KVIFF 2021: A Conversation with Ethan Hawke | Festivals & Awards

“That is the evolution that happens through any kind of success as an actor. When you study the career of Paul Newman, for example. What starts to be your job is how to use your success. DiCaprio can greenlight a hundred-million-dollar movie. But you start to have success and you realize, I can help this filmmaker get their movie made or I could not. What is my role in the community? One is, yes, I wanna thrive as an actor. I wanna take care of myself. I know the best way to do that is to facilitate opportunities for other artists. When you’re having a shared creative experience generally it’s better than when it’s just in service of yourself. That’s been the hardest part of my job is how to put myself in a position to succeed. How to help people who deserve help who aren’t getting it. If you don’t make anybody any money you don’t get to play. It’s a weird situation. You gotta pay to play. Even a filmmaker as successful as Richard Linklater struggles to get his films financed because they’re not commercial ideas, they’re revelatory ideas. They’re movies celebrated in an environment like this but they’re really hard to get financial backing for.”

Ethan Hawke in “The Good Lord Bird”

Hawke talks for a moment about his proposed next project, a movie about the transcendentalists, Emerson, Thoreau, the Alcotts. Linklater is apparently peeved that Hawke flew to Karlovy Vary to collect a lifetime achievement award instead of staying in with him working on the script, he says with a glint in his eye. 

“So finding a balance between supporting filmmakers and to make films that are still lucrative enough that you can do that. You also wanna be in a position where when a director likes your work, Robert Eggers or somebody, and they wanna work with you they can actually hire you. A lotta directors don’t get to hire who they really want because they need to finance their movies. ‘Well I think this actor’s ok and they’re really famous.’ You have that happen a lot. It becomes this huge balancing act. With the benefit of hindsight ‘Cool Hand Luke’ seems like an easy choice to make for Paul Newman but Stuart Rosenberg had never directed a movie. He could have easily said no, and everyone would have told him it was smart. When I did ‘Before Sunrise”’the perception of Rick at that moment was he’d tried to make a Hollywood film and it failed. Their conception of ‘Dazed and Confused’ was that it was a failure. That’s how stupid they are, but you’ve got to be smart enough to go anyone who thinks ‘Dazed and Confused’ is a failure is a knucklehead. You have to have the courage of your own belief. Also, I should say, there a lot of successful actors who don’t care about independent cinema, it’s not their thing, but for me those were the actors I loved. I remember as a kid watching Max Von Sydow and saying That’s the dream. Being in Ingmar Bergman’s theatre troupe. Like SHIT, that’s the gold standard. They don’t have all the ancillary negative elements of celebrity, they’re just making high art at a high pace and working with the most talented people. And that environment …” Hawke pauses and his beautiful eyes seem to find a point somewhere a hundred miles away, his voice turns to the chilled whisper he’s so perfected in his genre films. “… You know you’re lucky if it’s once a generation. It doesn’t … It’s not there for you.”

Hawke doesn’t put a lot of stock in awards, though he enjoys what they can remind him of. He keeps a space in his home his kids call the “hall of ego,” filled with awards and red carpet pictures and reminders of his many year friendship with Linklater because his confidence is so easily shaken. He remembers the failures more acutely than the success, so it’s nice to remember he had a good Tuesday once upon a time. He still remembers when Pauline Kael, his and his mother’s favorite reviewer as a young man, panned ‘Dead Poet’s Society.’ He says he was proud to get that negative review. His years in genre filmmaking, perhaps his most interesting period, have yielded many a negative review but he keeps going admirably unabated.

You can view the original article HERE.