Life's complicated after the sun sets

It was our own fault for making the second film," director Richard Linklater says. "Every time I made another movie, and did an interview, it would be 'What's happening with Jesse and Céline?'"

He's referring to the protagonists of Before Sunrise (1995) and its belated-but-brilliant follow-up Before Sunset (2004). Two star-crossed lovers, played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, they've been the subject of a will-they-won't-they romance ever since they met on a train bound for Vienna in Before Sunrise, spending just several hours together.

While the romantic drama won Linklater a Silver Bear for best director at the Berlin International Film Festival, it bombed at the box office. Consequently, "no-one expected a second film", he says. But when they eventually delivered a sequel nine years later - this time set in Paris, with Jesse now a published (and married) author on a book tour - that film caught imaginations.

Co-writers Linklater, Delpy and Hawke were all nominated for an Oscar for best original screenplay, but they had no intention of making a third part. "If anything, we rebelled against it," says its 53-year-old director. "We said, 'Everyone seems to want a third film … well let's just not do it.'"

Given the emotional cliff-hanger where Before Sunset left its audiences, that's almost cruel. The film ends as Jesse deliberates in Céline's apartment: should he stay or should he return to his wife and child? "I felt very sure at the end of the second film that Jesse does not go home," says Hawke. "Not right away anyway. I really enjoyed that practical sense of how damaging that would've been, the way he ended that marriage. A lot of the pain of divorce is not actually over the fact of the divorce, but how people obsess about how it happened."

Thankfully, Hawke - who was going through his own split from actress-wife Uma Thurman at the time of Before Sunset - decided to reunite with Linklater and Delpy to bring back Jesse and Céline. Continuing this beguiling US indie romance, Before Midnight ("we ran through quite a few titles," says Linklater) immediately shows that Jesse didn't get on that plane back in Paris. He stayed with Céline and - nine years on - they now have twin daughters of their own.