Original subtitles

This is Richard Linklater in 1987.

So what about this time machine?

What do you mean?

How does it work?

You good to go?

Yeah.

Hang on.

Okay.

Hi Richard, I'm just here with Koganada from "Sight and Sound".

Oh, great.

I'm recording the phone conversation, I just want to make sure you know that.

- You're cool with that? - Yeah, yeah. - Okay.

All is now being recorded.

It's a big element, isn't it, of our medium?

Kind of the manipulation of time, the perception of time, the control of time.

Kind of the building blocks of cinema.

Time is a really powerful factor, but it is in all of our lives.

You know, you look at a picture of yourself when you were 10 years old,

and stare at that for a second, and look at yourself in the mirror,

that's a powerful connection, you to that person, and we all have that.

Antoine Doinel, Antoine Doinel, Antoine Doinel, Antoine Doinel, Antoine Doinel, Antoine Doinel.

I think it's more a perception.

You know, it's like how your brain perceives and unfolds through a day,

or just a perception of an event.

It's so human, whether you're in a waking or a dream state.

I always have this strange feeling that I'm this very old woman laying down about to die.

I've just traveled all the way from the future.

I was just with your 82-year-old self.

You know that my life is just memories of something.

Like I'm looking back on my life.

Like my waking life is her memories.

But you're not real anyway, right?

You're just characters in that old lady's dream.

She's on a death bed, fantasizing about her youth.

Life?

Yes.

Life is a long... chain of dreams...

Drifting one into the other.

Cinema had existed for hundreds of thousands of years already, you know, in the dream state.

And people knew immediately how to watch films.

They've been doing it every night, forever.

Technological advances met consciousness in a new art form.

And so time is actually just this constant saying "no" to God's invitation.

I mean, that's what time is.

That, you know, behind the phenomenal difference, there is but one story.

And that's the story of moving from the "no" to the "yes".

All of life is like: "No thank you, no thank you, no thank you..."

And ultimately it's: "Yes, I give in", "Yes, I accept",

"Yes, I embrace".

I mean, that's the journey.

And if like film can let us see that, can just frame it so that we see like:

"Ah, this moment", you know, holy.

And it's like holy, holy, holy, moment by moment.

But like, who can live that way, you know?

All he could think about was that he was looking at something that was going to die someday.

He just couldn't get it out of his head.

And I think that's so true.

You know, everything is so finite.

But don't you think that's what... makes our time and specific moments so important?

I mean, this is it. This is actually happening. What do you think is interesting? What do you think is funny?

What do you think is important?

You know, every day is our last.

Like, is this really my life?

Like, is it happening right now?

... means the linear construct.

They're not you can...

They're these written parallel worlds saying something about different phases

of life or the times we're living in or just what it's like to be a person.

How you physically change, how you mentally change, you know,

how you're still the same person, but kind of not.

Can you believe it was nine years ago that we were walking around Vienna?

-Nine years? No, that's impossible. - No, it was.

I know, it feels like two months ago to me, but it was summer of 94.

Do I look any different?

We've met before.

Summer of 94.

- You're mistaking me for someone else. - No.

- We even fell in love. - Really?

I vaguely remember someone sweet and romantic.

Jump ahead 10, 20 years, okay? And you're married.

Only your marriage doesn't have that same energy that it used to.

You know, you start to blame your husband.

If we're meeting for the first time today on a train, would you find me attractive?

Think of this as time travel, from then to now.

Of course.

No, but really, right now, as I am. Would you start talking to me?

Would you ask me to get off the train with you?

Let me get my bag.

I love the way that people seem to be dissolving into the background.

It's like the environments, you know, are stronger than the people.

These human figures are always so transitory.

So transitory?

Transitory.

Sunrise, sunset, anything so ephemeral.

Just like our life.

We appear and we disappear.

And we are so important to some.

But we are just passing through.

Let me see if you stay together or if you dissolve into molecules.

How am I doing?

I think once I grasp the notion of how long people live and how long the earth has been here,

the universe has been here, and then our little part in that...

It's a beautiful, poetic thing and kind of a haunting thing at the same time.

I have this recording of Dylan Thomas reading a W. H. Auden poem.

He's got a great voice.

He just... It's like...

All the clocks in the city began to whir and chime.

Oh, let not time deceive you.

You cannot conquer time.

In headaches and in worry, vaguely life leaks away.

And time will have his fancy tomorrow or today.

Something like that.

It's good.

So what about this time machine?

I have a time machine up in my room and I've come to save you just like I said I would.

Save me from what?

Save you from being blinded by all the little bullshit of life.

It's not bullshit.

I assure you, that guy you vaguely remember, the sweet romantic one that you met in a dream...

That is me.

You know that my life is just...

Memories of something.

Oh, let not time deceive you.

You cannot conquer time.

In the burrows of the nightmare where justice naked is,

time watches from the shadow and coughs when you would kiss.

In headaches and in worry, vaguely life leaks away.

And time will have his fancy tomorrow or today.