Finding the story
There was good news and bad news regarding the materials that Hawke was provided by the Newman-Woodward family.
The good news: At some point in the '80s, Newman recorded hours of interviews for a memoir, which included the couple but also family and friends such as writer Gore Vidal, directors and frequent collaborators George Roy Hill and Martin Ritt, Woodward's stepmother and Newman's first wife.
The bad: When Newman decided to ditch the memoir a few years later, he burned all the tapes, though the conversations still existed in hundreds of pages of transcripts made by Newman's collaborator on the project, his friend, screenwriter Stewart Stern.
Hawke took the transcripts and reached out to his many actor friends to breathe life back into the stories the transcripts told. George Clooney plays Newman, Laura Linney took Woodward, and others including Sam Rockwell, Steve Zahn, Zoe Kazan and Josh Newman handled various real-life characters in the transcripts.
That same improvisatory spirit produced another unusual but effective technique in the documentary. As Hawke talked to his voice cast and others, including the Newman children and executive producer Martin Scorsese on Zoom, he recorded the video calls, never thinking he might use pieces of them in the documentary, he says.
“I didn't want to insert myself at all. And yet there was something, as I would Zoom with my friends and ask them to read these parts, that was bigger than us happening that I liked,” Hawke says.
“For example, just a little moment where you can tell Sam Rockwell's remembering a tiny moment in `The Sting' so vividly,” he says. “It's probably been 25 years since he saw that movie or thought about it, but he remembers the card playing scene, and what a great scene it is.
“You realize in the spontaneity of that moment, the impact the previous generation has had on this one, and how interconnected we all are.”
The Zoom interludes end up drawing viewers into the conversations Hawke and his collaborators are having about Newman and Woodward, almost making them part of Hawke's quest to understand what made the couple so special.
“My editor was like, `This might be an interesting way to make sure the audience is with us all the time,' ” Hawke says. “I just embraced the moment and made it part of the documentary.”