Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy—Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight—possessed a special alchemy. It was naturalistic and dreamy—romantic without being overly saccharine, profound without being pretentious. (Okay, maybe it was a little pretentious.) Each film was released nine years after the last, allowing the lead characters, played by Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, who also cowrote two films in the series, time to change and grow. But after the third film, released in 2013, there seemed to be a sense of finality around the series. Linklater said as much then, telling fans in 2019, “I wouldn’t hold your breath,” in regard to a fourth movie hitting theaters in 2022.

Now, though, it seems Linklater does have a sliver of an idea for how to carry on the series after all. In an interview with the New York Times pegged to the 25th anniversary of Before Sunrise, both Linklater and Hawke shared their respective thoughts on making another Before movie. Linklater’s concept? Make like the 2012 romantic drama Amour, and pick up with the characters decades down the line.

“Maybe we’ll wait until they’re in their 80s and do a comic remake of Amour, where one euthanizes the other in old age,” Linklater said. “I’m not ruling that out.”

Sure, it sounds mostly like a joke—but knowing Linklater’s particular cinematic patience (hello, Boyhood and Merrily We Roll Along), maybe we shouldn’t write off this idea just yet. If the director did go through with this, though, it would be the grimmest possible ending to a series made up of films that have, to this point, all ended charmingly, leaving endless possibilities in the air. (The best ending line comes in Before Sunset; this is not up for debate!)

Hawke, for his part, thinks the Before series as we know it is completely wrapped. “There was a feeling I had in my gut when we finished Before Midnight that I’d never had before, which was that we were done,” he said in the Times interview. “Sunrise, Sunset, Midnight is one work in its own strange way.”

However, he also offered this little gem: “That doesn’t mean there won’t be another work, like an epilogue. I would be curious about an After series, about something where you really deal with the second half of your life.”

So there’s hope after all. Nothing concrete, no press releases flashing promises of the newest Before—er, After—movie in the works. But at this rate, we’ll take what we can get.

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