Ethan Hawke put serious thought into ‘Good Kill’ role
WASHINGTON — In less than two decades, “The Truman Show” and “Gattaca” have become relics. Hold them up, in all their mind-bending glory, and you might feel a pang of nostalgia for a bygone era when studios bankrolled movies made for adults who like their entertainment with a side of smarts — and not the wise-cracking one-liner kind.
Andrew Niccol wrote both of those films, scoring an Oscar nomination for “Truman.” And he’s remained busy over the years, but it hasn’t been entirely easy given the shifting priorities of the studio system.
“We’ve had a couple other films we’ve tried to get made that didn’t get made,” said Ethan Hawke, Niccol’s friend, occasional collaborator and the star of the director’s latest, “Good Kill.” “He writes a kind of movie that doesn’t really get made anymore, so it’s very, very difficult (even though) Andrew is one of the best writers working today.”
Maybe it’s no surprise then that Niccol focused his latest story on another professional who’s starting to feel obsolete.
“Good Kill” follows Tom Egan (Hawke), a military pilot whose latest assignment takes him out of the cockpit and into an airstream trailer in the Nevada desert. He spends his days bombing terrorists 7,000 miles away. He’s a drone pilot, which could be a good assignment, in theory. He gets to wear his fancy flight suit, but his life is never in danger. He can go home to his wife, kids and cookie-cutter Las Vegas community every night, and the job pays the bills. The only thing is: He hates the soul-crushing nature of his work.
Even though he’s making life-and-death decisions, he’s utterly disconnected from the reality of war. When he presses a button to send a bomb plummeting onto an insurgent in Yemen, there’s no sound, just silence accompanying an image of a dusty blast. “Splash,” the drone pilots say. “Good kill.”
Hawke recently came to Washington, D.C., to promote the film. In a suit and tie, with slicked-back hair, he animatedly discussed what drew him to the role. He and Niccol had worked together on “Gattaca” — “really my first adult film, so it was really important to me,” Hawke said — and “Lord of War.” Like most of us, Hawke had heard a lot about drones but didn’t give much thought to the people controlling them. But once he did, he saw some parallels to that reality and everyone else’s.
“It’s not a huge jump from what’s happening to these pilots to what’s happening to all of us,” he said. “More and more of our intimacy, what used to feel real and tangible, is now automated, is now from a distance. We’re avoiding everything that was difficult, war being one of them.”
Unlike a lot of recent movies about Iraq and Afghanistan, Tom has no ethical issues with the war on terror. He wants to be of service and fight for his country. The problem is the way his country is using him. He’s overqualified for his post. That also struck a chord for Hawke.
“I know actors that end up spending seven years and making a fortune on some TV show where they say one line a week,” he said. “These are people that went to Yale drama, and they’re miserable because they’re atrophying.”
Thanks to some combination of luck, talent and good decision-making skills, Hawke has avoided that path. He’s been nominated for four Oscars, with a résumé heavy on small, independent projects. The past few years have launched him into Serious Actor territory, thanks to his work with another frequent collaborator, Richard Linklater, who wrote and directed the buzzy Oscar-nominated “Boyhood” and the “Before” trilogy.
Hawke’s strength is dramatic acting, and that job is disappearing as quickly as the militarypilot population. Studios want sure bets — genre films that are easy to market and easier to digest. These days, getting a thinking person’s movie released is no small feat.
So in the meantime, he keeps his eye out for exciting projects in the independent-film world and appreciates the small victories for “Boyhood” or “Before Midnight” when they come.
“That’s the triumph of a movie like ‘Boyhood,’ that somehow it was so different it managed to penetrate the zeitgeist without corporate backing,” he said. “I almost stopped believing that could happen.”