Ethan Hawke

Ethan Hawke was interviewed at the National Film Theatre on the 5 September 2002 by Robert Elms.

Besides memorable performances in off-beat films like Before Sunrise, Gattaca, Hamlet and Tape, Ethan Hawke has many other credits on his CV: he recently directed the feature Chelsea Walls, is co-founder of Malaparte theatre company and the author of the Hottest State. To mark the publication of Ash Wednesday, his new novel about fraught love Ethan Hawke was welcomed to the NFT to read excerpts from his book and discuss his versatile career.

• Getting Married in Ohio
• Burning a Hole in your Head
• Malaparte
• Being Earnest

Interview © BFI 2002

Getting Married in Ohio

RE: There are certain cross-cultural events that one faces with some trepidation. Actors singing: I'll just say David Hasselhoff. Even singers acting: Sting and David Bowie might prompt some kind of reminder of of how bad these things can be. But who we're going to meet here is a man who we think primarily of as an actor, writing - or certainly reading from his writing. Believe me, I've read this book [Ash Wednesday], and it's very fine, but I won't read it as well as he does.

EH: Hello. Thanks for being here tonight -- we're really going to have a multi-cultural evening which should, I hope, make an interesting hour. I'll read from the first chapter of this book that I wrote, and then we'll talk a bit. So I'll just dive right in - it's like a whole series of trailers we're experiencing here.

EH: reads Extract from Ash Wednesday

RE: And therein begins a tale, the tale of Ash Wednesday. It seems to me that it's a tale of discovery, of people looking for home, wherever home might be, and they're looking in a big continent, in a big place. Two, or is it three, little people trying to find where responsibility begins, and family ends, and [answers to] all of those questions that, maybe when you reach a certain stage in your life, become very big. And it's a big and fantastic book. It also seems to me that it's a book whereby the author has got very, very inside the two central characters. It's written in two voices, in two first-person voices, a male and a female, both in love. Whether it's with each other or with themselves or with the third person, it's difficult to say. How different was it [for you] getting inside a character to play? Is it a similar process?

EH: Getting inside a character to play and getting inside a character to write? It's strange, there's a classic acting exercise that you're supposed to do to get ready to play a part. Somebody told me this, that you're supposed to write the character's back-story. It's a classic thing, and most acting teachers will talk to you about this exercise where you write the character's story: where they were born, what their father did, a lot of times when the piece doesn't even bring it up. Playing something like [my character in] Training Day - all you know about that guy is what happens on that one day. So the classic kind of exercise for that would be to figure out where he was born, what his father did... Was his father a cop? Why does being a cop mean so much to him? Like when he got his heart broken, you're supposed to get into it with as much detail as possible. I remember I used to do that all the time. And that's my way in to writing. One thing that I think I struggle at, is plot. Some writers do this great stuff where the story is revealed in a strange way. All of a sudden you meet, say, his long-lost dog at the end, and you realise why the dog - because he was a dog in another life, or whatever it is - this incredible weaving of a tale. That's not what I do well. It's not even what I'm trying to do, really. With both these characters in this book, my whole approach is like an actor's: trying to play the scene out from all points of view, and do it like that.

RE: It seems to me that it's a very American book, in the way that the best of American culture is American. It's a culture that is young, that is reaching out, is a bit unstable. These are people who don't really know where they're from, they lack roots, lack identity, and they're struggling so hard to find all of these things. It seems to me it's almost a heartland novel, if you can see what I mean.

EH: Yes. There's a whole big section where they actually get married in Ohio, which is definition heartland, as heartland as you can get, and this is why I set it there. The book is an emotional journey they're on. You find out that's the worst day of Jimmy's life, and to recover from that he decides he's going to get back together with this girl that he mentions there. And what he doesn't know is that she's pregnant, and she was coming there that day that he broke up with her to tell him she was pregnant. So, she's on her own kind of mission of accountability, of taking responsibility for this child, and being very mistrustful of Jimmy, as you can tell; probably rightly so. It is a journey piece - she's on her way to her birthplace, so it is a journey home.

RE: One of the ways it's a journey .... he's a complete arsehole. Certainly at the beginning of the book, this is not a nice man, not an admirable man. This is no way a man that you're going to root for...

