Finally Finding Acclaim, but on His Terms
Now he’s 47, but when he was younger, Ethan Hawke read “Cassavetes on Cassavetes,” the indie filmmaker bible, and then went to hear the author’s widow, Gena Rowlands, speak.
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 remembered her saying.
She said that was nice, but 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.”
Mr. 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 defined for your life and work. He vowed 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 starred in “White Fang” and “Dead Poets Society.” But he didn’t just want to be a movie star. He started a theater company in 1991, but the world didn’t know how to react to his broad ambitions.
He debuted on Broadway in 1992 in “The Seagull.” The New York Times said he played Konstantin with an “arm-waving display of unfocused nervous energy.” Variety determined that he gave a “truly ineffective performance” in 2003’s “Henry IV”: “Movie actor Ethan Hawke is simply out of his depth.” The Chicago Tribune said his Macbeth in 2013 was a “tragic hero without drive.”
Anytime he showed ambition outside 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.” Variety wrote, “This slacker prince forms a sinkhole at the center of adaptor-helmer Michael Almereyda’s otherwise compelling contempo update.”
He wrote a novel, “The Hottest State,” which Kirkus determined was “clumsily written.” The movie adaptation that he directed was similarly panned. The Times described it as “nearly two hours long, with a tenuous narrative continuity.”
But he never forgot Cassavetes. He never forgot that it was entirely possibly 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.
The critics — the ones who called him pretentious, too earnest and too overly serious for a movie star — became a force he learned to defy, if not ignore.
He wrote two more novels, plus a graphic novel called “Indeh” about the Apache nations. He continued to mount plays. He directed a music video, then more movies. He helped write the sequels to “Before Sunrise” — “Before Sunset” in 2004, while his 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 films.
But it almost didn’t matter by then. Last summer, when a film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s “Camino Real” that he was set to direct got delayed, he was left with nine free months.
He had been wanting to write and direct a film about Blaze Foley, a barely known country singer who died in 1989. Foley devoted his life to music, but was wary of the way commerce could corrupt it. Mr. Hawke loved that. His wife, Ryan Hawke, had a childhood friend who was married to Ben Dickey, a folk musician who bore a resemblance to Foley.
During New Year’s 2016, Mr. Dickey pulled out a guitar and began to sing the Foley song “Clay Pigeons.” He sang it in a mournful way, and it was as if Foley were there. Mr. Dickey agreed to star in a movie about Foley, even though he had not acted before.
“Blaze” entered theaters attached to reviews that offer no qualifiers when they mention their admiration for the film and its director. And Mr. Hawke is a surefire Oscar contender for his performance as a depressed pastor in this spring’s “First Reformed.”
Richard Linklater, who directed “Boyhood” and the “Before” trilogy, said Mr. Hawke has had this instinct since the earliest days of his career.
When Mr. Linklater was casting “Before Sunrise,” he remembers that Mr. Hawke was “really at that moment getting offered everything from Hollywood, but here he is talking to an indie film guy about going to Vienna and doing a film for no money, super low budget, that he thinks probably won’t work, and would take a huge effort to make it work as a film. Ethan has turned down a lot of fame, in Hollywood terms.”