A great love affair
In this six-part show, readings by an array of celebrities bring to life transcripts of intimate, enlightening conversations once thought lost, writes
Ethan Hawke has already had a busy year, with roles in the Marvel/ Disney+ series Moon Knight, plus the movies The Northman and The Black Phone.
Later this year he will be in the anticipated Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, and he has other projects on the way.
Amid all that he also made The Last Movie Stars, a six-part documentary series about the lives and careers of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward that is now streaming in New Zealand on Neon.
The two were award-winning actors on stage and screen, with successes both on their own and together, and were married for 50 years. Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2007, Woodward has retreated from public life. Newman died from cancer in 2008.
Late in his life, Newman embarked on a personal oral history project for a planned memoir, as screenwriter Stuart Stern interviewed friends and collaborators. Newman eventually turned on the idea and burned the tapes.
Hawke, who was brought onto the project by Newman and Woodward’s family, was given transcripts of those lost conversations. Reading from those transcripts is a long list of Hawke’s friends and contemporaries, with George Clooney as Newman and Laura Linney as Woodward.
Zoe Kazan gives particularly stirring readings as Newman’s first wife, Jackie Witte; in addition, Sam Rockwell reads Stuart Rosenberg, Josh
Hamilton reads George Roy Hill, Alessandro Nivola reads Robert Redford, Rose Byrne reads Estelle Parsons and Oscar Isaac reads Sydney Pollack.
Hawke includes his own conversations over Zoom with those collaborators, affectionately sharing their ideas about Newman and Woodward. There are also discussions with Martin Scorsese, Sally Field, Hawke’s daughter, Maya Hawke, and his wife, Ryan Hawke, also a producer on the project.
Hawke spoke to the LA Times about his distinctive approach to the documentary, Newman and Woodward’s love affair and more.
The project begins as a biography of their relationship but then becomes this meditation on acting, fame, sustaining a career and a life. How quickly did that other stuff enter the project?
‘‘Sometimes you have to go slow to go fast. When I sped this story up, it became like an Entertainment Tonight special that I saw in 1986. When I slowed it down, it became something revelatory to me.
‘‘The spine of the movie is their love affair. They were flatout lovers. But what makes their story worth talking about is the breadth and scope of it. The fact that through their work, you see the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and the fact that they had this level of sustained excellence for so long.
‘‘Certain people have these high-water marks of artistic achievement where they achieved some brilliant grace note. And that’s where it’s obvious you centre a documentary around.
‘‘For them, the most obvious artistic achievement is the scope of it, this giant spider web they left behind.’’
The project came to you through the family. Yet at times it’s a remarkably unvarnished portrait of both of them. Did you ever fight an urge to pull back at all, especially regarding something like Paul’s drinking?
‘‘I said to the kids that without shadow, there’s no light – that if we don’t actually create this portrait, we’re not gonna see how beautiful they are.
‘‘I find their love affair more magnificent because of its problems. This idea that Aphrodite dropped rainbows and unicorns all over their life and they just had this party all the time – it’s just not accurate.
‘‘And it gives us all permission that we don’t have to work for love and for family and for art and for community, like they worked for this stuff. It was important to them and they failed a lot and that didn’t stop them. And I find that truth way more inspiring than ‘Ben and Susie were born perfect.’ ’’
The way that you put yourself and other contemporary actors into the movie via your Zoom calls – were you worried at all about getting in the way of Paul and Joanne and their story?
‘‘My wife is my producing partner and I said to her, ‘Look, this is gonna be a lot of work. Do you wanna do this?’ And she was like, ‘I’ll do it as long as you’re not in it.’
‘‘She’s like, ‘We’re gonna do this in service of these two people. I don’t want it to turn into, like, some self-expression.’ And it was, ‘Absolutely, absolutely.’ And then I started working on it and about a year or so went by, and I was really struggling with a point of view.
‘‘Any nonfiction material, the truth is too big; a good biography needs a point of view. And I was like, ‘Why should the audience care about these people in 2022?’
‘‘And I started experimenting with using the Zoom calls. It mostly came out of a necessity that when I showed early cuts to people, a lot of young people didn’t know who Elia Kazan was.
‘‘They didn’t know that Cool Hand Luke was a big, important movie. They didn’t know who Gore Vidal or Tennessee Williams were; they don’t know these names the way that they’re foundational to me.
‘‘And as opposed to, like, clicking a Wikipedia page or showing an interview, I started realising, well, maybe I should show Sam Rockwell and I talking about Cool Hand Luke. And that would be a more interesting way for an audience to experience why the movie might be relevant.
‘‘I did a short little cut to show my wife, and I was like, ‘Listen, you’re not gonna like this. If you don’t like it, I’m not doing it.’
‘‘And she watched it and she said, ‘Keep going – it’s working.’ And so she was really my ego police about when the point of view is helpful versus when it was distracting.’’
‘The spine of the movie is their love affair. They were flat-out lovers. But what makes their story worth talking about is the breadth and scope of it.’ ETHAN HAWKE, RIGHT
How did you come to deal with Joanne’s Alzheimer’s and the fact that, as one of their grandchildren says, she ‘‘left us a long time ago even though she hasn’t left us yet’’.
‘‘Simply put, all of our stories end the same, with sickness and death. I mean, that’s the human story. And I realised that I really didn’t want the movie to be about that. I wanted the movie to be about life and living it.
‘‘And the start of the movie is essentially when they met backstage as understudies.
‘‘Once we set up the rules of the movie, we find them meeting backstage as understudies at William Inge’s Picnic. And I basically end the movie with the last time they acted together, in Mr & Mrs Bridge. And that to me seemed like the right frame of how to discuss their life.
‘‘When she was diagnosed, nine days later he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. And about 18 months later, he was dead. And the kids basically say he let go of the rope. He knew what was coming and that their time together was over – and he didn’t want to live without her.’’
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The Last Movie Stars is now available to stream on Neon.