"Years before Richard Linklater wrote Before Sunrise, he spent a single night wandering through Philadelphia with Amy Lehrhaupt, a stranger he had just met in a toy store. They walked and talked until morning about life, fear, love, and the strange closeness that can arise between two people who know the night will end and they may never meet again. Years later, that fleeting encounter became the quiet foundation of a film in which two strangers step off a train and talk their way through a city before dawn. For years after the film was made, Linklater believed that perhaps one day she might appear maybe at a screening, maybe somewhere in the audience recognizing fragments of their night scattered through the dialogue and wandering streets. But she never came. Only later did he learn why: Amy had died in a motorcycle accident in 1994, before the film was even released. In that realization lies the trilogy’s most haunting undertone that the story began as a memory of someone real, and the films that followed became, in some quiet way, a message sent too late to the person who inspired it. As Linklater himself later reflected, if she had never existed, the films would never have been made."