough that he could have creative control over the material. He was also able to assemble a very impressive cast that consisted of Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, and Winona Ryder. However, his choice to utilize rotoscoping animation (where animators basically draw over live action footage) was not embraced by everyone and ended up causing Linklater all kinds of headaches in post-production. That being said, the style of animation he employed was well suited for the film’s various drug hallucinations and in realizing the scramble suit technology.

Dick’s semi-autobiographical book was first published in 1977. It was a fictionalized account of his experiences with the 1970’s drug culture. Between 1970 and 1972, after his fourth wife had left him, he had a rotating group of predominantly teenage drug users living semi-communally at his home in Marin County. At this time, he had stopped writing completely and became hooked on amphetamines. A turning point in Dick’s life came in early ‘72 when he delivered a speech at a Vancouver science fiction convention entitled, “The Android and the Human.” The speech was the genesis of recurring themes and motifs that would appear in A Scanner Darkly. Around this time, his home was allegedly broken into and his papers were stolen, which fueled the paranoid vibe prevalent in the novel.

The book is about a man named Bob Arctor, who lives in a house with several other drug addicts. He is also Agent Fred, an undercover police officer assigned to spy on Arctor’s house. He protects his true identity from his fellow junkies and from the police as well – a requirement of narcotic agents is that they remain anonymous to avoid corruption. While under the guise of a drug user, Arctor has become addicted to Substance D, a strong psychoactive drug that originates from a blue flowering plant. He is also romantically involved with Donna, a drug dealer whom he plans to expose as a high-level dealer of Substance D. Arctor’s chronic use of the drug results in the two hemispheres of his brain to function independently and the book depicts his gradual disconnect from reality. Is it real or is it Substance D?

The film is set seven years in the future in Anaheim, California where 20% of the population is considered addicts. When we first meet Arctor/Fred (Keanu Reeves) he’s already struggling with his addiction to Substance D. He is addressing a local chapter of law enforcement officers and speaking about the dangers of and the war on D. Partway through his prepared speech, he veers off script and the tone of his talk shifts to a melancholic, defeated vibe, which ends things on an awkward note. He is also wearing what is called a scramble suit, which allows him to avoid being discovered by the latest voice and facial detection technology by constantly changing his appearance so that he looks like a “constantly shifting vague blur.” The film’s rotoscoping animation is perfect for realizing the suit’s technology as we see Arctor’s image constantly changing in dazzling kaleidoscope fashion.

After shedding the scramble suit, Arctor adopts his Fred persona and contacts Donna Hawthorne (Winona Ryder), his drug connection and girlfriend, to score some narcotics. We soon meet his friends and fellow drug users: James Barris (Robert Downey Jr.), a motor-mouthed conspiracy theorist; Charles Freck (Rory Cochrane), a twitchy paranoid-type who has clearly done too much Substance D; and Ernie Luckman (Woody Harrelson), an aggressive junkie. Arctor hopes to get close enough to Donna and discover her supplier. Can I just say what a delight it is to see the likes of Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, Winona Ryder bounce off each other in the same scene? For example, one day Barris comes home with an 18-speed bicycle for only $50 and Luckman points out that it is in fact an 8-speed bike, which sends Barris into a tizzy as he tries to figure out what happened to the “missing” gears. It’s an amusing scene as Ryder plays straight man to the excitable Harrelson and the indignant Downey. The comic timing of the latter two actors is excellent.

Downey’s Barris, with his endless supply of elaborate conspiracy theories and paranoid ramblings about “covert terrorist drug” organizations, evokes some of the more eccentric character in Linklater’s Slacker (1991) and he would not look out of place in that film. Only Downey could impart the large chunks of dialogue Barris spouts so fast and intelligibly while also making it entertaining. It’s how he emphasizes certain words or drags one out for effect that is so fun to watch. In certain scenes Linklater wisely winds Downey up and lets him cut loose. This is particular evident in the banter between Barris and Luckman, which provides A Scanner Darkly with much-needed moments of levity so that we are not overwhelmed by the bleak lives of these characters.

Against such colorful actors like Downey and Harrelson, Reeves wisely acts low-key, only taking center stage in the scenes with minor supporting characters where Arctor is the focus. Reeves’ increasing dazed and confused expressions convey the effects Substance D is having on him. Arctor is losing his grip on reality, which is exacerbated by having to juggle two different identities. As he says at one point, “Now, in the dark world where I dwell, ugly things and surprising things, sometimes wondrous things spill out at me constantly and I can count on nothing.” Reeves has always been an easy target, his acting criticized or rejected outright but I always felt that his strength was reacting off of other actors. At times, he is the perfect blank slate for others to imprint on and this is why he is perfect for this film. His character is supposed to be observing drug users and reporting back to his superiors with his findings.

