Ethan Hawke on Donald Trump, Diversity and Denzel
At Spain’s San Sebastian Festival to accept a career achievement Donostia Award, its highest honor, a forward-looking, reflective and self deprecating and gracious Ethan Hawke fielded a huge gamut of questions example: “If your life was a graphic novel, what would the cover image be” - talking about anything from Donald Trump to death. His Donostia Award came as he presented Antoine Fuqua’s “The Magnificent Seven,” which world premiered at Toronto, opening the festival. Some highlights:
1. Donald Trump
Asked if Donald Trump would like “The Magnident Seven,” in which he stars: “I bet Donald Trump would like the film. But he doesn’t know that what the film is actually about is people gathering together to defeat him.”
2. On diversity
A Spanish femme journalist - and quite a lot of femme journalists asked question to Hawke, who doesn’t seem quite done as a lady-charmer - commented that the original “The Magnificent Seven” had racist elements: Eli Wallach playing a Mexican “in brown makeup, doing a bad Mexican accent and seven white guys, for instance,” as Hawke recognized. He went on: “I think one of the greatest ways to speak about diversity is to make a movie with a bunch of people from different cultures and make something beautiful. I get to work with people from lots of different cultures. We have Vincent D’nofrio, Denzel Washington, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, a Mexican actor. It’s great to have us all work together. It’s great the movie doesnt talk about race but just shows it.
3. Denzel
“One of the wonderful things Antoine did with this film is let the film speak for itself .... If Clint Eastwood walks into a room and everyone stops it’s because he is a gunslinger, if Denzel [Washington] walks into a room and everyone stops you don’t know why.” Hawke paid tribute to his “Magnificent Seven” co-star, also the recipient of a Donostia Award a few years back. “It’s great working with Denzel because he does this profession at a very high level. There are very few giant movie stars who are great artists. Denzel is one. He has done it even with the albatross of race being thrown at him which I’m sure gets very boring.
4. His life work
Unlike some big award recipients, Hawke, who had obviously prepared some big answers to potential big questions. He got them. What would he like to achieve in life? one journalist asked. Hawke had an answer: “I’ve tried to focus my entire life on the goal of making substantive meaningful art. It’s a small goal but I do believe that in telling stories and making movies, literature, painting, graphic novels, that the arts have a collective power to be part of our consciousness. Like a person is only as good as their mental health so is a community. A community’s mental health is their arts.”
5. Hawke’s fears
And what was he afraid of? “I’m afraid of dying. I don’t want to do that. But he was chuffed by the way he did die on “The Magnificent Seven:” “One thing I love about working with Antoine [Fuqua]. So many directors have everything planned out but he works from his gut... I walked on that set and saw the church and said ‘I wanna die up on that church’ and Antoine said ‘Hell, yeah.’ I wanted to get shot down by a Gatling gun. I thought : a character who is afraid to die dies in a grotesque way. I love that he fell into the cemetery.”
6. And his future
Hawke mentioned he had written a graphic novel, “Indeh,” about Geronimo, the great Chiricahua-Apache leader. He certainly doesn’t want to give up acting. “As I get older, I am more interested in being different people, playing different roles,” he said. Hw was especially grateful and gracious with a journalist who asked about his plans to direct more movies. “It’s kind of you to ask that question. It’s a funny thing to be here accepting an award. It’s 30 years of acting for me .... A lot of it has been a training ground for getting more knowledgeable and intimate with film. I would like to direct more. I would be lying if I said the next time I come to San Sebastian, I don’t want it to be as an director,” Hawke said. He also had one idea about a subject, if he were to make a movie: “The Cherokee, there has never been a movie from their point of view. I would love to be a background actor in a film where a Native American person starred.”
7. And if his life were a graphic novel, the cover image?
“If my life were a graphic novel, what would the cover image be?” I don’t know. I hope it would be me playing my greatest role as King Lear at 97. That’s what I hope, big grey hair and covered in wrinkles. Got no,” he joked. — Reuters