Quotes

Most of us are losers most of the time, if you think about it.

[Terrence Malick] is a guy who sees his movies and thinks, "I would have done that differently". I see mine and say, "Given the circumstances, that's what I did and that's what I'd do again". I don't know how much of a free-will guy I am.

But nothing is going to knock me off my game. Because I have some pretty low-budget films I want to do.

I would have loved to have been a '40s studio director like Vincente Minnelli. You ended up with a real diverse career. Now you don't get a call from [Darryl F. Zanuck] saying, "Come do this movie on Monday". So you have to do it on your own.

We all give ourselves a lot of leeway, but we want consistency from other people.

These days we can be sued for disparaging an industry. It's like it's a felony to say something bad. I think they should make it a felony to criticize a film product. Particularly my film product. It's anti-American. I'd like to see people get sued if they wrote a bad review of my movie. If you can't say something nice you shouldn't say anything at all.

My plan B has always been to make a film about people who talk a lot.

It's tough, man. Unless it's a tentpole, sequel, remake, or over-the-top comedy, that's all the studios are even doing. They've kind of admitted they're not in the business of doing anything else. The slightest level of irony or intelligence and, boom, you're out of the league, you're done.

[on Raging Bull (1980)] It made me see movies as a potential outlet for what I was thinking about and hoping to express. At that point, I was an unformed artist. At that moment, something was simmering in me, but "Raging Bull" brought it to a boil.

We get a lot of cautionary tales about the dangers of getting exactly what you want in life. You know, if you take out the striving and the incompleteness, then where are you?

This whole notion of love being based on attraction is fairly recent in history and is not a very stable indicator. That's why, throughout history, most marriages have been arranged and not in the hands of the people themselves because you're not equipped to to make a good decision when you have the hots for someone. It feels good now, but where are you going to be in two years from now. You can't entrust love to two kids. Look at Romeo and Juliet. Tying love an romance together is really just something we've done in the last two or three hundred years.

[on the 'Before' films] Each film is like doing a thesis, and this is an ongoing doctoral dissertation. I feel I could go back and get another degree. I read books about it and articles, and all that stuff. I know a lot on an intellectual level, but how it applies to my own life, I don't know...it's my exploration of being an adult male. It's a mystery how love redefines itself. There's the white heat of attraction that we interpret as a deep connection and love. But it's different from what makes a long-term partnership.

[on Before Midnight (2013)] The essence of you probably doesn't change and that's really one of the concerns of the movie. Have Celine and Jessie changed? They are still themselves; they seem very connected to the same person they were at 23 and yet life has this way of attaching things to them, whether it's children or just life experience and responsibility certainly. It's a very different life at 23 where you could just get off a train with no one waiting on you back home, no schedule. When we meet them the second time they are very scheduled. He has a plane to catch, he is at work and she is grounded in the city she lives in. So you see the reality closing in even though it's still this romantic encounter. By the time of the third film they are in the real world, we see their social interactions and they are much more grounded.

[on the woman Linklater met in Philadelphia as a young man, who inspired the Before Trilogy] She kind of echoes through the film. I always felt I would see her, like she would show up at a screening. When you make a film, you're in public quite a bit. You do screenings, festivals. I run into a lot of old friends, and I figured, just in my mind, 'I have a screening in Philadelphia; maybe she'll be in New York. ... ' And she never showed up. Even in the second film, I think that, in a way, works into the idea of the novel [that Hawke's character, Jesse, writes] and it's sent out as a beacon, you know, in some way, what Jesse admits to, that was swirling around. And I don't want to exaggerate: [My experience] wasn't as intense of a relationship, obviously, as Celine and Jesse have; it was just something swirling around in my mind. The new film is dedicated to her." [Linklater learned from a mutual friend that the woman died in a motorcycle accident shortly before Before Sunrise (1995) began filming.]

We get a lot of cautionary tales about the dangers of getting exactly what you want in life, you know, if you take out the striving and the incompleteness, then where are you?

[on Greece as the setting for Before Midnight (2013)] To place Jesse and Celine's issues of the day in a much bigger context, you realize there's nothing new here, this is completely eternal. Issues go on between partners, men and women, families. I liked the macro thinking of all that with our specific little moment in time.

The most unique property of cinema is how it lets you mold time, whether it's over a long or a very brief period.

[on how he handled the passing of time on Boyhood (2014)] I think the tendency would be to draw attention to it, like, "Hey look how it's a year later!" And your memory doesn't work that way. I wanted the thing to feel like a memory, and it just kind of flows. So I wanted the audience to earn the transition by observation. Sometimes it's a little more obvious. But I didn't want like, a direct-cut close-up of Ellar with long hair, and then the next shot he has short hair. I actually cut a transition between years one and two and then again between years 11 and 12 because I wasn't happy with it. It was a little too obvious.

You see how life just accumulates. Our fundamental view of the world is measured by who we are today and who we've been, and that's not going anywhere. It's only expanding throughout our lives, it's always profound and inescapable how we perceive the world through that viewpoint.

[on the power of time as a concept] I bet the whole farm on what I thought would work with every ounce of my cinematic being, the way we perceive time and cinema and the way we identify with people put before us in a certain way. I thought, "Oh, there will be this cumulative effect." It's an investment. Just the way the crew and the cast had invested, two years in, three years in, it just deepened and felt richer.

[on Boyhood (2014)] It was ultimately 12 scripts. Every year, I got to think about it. And as we got closer to shooting, I got to see how the film felt over the years. It's rare that a film gives you that chance to edit and think about what it needs. There was this ever-growing film that I got to just contemplate that was pretty amazing. I never did a film that wanted to be itself so much. Just its own thing. So it was a very incremental adjustment every year with the actors. It's a methodology that's so unnatural, so different, but there was a real upside within that.

If cinema was a painting, time would be the paint itself.

[2013 interview, on Before Sunrise (1995)] Julie, Ethan and I all knew we had had a special experience, but you don't expect anything more than that. I think we all like the film and were happy with what it became and everything, but we never talked of it at that time as anything more. It was actually a small studio release - it got released by Columbia - but it was 2.7 million dollars, it was less than half the budget of the film I had made before, Dazed and Confused (1993), so to me it was a little European art film, but I think for a second there was some expectation that this could be the next Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), and I'm like, " I could guarantee you it won't be, for all these reasons!", but I can't blame anyone for having hope - I love that about our business, people want to be optimistic about stuff. But it did about....what the other two have done! You know, there's an audience but it was never going to be a mainstream success. But it got generally well-reviewed I felt, people got it. That's were it started - the people who liked it, liked it. Most people....didn't notice it!

[2018 interview, on whether there will be a fourth Before... film] I don't know! We're about the five-year mark. This is usually around the time we have an idea. But it hasn't happened yet. We've got four more years. We were joking it takes us about five years to recover from those. They're pretty rigorous. But yeah, if at age fiftyish Jesse and Celine have something to say, we'll do it. I don't want to do it just to do it, unless there's something we feel compelled to share. Again, I'm not going to force it.

[on Spring (2014)] A beautiful and unique love story...a real accomplishment of genre and tone.