You probably don’t know the name Amy Lehrhaupt. I didn’t until yesterday when Slate‘s Forrest Wickman revealed the story of her night with Before Midnight director Richard Linklater 25 years ago, which would later inspire 1995’s Before Sunrise, telling the story of a chance meeting of two strangers on a train bound for Venice and the resulting romantic spark.
Linklater dedicated Before Midnight to Lehrhaupt and after foraging through several interviews, Wickman pieced her and Linklater’s story together.
Linklater met Lehrhaupt in fall 1989, when he was visiting his sister in Philadelphia. He was 29 and had just finished shooting Slacker, and was staying there for one night while passing through on the way home from New York. Lehrhaupt was several years younger, about 20. They met in a toy shop, and ended up spending the whole night together, “from midnight until six in the morning,” “walking around, flirting, doing things you would never do now.” As in Before Sunrise, most of what they did was talk, “about art, science, film, the gamut.” Did they kiss? Yes. Did they have sex? The Times went so far as to ask Linklater in a recent interview, but he said he wants to “leave a little mystery.”
The story of Linklater and Lehrhaupt’s night differs from that of Before‘s Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) in that they didn’t agree to meet again at some future moment in time, but briefly kept in touch over the phone. However, the brief romance eventually fizzled as a result of the distance between the two and they never spoke again.
There’s a tragic aspect to this story, however. On May 9, 1994, Lehrhaupt died in a motorcycle accident before her 25th birthday. The accident came only weeks before Linklater began shooting Before Sunrise, but he “only learned of her death three years ago, when a friend of Lehrhaupt’s, who knew about the encounter, put it together and sent him a letter.”
As a result of meeting Lehrhaupt, Linklater told Moviefone, “Who knows how we reverberate through each other’s lives,” which is a fantastic memory of a person that obviously meant a lot to him, but I love the following comment he made on The Q&A with Jeff Goldsmith:
Even as that experience was going on … I was like, “I’m gonna make a film about this.” And she was like, “What ‘this’? What’re you talking about?” And I was like, “Just this. This feeling. This thing that’s going on between us.”
Linklater trying to explain what he would get across in the film is exactly what I was trying to tap into in I wrote
Watching Before Sunrise after seeing [Before Sunset] and now having seen Before Midnight, I realize there is a perfect time for all of us to step into Celine and Jesse’s lives and a selection of three films with which to begin the journey. Determining which of the three to start with is up to you, but for me I’m not sure their story would mean as much had I not met them exactly when I did. For this reason I feel strange reviewing Before Midnight as merely a movie, or at least I don’t want to treat it as one.
This films create a feeling in me that’s almost impossible to put into words. They feel very personal and there are only a handful of films that I’ve seen in my life that create similar emotions. To read Linklater’s story (and I suggest you read the full thing over at Slate) helps me understand how these three films managed to achieve their level of reality and honesty and, as if it were even possible, I think I love them even more now.
And, on a lighter note, here is a new PSA that Hawke and Delpy made for the Alamo Drafthouse. Enjoy, and go see Before Midnight in theaters now. To find out where click here.