No longer the A-list darling she was in the 1990’s, Winona Ryder has wisely appeared in a number of independent films that she feels passionately about. She fits in seamlessly with this eclectic cast as the rather enigmatic Donna. She has good chemistry with Reeves while also conveying a vulnerability as Donna’s true nature is revealed towards the end of the film. As Ryder has gotten older and more experienced as an actress, her performances have improved. She seems more comfortable in her own skin. The easy-going nature of Linklater’s style of filmmaking clearly rubbed off on her as she delivers a loose performance devoid of most of her usual acting affectations.

At a certain point in the film, Arctor thinks to himself, “What does a scanner see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does it see into me? Into us? Clearly or darkly? I hope it sees clearly because I can’t any longer see into myself.” These thoughts are conveyed via voiceover narration and echo his fear of losing identity. He is experiencing a split personality and is told that the two hemispheres of his brain are competing against one another largely due to the effects of Substance D. The theme of examining and trying to recover one’s own identity is a prevalent theme in Philip K. Dick’s fiction and this is no more apparent than in A Scanner Darkly. The horrific part of the story is that Arctor loses a sense of who he is. Drugs have destroyed his life and those around him. In a nice touch, Linklater includes an abridged version of the afterword of Dick’s novel where he lists those nearest and dearest to him who died or were permanently damaged through drug use. It ends things on a sobering yet poignant note as Linklater drives the point home on just how personal the book was to Dick. His novel and the film show the dehumanizing and punishing effects of drugs. As he puts it, “This has been a story about people who were punished entirely too much for what they did.”

Richard Linklater began thinking about adapting A Scanner Darkly while talking to producer Tommy Pallotta before they made Waking Life (2001) together. Initially, he had toyed with adapting another Dick novel, Ubik, but stopped early on because of a rights issue and he “couldn’t quite crack it.” He moved onto Scanner Darkly soon after because he loved the book more and felt he could make a film out of it. According to Linklater, the challenge in adapting Dick’s novel was capturing “the humor and exuberance of the book but not let go of the sad and tragic.” He was not interested in turning the novel into a big budget action thriller as had been done in the past with some of Dick’s other works because he felt that Scanner Darkly was “about these guys and what they’re all doing in their alternate world and what’s going through their minds is really what keeps the story moving.” He related to the dysfunctional makeshift family of characters that was similar to his twenties spent in Austin. He wanted to animate the film much as he did with Waking Life because he felt that there was very little animation targeted for adults.

Linklater wrote the screenplay for A Scanner Darkly after Waking Life came out. After completing School of Rock (2003), he told Pallotta he wanted to make Scanner Darkly. It was important to Linklater that Dick’s estate approved of his film. Pallotta wrote a personal appeal to Russ Galen, the Dick estate’s literary agent who in turn shared it with the late author’s two daughters, Laura Leslie and Isa Hackett. However, they weren’t too keen on “a cartoon version” of their father’s novel. After the high profile adaptations of Minority Report (2002) and Paycheck (2003), they had taken a more proactive role in evaluating every film proposal, including unusual projects like Linklater’s. Pallotta told them that Linklater’s take would be a faithful adaptation of their father’s novel. They read the screenplay and liked it. They then met with him to discuss their respective visions of Scanner Darkly. Laura and Isa felt that the novel was one of their father’s most personal stories and liked that Linklater wasn’t going to treat the drug addiction/abuse aspects lightly. It was important to the filmmaker that he keep the budget under $10 million – that way he would have more creative control, remain faithful to the book and also make it as an animated film.

For the dual roles of Bob Arctor/Fred, Linklater thought of Keanu Reeves but figured that the actor would be burnt out from science fiction after making The Matrix trilogy. Robert Downey Jr. was attracted to the project when he heard that Reeves was going to star and Linklater to direct. He thought that the script was the strangest one he had ever read. Linklater wrote the role of Charles Freck with Rory Cochrane in mind. The actor was interested but didn’t want to recreate his Dazed and Confused (1993) role. Woody Harrelson and Winona Ryder both agreed to do the film based on the script. Although, for the actress, she had a personal connection to the material – her godfather, counterculture guru Timothy Leary, had been friends with Dick, as was her father. Her and Reeves felt so passionately about the project that they agreed to work for the Screen Actors Guild scale rate plus any backend profits.

