There’s a scene near the end of Before Sunrise.
Jesse and Céline are lying by a fountain at dawn. They’re not really saying much. Just existing together, in that quiet stretch before they have to part ways.
Nothing happens. No plot. No stakes, really.
And yet, I’ve thought about the quiet weight of that scene more than almost anything else I’ve seen in cinema.
I was fifteen when I first watched it. At that age, most of the people around me were focused on getting or keeping a girlfriend. The emotional vocabulary just wasn’t there yet, mine included. But something about watching these two people talk to each other, really talk, had me enraptured completely. I couldn’t name what I was seeing. I just knew I’d never seen anything like it.
Richard Linklater once said: “If cinema was a painting, time would be the paint itself.”
Most directors treat time as a container. You have 90 minutes, fill it. Linklater treats time as the medium. The thing you’re actually working with.
The Before trilogy: Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), Before Midnight (2013), was shot over nearly 18 years with the same two actors. Each film is set in real-time, roughly the length of the film itself. You’re not watching a story about Jesse and Céline. You’re watching Jesse and Céline age. You’re watching a relationship gather weight. The films don’t explain what happened in between. Life did.
I stumbled onto Before Sunset years after it came out. 2008. I didn’t even know it existed. But the moment it began, something familiar clicked back into place. The fifteen-year-old version of me was still there. Still paying attention to the same things.
Then came Boyhood. Filmed over 12 actual years, same cast, same boy growing up on screen. Not a child actor followed by an adult actor. The same person, year after year, visibly changing.
No one does this. It’s almost categorically different from how cinema works.
What drew me to Linklater wasn’t just the craft. It was the way he seemed to see the world. That ordinary moments… conversations, silences, the texture of a particular day… they’re worth preserving on film. That drama doesn’t need car crashes. That if you’re willing to pay attention, time itself is enough.
That stayed with me.
Maybe more than I realised.
It shaped what I look for in creative work. Does this trust the audience? Does this treat time as something worth attending to? Is it trying to manufacture emotion or earn it?
So when I came across Aditya Kripalani and spent time understanding his work and his vision, something clicked in a way I wasn’t expecting.
Turns out he also admires Linklater’s work. He’s even made a film directly inspired by him. His approach to storytelling is intimate, character-driven, willing to let a scene breathe, and it felt familiar in the best possible way. Like recognising a sensibility you share without having named it.
Some time ago, I decided to get involved in his latest project.
The timing mattered more than I admitted at first.
For the first time since I started working at twenty-three, I had space. Real space… not the kind you carve out between meetings, but long unstructured stretches of it. And in that quiet, something changed. It turned out to be more than reflection. I spent those months taking stock of who I was. Dismantling and quietly rebuilding. And in that kind of quiet, things you’ve always wanted but never chased start to feel different. Not reckless. Just possible.
Cinema is a craft I’ve cared about my whole life. At its core, it’s about people and the small things that happen between them. And that’s always been where I find the richness in life. The experiences that stay with you aren’t the grand events. They’re the conversations, the silences, the small moments that quietly change you. The little details in the world around you that get lodged in memory. The way someone said your name. How pleasantly spicy a handwash smelled, and how it lingered on your hand the rest of the day. The quality of light on a particular Monday afternoon.
Cinema, at its best, is the only art form that can actually hold all of that at once. I’d just never imagined a way in. And then one appeared.
But this felt like a door I’d never thought to knock on, and suddenly it was open. A decade-long friendship made that possible. Some doors don’t appear out of nowhere. Someone you trust holds them open for you.
What I wanted wasn’t a role. It was proximity. I wanted to be close enough to see how a film actually gets made. The project management of it. The space between intention and execution, and how a director navigates it. How you get a performance out of an actor on a difficult day. How creative problems get solved with no budget and no time. The unglamorous, operational, deeply human work of making something from nothing. That’s the part I’m drawn to.
I wish I’d been there from the very beginning. But a foot in the door is still a foot in the door.
Linklater’s characters grow across decades of real time. I’m at the beginning of something I don’t fully understand, in a space I know almost nothing about, with no idea where it goes.
That feels right, actually.
And when the next project comes (and I hope one does), I’ll go in a little less ignorant, a little more useful.
Cinema that spans decades starts with a single scene in a park at dawn.
I’m just glad I finally asked to be in the room.