FILM 1595: BEFORE SUNSET

TRIVIA: The longest take is about 11 minutes long.

The man and woman that Celine speaks to in the courtyard of her apartment are played by Julie Delpy's real parents, Albert Delpy and Marie Pillet.

Though this movie was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, the screenplay is not based upon any existing text. However, the Academy rule book says that all sequels are adaptations.

Julie Delpy wrote and performed three songs for the soundtrack.

Since the film takes place during the mid-late afternoon, it was the only time of day director Richard Linklater would shoot the scenes in the film. He felt it added to the hyper reality of the film, and often relied on the actors to get perfect takes at the right time.

Shooting took a mere 15 days.

The film is notable for essentially taking place in real time, i.e. the time elapsed in the story is the run time of the film. In the fast-changing temperate Paris climate, this created challenges for the cinematographer Lee Daniel to match the colour and intensity of the skies and ambient light from scene to scene. The scenes were mostly shot in sequence, as they were still developing the screenplay.

In the movie, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) confesses to Celine (Julie Delpy) that he wrote a book about their meeting 9 years before, partially in the hope that she would read it, and re-establish contact with him. Like Before Sunrise (1995), this is based on events in director Richard Linklater's own life. He had once spent a night walking and talking around Philadelphia with a woman called Amy in 1989. Though they initially stayed in touch over the telephone, they lost contact eventually. In 1994, Linklater shot Before Sunrise (1995), based on his night with Amy. Like Jesse in "Before Sunset", Linklater was secretly hoping that Amy had heard of the movie, and would show up at the premiere, but she did not. When "Before Sunset" was released, she did not show up either. It wasn't until 2010, before Linklater started production on the second sequel, Before Midnight (2013), that a friend of Amy, who knew about their story, contacted Linklater to tell him that Amy had died in a motorcycle accident on May 9, 1994, at the age of 24, a few weeks before he started shooting Before Sunrise (1995).

FILM 1430: THE END OF THE TOUR

TRIVIA: In the scenes filmed at the home of Wallace (Segel) meat had to be placed in the pants of both David Foster Wallace (Segel) and David Lipsky (Eisenberg) in order to have the dogs all over them. In the scenes where the dogs woke up Lipsky (Eisenberg) peanut butter was also placed on his face, again, in order to attract the dogs.

Although this is never made clear or followed up on in the movie, David Lipsky never published the article he was assigned to write on David Foster Wallace in Rolling Stone. He did conduct five days of interviews with Wallace in 1995, but upon his return to New York, Rolling Stone reassigned him to other stories that they deemed more urgent (including rock star Shannon Hoon's drug overdose death). After Wallace's death in 2008, Lipsky unearthed the interview tapes and wrote a book based on them titled "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace."

David Lipsky's book was the main resource used by the screenwriter. Lipsky's tapes, which play a large part in the movie, were only used as a resource for the cast and crew during their research of the characters.

The song heard on the soundtrack when the film ends is "The Big Ship" by Brian Eno, one of David Foster Wallace's favorite songs.

Throughout the movie, people ask David Lipsky about "Jann". For example, Wallace asks him at the start of their interview, "What does Jann want," and says as Lipsky is leaving, "Say hi to Jann for me." This is Jann S. Wenner, the cofounder and editor-in-chief of Rolling Stone Magazine. Although Wenner was always unusually well-known in the general culture for a magazine publisher, he had been especially prominent in the news during the period just prior to the time when Lipsky went to interview Wallace because Wenner had recently left his wife of two decades (also an executive at Wenner Media) for a much younger man. Although they separated in 1995, Jann and Jane Wenner did not actually get divorced until 2011, after same-sex marriage became legal in New York.

The two women with whom Wallace and Lipsky hang out in Minnesota are both played by daughters of international celebrities: Julie is played by Maimie Gummer (a daughter of Meryl Streep) and Betsy is played by Mickey Sumner (one of Sting's daughters).