Linklater assembled the cast for two weeks of rehearsals in Austin, Texas before principal photography began in order to fine tune the script and get input from the actors. The shooting script became a fusion of Linklater’s take on the material, the novel and the actors’ input. Principal photography began on May 17, 2004 on a budget of $6.7 million and lasted six weeks. To prepare for their roles, Cochrane came up with his character five minutes before he got on the elevator to work while Downey memorized his dialogue by writing it all out in run-on sentences, then converting them to acronyms. Meanwhile, Reeves relied on the novel, marking down each scene to its corresponding page.

Finding Arctor’s house for the film proved to be a challenge with the filmmakers looking at 60 houses before they found the right one, located in southeast Austin. The previous tenants had left a month prior to filming and left the place in such a state that production designer Bruce Curtis had to make improvements so that it looked like Arctor’s run-down home. Linklater actually shot a lot of exteriors in Anaheim, California (where the story is set) and then composited them into the Austin footage during post-production. Dick’s daughters visited the set during filming and spoke with the principal cast and crew members. They made Laura and Isa feel like they were a part of the production. Since everything would be animated over later, makeup, lighting and visible equipment like boom microphones were less of a concern. However, cinematographer Shane Kelly carefully composed shots and used a color palette with the animators in mind. Sometimes they would show up to the set and tell Kelly what they needed.

After principal photography was finished, A Scanner Darkly was transferred to Quicktime for a 15-month animation process known as interpolated rotoscoping. It allowed the animators to paint over the live-action footage so that they didn’t have to hand-draw each line in every frame. The computer connected fluid lines and brush strokes across a wide range of frames. The technique differed from Waking Life in that the “one scene could be wildly different than the one that followed but on this film, we were always thinking in terms of a graphic novel that would have a similar design throughout,” said Linklater in an interview. It took up to 500 hours to animate one minute of film with 30 people working full-time every day.

To say that it was a trying process for Linklater is an understatement: “I know how to make a movie, but I don’t really know how to handle the animation.” The filmmakers used the same animation software that was utilized on Waking Life, created by MIT graduate Bob Sabiston. He updated it for A Scanner Darkly. Most of the animators were hired locally with only a few of the 30 people having moviemaking experience. Six weeks into the process and only a few animated sequences were completed while Linklater was off filming Bad News Bears (2005). Sabiston had divided the animators into five teams and split the work amongst them.

However, there was poor communication between the teams and the uniform animation style that Linklater wanted was not being implemented. After almost two months, some animators were still learning the software and he became frustrated with the lack of progress. In late November 2004, the head of Warner Independent Pictures Mark Gill asked for a status report. It was not good. There were no finished sequences as the entire film was being animated at once as opposed to from beginning to end. Under pressure, some animators worked 18-hour days for two weeks to produce a trailer and this seemed to appease Gill and Linklater.

Sabiston and his team were falling behind schedule and reportedly asked for more time, money and staff. This created tension and one Friday in February 2005, while Sabiston and his four-person core team were strategizing at a local café, Pallotta changed the locks and seized their workstations, replacing him with two local artists, Jason Archer and Paul Beck. The studio increased the film’s budget to $8.7 million and gave Linklater six more months to finish. Pallotta took charge of the animation process and instituted a more traditional Disney-esque production ethic: creating a style manual, having strict deadlines and breaking the film up into even smaller segments. The animation process lasted 15 months. On the post-production problems, Linklater said, “There’s a lot of misinformation out there … changes took place during the early stages of us really getting going on this that had everything to do with management and not art. It was a budgetary concern, essentially.” I think it’s safe to say that after everything he went through on Scanner Darkly we aren’t going to see Linklater make another animated film any time soon.

Originally, A Scanner Darkly was supposed to be released in September 2005. However, due to the lengthy post-production delays, a test screening was scheduled for December and that went reasonably well with a temporary soundtrack that was entirely comprised of Radiohead songs. A revised release date was set for March 31, 2006, but Gill felt that there wasn’t enough time to mount a proper promotional campaign and the date was pushed back to July 7th, putting it up against Pixar’s Cars and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.

