Ethan Hawke is bored of romantic movies that just show "Eva Mendes crawling across the floor in a bikini".
The actor stars alongside Julie Delpy in Before Midnight, which is a far cry from usual films about love. They portray Jesse and Celine, characters who first met in the 1995 movie Before Sunrise. That saw them enjoying conversations on a train, with the audience left thinking they would meet again in six months. The 2004 sequel Before Sunset showed that never happened, while the latest instalment finds the pair living in Greece nine years later.
Ethan loves the pictures because although they are about love and relationships, they are never clichéd.
"A lot of times when you see married life it's either some kind of cornball, whitewash thing where everybody's OK, or it's heavy drama, alcohol and stress, they secretly hate each other and it's either too white or too black," he is quoted as saying.
"What's fun about this as a romance is that neither gender wins or loses - most romances seem to have either a female agenda, where the guys are all dopes, or a masculine idea of what romantic love is supposed to look like, with Eva Mendes crawling across the floor in a bikini. What's so wonderful about these movies is they're kind of genderless."
Ethan is proud that while the films are unapologetically about love, he would be happy to suggest them as viewing for his male pals.
Neither Ethan nor Julie knows if there will be another instalment of the story. Making the films is fun but can also be stressful, not least because writer-and-director Richard Linklater has a keen idea of what he wants.
"It's gruelling," Ethan added. "They don't come easy and they always are worth it. It's difficult to write a movie as incredibly personal to three people, and the style of acting that Rick is going after is a little merciless because if it's ever noticeable that you're acting you've ruined the whole project."
