Julie Delphy and Ethan Hawke are having a romantic reunion, reports Charles Hutchinson.

THIS is the story of the two Texans and the Parisian.

The Americans, Houston indie director Richard Linklater and Austin actor Ethan Hawke, form a film-making triptych with French actress Julie Delpy.

They forged their bond when filming Before Sunrise, the 1995 gem of a study of the buds of love.

Delpy played Celine, the easy-going Parisian heading home from Budapest to study at the Sorbonne; Hawke was Jesse, the American on the last day of his Eurorail tour. The strangers met on a train, en route to Vienna, whereupon she took up his impromptu invitation to wander the Austrian city on a loquacious night together as he awaited his flight to the States.

If you ever wondered what happened to Celine and Jesse after that brief encounter, Linklater and his screen duo decided they should indeed link later, and so nine years on here is Before Sunset, the sequel that opens today at City Screen, York.

In the interim, Jesse has written a best-selling book about their Viennese whirl and during his European book tour, he unexpectedly reunites with Celine in Paris. So begins another picturesque walk through a European capital, this one filmed in real time as they talk intimately, both revealing they are involved in long-term relationships yet each aware that the initial Viennese spark still flickers.

Hawke, 33, says the desire to revisit this material, to say something more about love, came about through the strength of his collaboration with Linklater, 43, and Delpy, 34.

"I had a burning desire to be in the room with them and continue this conversation that we had had," he says.

"In many ways, it was Jesse and Celine that gave us the chance to continue the conversation that we had started nine years ago. I think in some fantasy world I have this dream that maybe we can make five of these films and have it be this giant magnum opus on romantic love. We would follow people from their early twenties to their late seventies."

The "connection" between the trio comes from being like-minded, Hawke suggests. "It's finding the same things funny. Rick Linklater has a real interest in, for lack of a better word, humanity. His primary interest as a filmmaker is in telling stories the way Steven Spielberg is interested in telling myths.

"Rick loves the simplicity of human existence and the idea that we could make a deeply romantic movie that had as few lies in it as possible. You don't amp it up with music, with cutting away from the boring parts. No. Life is beautiful as it is. It's beautiful enough. Let's just do it as simply as that and let the moments speak for themselves. That's an exciting challenge."

Delpy says "there's no way" to articulate their chemistry: "We were talking about that today. There are no words to describe to people this wonderful and productive time we had together. We laughed constantly but at the same time, we came up with the idea for the film. So it's like constantly balancing each other and bouncing ideas off each other.

"It's a wonderful time. It's indescribable and the best way to explain it is with the film. But you can't really put this chemistry into words. It's more like a friendship, a bunch of people really working hard. But we all love each other."

Both she and Hawke receive screenwriting credits alongside Linklater.

"Yes, we wrote the script together but we did have a period of rehearsal where we had to learn not only the lines but every gesture," Delpy recalls.

"Every thing is written. There's nothing improvised in the film. I always compare it to a dancer who seems to do a very painless, effortless movement when behind it, there are months of work. For us, it was weeks and weeks of really rehearsing and learning the lines."

Hawke illustrates their collective method of film-making.

"We rehearsed this movie more than I've probably rehearsed all the other films I've done combined. By the time we got to shoot this movie all those shots were meticulously mapped out. Like when they had to get us from the bookstore to the caf. That walk is eight and a half minutes long so we needed a scene. We needed dialogue that took us eight and a half minutes that was co-ordinated with the shot.

"It was just one conversation that needed to go from all the boring awkward parts of meeting and greeting, and being apprehensive around each other to trying too hard to impress each other, to letting the conversation get a little sexy and then letting it actually turn into something hopefully more substantive. That's the dream."

Before Sunset is the fifth film liaison between Linklater and Hawke. Delpy and Hawke reunited in Linklater's Waking Life in 2001 and now do so again.

How have they changed over the decade since their first movie partnership? "I think Ethan Hawke has grown a lot. I loved him at the time. I love him ten times more now," says Delpy. "I've also changed. I'm much more relaxed.

"I was quite intense and I'm still pretty intense now but not in the same way. I always joke and I'm much more relaxed about a lot of things. I was younger. You take everything more personally when you're young. You get hurt and offended more easily. Now, it's really hard to offend me."

Hawke notices how his own changing feelings mirror those of Jesse and Celine.

"The first film was all about hope and possibility. When you're 23 the primary thing that you think about is what's going to happen? Who am I going to be? Put ten years on that and things have started to happen. You respond to them and everything isn't about the future," he says.

"Your past is starting to have more depth to it. So you have to navigate that. The characters in the movie are still deeply romantic, curious and hopeful but they're also a little humbled."

Delpy can envisage further instalments in Celine and Jesse's story.

"I'd like them to go to another place in themselves and with each other. I'd like them to take another step and explore something different in love," she says. "There are stages of love. There's romantic love. That was the first film. There's romantic but realistic love. There's also every-day love maybe. Then there are other things. We're discovering as we go along. It's almost like a sociological study."

Updated: 16:30 Thursday, July 22, 2004