A Scanner Darkly received mixed to positive reviews. In his review for the New York Observer, Andrew Sarris wrote, “In the final analysis, A Scanner Darkly provides a stylish peek at the future, which will probably be even more discouraging than the present—or have you stopped looking at the news too? Mr. Linklater emerges once again as the Austin auteur par excellence, even if A Scanner Darkly is set in a ratty precinct of Orange County.” Empire magazine’s Kim Newman gave the film four out of five stars and praised Linklater’s take on the material: “For a start, he is the first director since Ridley Scott to take one of Dick’s major novels as a source; moreover, he might well be the first director ever to feel Dick is worth a faithful adaptation rather than the source for a handful of cool ideas that could be stripped while the rest of the matter got thrown away.” The Washington Post’s Desson Thomson concurred: “He infuses Scanner with the goofy spirit that enlivened his early films, Slacker and Dazed and Confused. His comic scenes are funny on the surface, certainly, but they're symptomatic of a civilization that's disintegrating.” In his review for the Village Voice, J. Hoberman wrote, “What's extraordinary about Linklater's animation, computer-rotoscoped in the fashion of his 2001 Waking Life, is just how tangible the Dickian labyrinth becomes.”

The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis wasn’t totally sold on Linklater’s decision to utilize rotoscoping animation: “Rotoscoping makes certain sense for a film about cognitive dissonance and alternative realities, though both the vocal and gestural performances by Mr. Reeves, Mr. Harrelson and, in particular, the wonderful Mr. Downey make me wish that we were watching them in live action.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “C-” rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “In A Scanner Darkly, we're watching other people freak out, but the film is maddening to sit through because their freak-outs never become ours.” In his review for The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw wrote, “The movie itself is often startling and engrossing, but the question of what the heck is going on, and why, is never entirely absent from your mind.”

The rotoscope animation adds to the druggy atmosphere of A Scanner Darkly and is particularly effective during the moments when the characters have drug-induced hallucinations. The animation isn’t photo-realistic by any means but rather more impressionistic in nature, creating the notion that none of what we are seeing may be real, that it may exist only in Arctor’s fevered, drug-addled imagination. However, the style of animation limited the film’s mainstream appeal – that, and the stigma of animation being for kids only made it one of the more expensive cult films in recent memory. Linklater’s refusal to water down the material and make it more palatable for a mainstream audience also accounts for its marginalized status while also making it one of the most faithful and best Philip K. Dick adaptations ever put on film.

Before Sunrise

Few people saw Before Sunrise when it was released in 1995 but those who did really loved it. In its own subtle and unassuming way, Richard Linklater’s film flew in the face of most romantic films at the time. It refused to be dated by obvious, trendy popular culture references and music. It featured an honest dialogue between two twentysomethings who meet by chance on a train and decide to get off together in Vienna. Before Sunrise would also mark an interesting change of pace for Linklater. With Slacker (1990) and Dazed and Confused (1993), he had worked with rather sizable ensemble casts but with this film it was essentially two characters and the occasional people they encounter.

Before Sunrise opens with Jesse (Ethan Hawke), an American taking a train to Vienna where he plans to fly back home after a disastrous summer trip around Europe. On-board he meets Celine (Julie Delpy), a French student headed for Paris to resume classes at the Sorbonne, thanks to a loudly bickering German couple that causes her to move and sit across from him. In a sly, self-referential nod to the format of Linklater’s to Slacker and Dazed and Confused, which adhered to a 24-hour time frame, Jesse tells Celine about a reality show he would like to see that would consist of 24-hour-long episodes documenting a day in the life of an average person. It sounds like something one of the characters in Slacker would pitch.

Jesse and Celine get to talking in the dinner car and enjoy the experience so much that they agree to get off the train together in Vienna and spend the night walking around the city getting to know each other, taking in the sights. They also encounter several intriguing people along the way, like the two guys who invite them to their play Bring Me the Horns of Wilmington’s Cow, which, of course, is an amusing reference to Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974). The description of their play sounds quite interesting and every time I watch the film I kinda wished that Jesse and Celine had checked it out. It’s a funny, throwaway scene that appears early on and adheres to the amiable, structure established in Slacker of protagonists going from encounter to the next with no real rhyme or reason.

There’s a great moment early on when Jesse and Celine are in a record store listening booth listening to “Come Here” by Kath Bloom. It’s obviously a romantic song and you can see Jesse thinking about making some kind of romantic gesture but stopping himself because it would be way too corny. As Linklater has pointed out in an interview, there is a wonderful awkwardness about this moment that is true to life and something you don’t see much in romantic films.

