What now?
Ethan Hawke has spent his career wrestling with being an artist in Hollywood, with countless projects, plays and films which he valued, even if others didn’t. Now, the world has caught up and sees the worth of his work, whether directing Blaze or starring
Fame and money came to Ethan Hawke young. Working out how to live his life was a little harder
Now he’s 47, but when he was much younger, Ethan Hawke read Cassavetes on Cassavetes, the indie filmmaker bible, and then went to hear the author’s widow, Gena Rowlands, speak. She looked out at the crowd and laughed. She said John Cassavetes was always disappointed because nobody would finance his movies; he’d always felt dismissed and disregarded. “‘And now here you guys are making a big deal out of him,’” he remembers her saying. She said that was nice, but that they shouldn’t miss the point. “‘Make a big deal of yourself.’ You know? Whatever indifference the world gives you, he felt it, too. So you’re just as good as he is. Like, go out and do it.”
Hawke found that so moving, the idea of ignoring what the world was telling you about yourself and instead living only by standards that you had, yourself, carefully defined for your life and work. He vowed right then that he would do whatever it took to make good art on his own terms, no matter what anyone said. He would take himself seriously, even if no one else did.
He’d had his first starring role by then – in Explorers, when he was 14. By the time he was 20, he’d already starred in White Fang and Dead Poets Society. But he didn’t just want to be a movie star. He started a theatre company in 1991 called Malaparte with his friends, but the world didn’t quite know how to react to his kaleidoscope ambitions. He debuted on Broadway in 1992 in The Seagull, and the New York Times said he played Konstantin with an “armwaving display of unfocused nervous energy.” Variety determined that he gave the “single truly ineffective performance” in 2003’s Henry IV: “Movie actor Ethan Hawke is simply out of his depth.”
Anytime he showed ambition outside the avenue of mainstream matinee idoldom, it was the same thing. In 1998, the Times said of Great Expectations, “Mr Hawke seldom registers anything more interesting than astonishment at Finn’s good fortune.” Of his Hamlet in 2000, the Times wrote, “Mr Hawke’s moping slows things down too much.”
He wrote a novel, The Hottest State, which Kirkus determined was “clumsily written” and “takes itself very seriously.” The movie adaptation that he directed was similarly panned, with the Boston Globe writing that “Hawke has the instincts of an actor rather than a director.”
But he never forgot Cassavetes. He never forgot that it was entirely possible that people wouldn’t appreciate your work while you were doing it. That they might appreciate it only long after you were dead. Or maybe even never. But that didn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. He learned to defy the critics, if not ignore them. He learned to let them remind him what he was supposed to be, which is an artist, which is someone who tells the truth, not just a puppet who dances to please his audience in a series of films that resemble the one he just did.
He wrote two more novels, thank you very much, plus a graphic novel called Indeh about the Apache nations. He continued to mount plays. He directed a music video, then a movie, then another, thank you very much again. He helped write the sequels to Before Sunrise – Before Sunset in 2004, while his own marriage to Uma Thurman was “collapsing and I took all of that and put it into that movie”– and Before Midnight in 2013. He earned Oscar nominations for best adapted screenplay for both, thank you very much.
But it almost didn’t matter by then. By then he’d learned to metabolise the criticism as something else. He remembers when his mother read the first draft of The Hottest State, she said, “It’s not Chekhov, but it’s a start.” He thought that was a nice way of looking at it. “The subtext of that is it’s OK to try to be Anton Chekhov, and if no one tries to be, no one will be.” He didn’t win the best supporting actor Oscar in 2002 when he was nominated for Training Day .But Denzel Washington whispered into his ear right there in the seat next to him that losing was actually a good thing. “‘You know, you don’t want to win that, man. Wait until they give it to you because they have to. You want to win because the work demands it.’” He was years away from the kind of unequivocal, unsurprised accolades that would accompany his performance in Boyhood and now First Reformed. Back then, he liked the idea that he was in training, that he was at the beginning, that the world wanted him to do only what he was expert at, but that his goals were bigger and that no one would really understand until he finally arrived, however and whenever and if ever that happened.
