The Before Trilogy

“Literally The Before Trilogy, Richard Linklater. They're just great but I sat down with my partner and watched all three movies with her years ago and we finished them while on vacation in Central America and had like a life-changing discussion about our relationship after watching Before Midnight and just kind of like renegotiating our relationship because like seeing this Mirror in front of us of just like where we were headed and like what it's like to domesticate someone you love.”

“Not the whole Before Trilogy, but the final one. Sharon Horgan and I were writing the first season of the show Catastrophe, and my wife said, 'Let’s watch Before Midnight.' And so she puts it on and watching I’m like, 'Oh my God.' As soon as it was over, I called Sharon, I was like, 'Put down your quill. We have to retool everything because the ultimate work of art about a marriage has just been made, and if we think that we’re gonna play in that arena, then we got to study this playbook.'”

“This is going to be a box-set kind of day for me. I have to do this. This is probably going to be a little obvious for you who have seen a lot of my small, intimate films, but this is The Before Trilogy by Richard Linklater. Why this is so special for me in particular is, when I was 18 years old, I had seen Slacker, I had been to all the midnight screenings of Dazed and Confused, and this movie came out. I’ve been obsessed with these movies ever since.”

“And I’ve also got this down because, when we were doing White Lotus, a lot of us rewatched these. So, I always related to the first one the most. And then it was quite a big moment when I realized I now relate to the second one more and I’ve grown up, and there’ll be a day that the third one will resonate with me more, and it just feels like it’s a trilogy that you grow with. So I’ll take The Before Trilogy with me home.”

“I kind of want a bunch of movies that I just haven't seen which are not interesting to talk about like The Before Trilogy. I've never actually seen. That's where they walk and they talk and they like each other a lot, right?”

“The Before Trilogy. You know sometimes when a film is a poisonous Mirror and you look at it and you’re like, “No!” It is a bisexual text. I don’t feel like I need to elaborate on that. That should be… The reasons why that’s true, I think, are evident if you’ve seen this stuff.”

“The Before Trilogy. Before Sunrise, of course, is my favorite. And what Richard Linklater captured in Before Sunrise is so hard to do. You’re just watching two people walk and talk for an entire film, and you’re not bored, you’re so in it, because everyone knows what it feels like to have that feeling of falling in love in real time and sharing intimate moments with a complete stranger. This movie is just so, so beautiful and captures the nuance of falling in love perfectly.”

“Oh, yeah, The Before Trilogy. I love these movies so much. I remember when the first one came out, Before Sunrise, it was 1995 and I went to see it by myself and loved it. And Ethan Hawke was so important to me in that era. But now looking at them, and them as a trilogy, it’s timeless, and we’ve kind of moved through the decades with these three people, and I would love to see another one. I hope they do another at some point. This is a really important trilogy.”

“The Before Trilogy. I have not seen the third one yet, and I only watched the first two in the last few months. It’s nuts to watch something that you feel like you’ve seen and have always wanted and then it’s existed, then you catch up with it. Just two people, just great dialogue, great performances, and you get to be a fly on the wall and you kind of, like, romantically hope to seek out one of those moments in life.”

“The Before Trilogy. I adore all of these films made by Richard Linklater. But Before Midnight stayed with me the most because there was something about the representation of just a real marriage. And the argument at the end, which I’ve tried to recreate in other shows of mine, actually, but never could. But that argument that they have in that little hotel room, that starts off as lovemaking and just becomes the most violently brutal argument you could have as a married couple, is just an extraordinary thing. And it was quite an inspiration for Catastrophe when Rob and I were writing it.”