Celine seems to be obsessed somewhat with death. She takes Jesse to a graveyard populated by unknown people who washed up on the banks of the Danube River. She points out one grave of a 13-year-old girl, the same age when she first saw it. Celine speaks about how much it impacted her at the time and how it still resonates with her. It’s a nice, poignant moment that reveals a lot about her character. A few minutes later, we learn how Jesse is much more jaded about love and life in general – perhaps as the result of coming from divorced parents and recently being dumped by his girlfriend. At one point, he tells Celine that he views life like “I was crashing a big party.”

Jesse and Celine kiss on the same Ferris wheel made famous in The Third Man (1949) when Orson Welles delivers a famous monologue. It is Before Sunrise’s only obvious, touristy moment. There are so many wonderful little interludes in this film, like when Jesse and Celine are sitting at an outdoor cafe and she gets her palm read by an old gypsy lady who tells them that they are stardust. It’s a funny moment but when the lady first takes a look at Celine’s hand she tells her that Celine has to resign herself to the “awkwardness of life.” It’s the one decent observation among the cliché observations that she tells Celine. After the palm reader leaves they laugh about it but the scene underlines the romantic nature of Celine and the cynical worldview of Jesse.

Celine speaks fondly of her grandmother and how she sometimes feels like an old woman and Jesse replies that he sometimes feels like a 13-year-old boy stuck in a dress rehearsal, taking notes for when he has to become an adult. I remember feeling like that in my twenties; in that transitory state between college and joining the workforce. You don’t quite feel like you belong anywhere and Linklater nails it with this exchange between Jesse and Celine.

One my favorite scenes in the film is when Jesse and Celine happen upon a street poet. Instead of just asking them for money he asks them for a word. He composes a poem for them with the word inserted somewhere. If they like it they can give him some money. He recites a wonderful little poem that is romantic and filled with evocative imagery. Again, this scene reinforces Jesse and Celine’s different views of love. She finds the poem romantic and spontaneous while he says that the street poet probably just inserted the word into a pre-existing poem that he had already written.

By today’s standards, with the proliferation of technology like cell phones and virtual meeting places like MySpace and Facebook, the way Jesse and Celine interact in Before Sunrise is positively old school and dates the film in a good way. For example, in one scene Jesse and Celine talk about past relationships over a game of pinball in a nightclub. Pinball machines are rarely made anymore and not as common as they used to be a decade ago. Linklater grew up in the 1970s when pinball was all the rage and as someone who has fond memories of them, I love how they are used as a piece of business for Jesse and Celine to do while they talk about their ex’s.

What makes Before Sunrise such a great film is that it avoids the sappy clichés that are so rampant in most romantic films. Despite the Generation-X marketing of the film, complete with a Lemonheads song in the trailer, Before Sunrise also avoids that pitfall by not using any contemporary “alternative” music or excessive usage of pop culture references that have mired and dated lesser films. This was a conscious concern for the cast as Delpy said in an interview, “We wanted to avoid any pop culture references and just show individuals attempting to communicate and care for someone else.”

The seeds for the film had been planted long ago. According to Linklater, he had been thinking about Before Sunrise for five years. It would be a film about two people, because, at the time, he had never really dealt with male-female issues or romance. The film was based on an encounter Linklater had in 1989. He met a woman in a toy store in Philadelphia and they spent the night walking around the city together, conversing deep into the night. Originally in the screenplay, who the two characters were and the city they spend time in was vague. He realized that because the film was so much a dialogue between a man and a woman he knew that it was important to have a strong woman co-writer – Kim Krizan who had small roles in Slacker and Dazed and Confused. He wanted to write a script with her because he “loved the way her mind worked – a constant stream of confident and intelligent ideas.”

Linklater wanted to explore the “relationship side of life and discover two people who had complete anonymity and try to find out who they really were.” He put Jesse and Celine together in foreign country because “when you’re traveling, you’re much more open to experiences outside your usual realm.” He and Krizan talked about the concept of the film and the characters for a long time. Then, they worked on an outline followed by the actual script which was written in 11 days.