He was thinking of Cassavetes again when, last summer, a film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ Camino Real that he was set to direct got delayed temporarily after an actor pulled out. Hawke was left with nine free months on his hands. He had nothing to do, and let’s just say he’s not the kind of guy who should be left with nothing to do for that many months.
But he’d had this idea for a while. He’d been wanting to write and direct a movie about Blaze Foley, the barely known country singer who died in 1989. Foley devoted his life to music, but was wary of the way commerce could corrupt it. Hawke loved that – he loved the story of a man who battled the questions of how an artist is supposed to exist in the world, and whether making art for its own sake can ever be rewarding enough (and rewarded enough) to forgo fame – or if celebrity is necessary to continue doing what you love.
As it happened, one of his wife Ryan’s childhood friends was married to Ben Dickey, a folk musician who bore a strong resemblance to Foley. At New Year’s Eve 2016, Hawke and Dickey had been drinking, and Dickey pulled out a guitar and began to sing the Blaze Foley song Clay Pigeons. He was sad; his own band was dead, and he sang it in a particular, mournful way, and it was as if Blaze Foley himself were in that room. That night, Hawke asked if he’d ever consider starring in a movie about Foley. Dickey hadn’t acted before, but yes, he’d do it.
Hawke wrote the screenplay with Sybil Rosen, Foley’s former romantic partner, and the author of a memoir of her time with him, Living in the Woods in a Tree. They shot the film, a “gonzo country-western opera,” as
Hawke called it, last summer in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. They’d find old cars driving through town, and they’d give the drivers $50 to drive back and forth through a scene so that they’d have 1982 Cutlasses in the background of a shot.
He told Dickey that they’d be spending the first week just doing screen tests, and Hawke would let the camera run while Dickey and Alia Shawkat, who played Rosen, sat and talked. But they weren’t screen tests. Hawke was making his movie.
Blaze started playing festivals this year. The early reviews are truly golden: “Blaze is more affecting than most other live-hard/die-ugly music biopics,” wrote The Hollywood
Reporter. “Hands down the best movie of its kind since Inside Llewyn
Davis,” wrote Rogerebert.com. No one was saying that he was taking himself too seriously this time; no one was asking why an actor had such outsized ambition.
Over the years, he’s somehow worn his critics down with his earnestness and his dedication and his sincerity – the same things that caused the ridicule in the first place. Then there is the patronising surprise that the acting, the directing, the writing isn’t as bad as one would imagine. And now – now! Now here he is, a nearly 100 per cent surefire Oscar contender for his performance as a pastor in this year’s First Reformed, the kind of role he would never even dream of asking to audition for 10 years ago. Blaze is entering cinemas attached to early reviews that offer no qualifiers when they mention their admiration for it and its director.
By the time he sat down with me in July at a restaurant in Brooklyn, near his home, he didn’t even have to appear in his own movie to get it into festivals. His pursuits have become markedly unchallenged. He is able to do the work he wants to do without any resistance. The battle that defined the first part of his life is won. And Hawke, with no tide to fight against, finds himself happy and satisfied. Maybe. OK, not truly. Because if he is honest, well, now what?
Dead Poets Society wasn’t his first movie, but it was the one that made him a star: 1989, 18-years-old, and the offers just start coming in. He drops out of college. He does Mystery
Date. He announces that he’s going to start Malaparte. He does A Midnight
Clear. He’s going to use the money from those movies to mount a newly translated Pirandello play. His mother, who had him when she was 18 in Austin, Texas, and raised him herself from a young age on the East Coast, worked so hard to give him a chance at life – she can’t stop crying. Sure, she’s supportive, but all she ever wanted was his solvency, and he’s putting the first money he’s earned into the paper shredder known as off-off-broadway. She doesn’t understand that he is balancing out his universe with the necessary corrections that a handsome (he will only cop to “photogenic”) man with a soul must make.
He has the 20-something actors he needs for the play. Thing is, they