Well, this is the best news I’ve read all month. All year? Maybe all year. In a recent interview with Allocine (via The Playlist), writer/director/actor Ethan Hawke revealed that he, Julie Delpy and Richard Linklater have been talking and are hoping to start writing a third film in the Before Sunrise/Before Sunset saga that has a poignant, much-loved following in the indie film community. Sunset earned the trio (along with Kim Krizan) an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay back in 2005.

“Well, I don’t know what we’re going to do but I know the three of us have been talking a lot in the last six months,” Hawke said, in regards to the third film.

“All three of us have been having similar feelings that we’re ready to revisit those characters. There’s nine years between the first two movies and, if we made the film next summer, it would be nine years again so we’re really started thinking that would be a good thing to do. We’re going to try write it this year.”

Hawke has had a career-long relationship with Linklater, starring in both the filmmaker’s smallest pet projects (the brilliant Tape, Waking Life) and some of his more noticeable studio missteps (The Newton Boys).

The actor spoke on the progress of Boyhood, his “one short film a year for nine years” project he’s been working on with Linklater, in which he plays the father of the lead character, a character who starts as a boy in year one and grows into a young man by year nine: “It’s a movie about time. You’ll watch us all age in the movie, it’s about growing up – I can’t wait for people to see it.”

Both Boyhood and a potential third Before film represent a surviving relic of the late 80s/early 90s American indie movement; call it the maturation of the GenX generation, slackers wearing ties and having kids.

Let’s all hope small, passionate, personal films like this never go away.

Have you seen the Before movies? Should they become a trilogy?