Before Sunrise is filled with great conversations about sex, relationships, dreams, death, religion, and life in general. Imagine My Dinner with Andre (1981) if the two characters from that film had actually left the restaurant. There are conversations in Before Sunrise that you swear you’ve had before — they are that good. It doesn’t hurt that the film contains only two protagonists and this enables Linklater to take the time and explore their personalities. “In both Slacker and Dazed and Confused, the audience was literally plopped down amongst the characters and you never really got to know them that well apart from their momentary interactions and behavior with each other. So I wanted to make a movie about a unique relationship while still conforming to a character-driven narrative where their personal thoughts are continually verbalized.” The structure of Before Sunrise lies in the characters themselves. The narrative is propelled by their decisions and their actions. Linklater was careful in who he chose for the two main roles which went to Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. The director didn’t care what they had done before, but instead based his choice on his impressions based upon meeting the two actors.

When Linklater first considered casting Hawke he thought the actor was too young. Linklater saw him at a play in New York City and reconsidered after talking to him. To his credit, Hawke amends for his self-conscious hipster from Reality Bites (1994) – something I can’t fault him for entirely as I’m sure he played the character as it was written. With Jesse, Hawke plays a much more developed, three-dimensional character that he obviously had input on how he was going to portray him. Hawke’s character actually suggests some depth and personality than merely turning into a philosophizing, ‘70s sitcom quoting machine like in Reality Bites. Initially, Jesse comes across as Linklater’s philosopher character at the beginning of Slacker with his crazy idea for a reality show, but over the course of the film he falls under Celine’s spell. She manages to get pas his cynical exterior with her earnest romanticism. Hawke does a nice job of hinting at the romantic that lurks beneath his facade only to emerge in the subsequent sequel Before Sunset (2004).

Linklater met Julie Delpy and liked her personality. She is simply wonderful in her portrayal of Celine. Before Sunrise is, without a doubt, my favorite performance of hers. She plays Celine as a smart, funny independent woman but with insecurities and self doubts that only make her even more endearing. It doesn’t hurt that she’s beautiful, truly the Botticelli angel that Jesse describes her as being. As she remembers, “Although my character was very much my romantic side, I also had to be strong while dealing with this American man.” Delpy was concerned that her character would be reduced to some “cliché-ridden feminine mass,” but Linklater never lets this happen. This is due in large part to the fact that he wrote the screenplay with Kim Krizan to give the film more balance. “I certainly thought that since the film is so much a dialogue between a man and a woman,” Linklater explains, “it was important to have a strong woman co-writer and a strong woman in the production.” Delpy has incredible chemistry with Hawke and it feels genuine. The way they look at each other, especially when the other one is talking, you can see, over the course of the film that their characters are falling in love.

Before Sunrise received overwhelmingly positive reviews from film critics. Roger Ebert gave Before Sunrise three out of four stars and described Julie Delpy as "ravishingly beautiful and, more important, warm and matter-of-fact, speaking English so well the screenplay has to explain it (she spent some time in the States).” In her review for the New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, "Before Sunrise is as uneven as any marathon conversation might be, combining colorful, disarming insights with periodic lulls. The film maker clearly wants things this way, with both these young characters trying on ideas and attitudes as if they were new clothes.” Hal Hinson, in his review for the Washington Post wrote, "Before Sunrise is not a big movie, or one with big ideas, but it is a cut above the banal twentysomething love stories you usually see at the movies. This one, at least, treats young people as real people.” In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Peter Rainer wrote, "It's an attempt to make a mainstream youth movie with a bit more feeling and mysteriousness than most, and, in this, it succeeds.” Marjorie Baumgarten, in her review for The Austin Chronicle, wrote, "Before Sunrise represents a maturation of Linklater's work in terms of its themes and choice of characters.” Finally, in his review for The New Yorker, Anthony Lane wrote, “Just once, for a single day, Jesse and Celine have given life the short of shape and charge that until now they have found only in fiction, and may never find again.”

At one point Jesse tells Celine, “I feel like this is some dream world we’re in,” to which she replies, “It must be like I’m in your dream and you’re in mine.” This is what Before Sunrise is – a cinematic dream world that we can lose ourselves in every time we watch it. Linklater captures a specific moment in time for these two characters – one magical night where they make a true connection that they will never forget. Interestingly, Before Sunrise ends like Dazed and Confused, in the early morning with Jesse and Celine rejoining the real world after spending all night together. Near the end of the film there is a montage of places that they shared together – it’s a visual summary of the film and also a sad reminder of places that they will never be again. Before Sunrise ends on a melancholic note with feelings of longing for what could have been. It’s a very unusual way to end a romantic film but it is keeping perfectly in tone with the rest of the film.