Script To Screen: “Before Midnight”
The final scene in the 2013 movie Before Midnight, written by Richard Linklater & Julie Delpy & Ethan Hawke, characters by Richard…
The final scene in the 2013 movie Before Midnight, written by Richard Linklater & Julie Delpy & Ethan Hawke, characters by Richard Linklater & Kim Krizan.
Plot Summary: We meet Jesse and Celine nine years on in Greece. Almost two decades have passed since their first meeting on that train bound for Vienna.
The scene from the movie:
Many people think that Delpy and Hawke improvise most of their lines of dialogue. This excerpt squashes that idea in a big way. In fact, they work out the dialogue down to the word beforehand in the script. And you have to love this moment — What follows is a lengthy silent sequence where they just sort of stare at each other, seemingly going through everything past and present — in the film version.
Such a wonderful trilogy of films.
One of the single best things you can do to learn the craft of screenwriting is to read the script while watching the movie. After all a screenplay is a blueprint to make a movie and it’s that magic of what happens between printed page and final print that can inform how you approach writing scenes. That is the purpose of Script to Screen, a Go Into The Story series where we analyze a memorable movie scene and the script pages that inspired it.
For more articles in the Script To Screen series, go here.