EH: And she comes off as kind of winning. I don't know why I did that to myself and to my readers. But if you're looking at it like a journey, which is how [I did] when I was breaking the story down in my mind, I wanted it. This is a story of somebody becoming a man, becoming an adult. I had to start him as far away from that as possible, so that you can catch the growth of him as it goes on. It's a difficult way to start a book, I know, because you can finish that chapter and go, 'I hate that person; I have no desire to talk to that person'. But, hopefully.... My favourite kind of characters to play, and to see in movies, are not wholly likeable, as individuals. There's something my wife always says about acting - that if you can put a whole human being on scren or on stage, that's the challenge. Because so often in movies there's so much posturing, particularly with female parts, where they're supposed to play [only] this one side of a person: the supportive girlfriend, or the manipulative bitch, or whatever. Whereas most of us can be all of those things. So I was really trying to write something where people love each other, and where it's a story of passion, and enthusiasm, and love, and at the same time of ambivalence and anger and resentment - the stuff that makes up real intimacy.

RE: You mentioned your wife, so I'll fear to tread. How much of it has come from your own process of being a married man? A father? All those things that responsibility brings with it. Because that's what the book's about, as much as anything.

EH: I really kind of used those characters and this story as a way to explore all of these things I was thinking about. In a weird way, Jimmy and Christie are both characters that come from my imaginary life, but their behaviour is all filled up with my subconscious.

RE: Did you scare yourself at all, writing it? Or hurt yourself?

EH: You know you have to try to. Because if you start being really honest with yourself all the time, you find yourself saying things you don't necessarily mean. That happens all the time in relationships. Somebody will say, 'I hate you', or something; or 'I never loved you'; and it doesn't mean it's true. But sometimes it feels true until you say it. There's a great story about a playwright who had been married for a long time - I think it might have been Neil Simon, or someone, I don't know - and he's sitting there over dinner and he says, 'You know what, I gotta get a divorce; we've gotta split up'. This is totally out of the blue, and his wife just said, 'OK'. And he said, 'You know what, just forget that'. It was just something that had been burning a hole in his head. You feel that you're trapped until you realise that you're not. What that has to do with the question, I have no idea...

Burning a Hole in your Head

RE: How much does acting burn a hole in your head? Or the books? This isn't your first; you've proved you can do it now. [Speaking] as another writer, stop please, you do it far too well. You say that you can't just go on playing other people. It seems to me that [when you're] acting, you're directed, you're written for. Is this [writing] the process of reclaiming your destiny?

EH: It is. I started acting so young. I think if you've worked really hard for it, you'd know more what it means for you. I was in Dead Poets' Society when I was 18, and so I felt almost led; like acting was leading me. While writing is something I've chosen. It's so much more rewarding to me because of that, and at the same time it helps me. After I finished Training Day, I took a year out from acting to finish this. I had a first draft, but I knew it needed my full attention if I was really going to expect anybody should pay any money for it. And now the book's come out, I'm getting really excited to act again. So in a strange way for me, it has really helped me create some kind of balance in my life.

RE: It seems that in acting you make very considered choices of the roles you play. I mean this is not a Hollywood book, and you don't do big Hollywood films. How do you feel about that line. It's a difficult one, isn't it? Because you want people to see you, just as you want them to read you, and yet you don't want to be swallowed up by the beast.

EH: That's the big, hard line to walk. Once you have the benefit of having some opportunity, what then do you do with those opportunities? I've done a bunch of independent-minded movies, where basically you don't get paid anything to do them, but because of that you have all this creative freedom. But you don't get paid for doing nothing. You [also] have an obligation to make something that can play in the malls of America, and be distributed around the world. But every now and then, you can walk that line: like I felt lucky with Training Day, because I was very excited by the material and yet it was very mainstream. Every now and then you can kind of thread the needle like that. But most of the time, if you completely dive into esoteric, kind of experimental films, they slowly won't even let you make them. We've seen a clip from Gattaca tonight, and both Ewan McGregor and I want to be in Andrew Niccol's new film. But it's kind of like Brecht or something, and nobody will give him the financing for it. So then this encourages you to think you'll just do this [one] really popular movie, then you'll get to do these other kind of things. What the balance of that is - it's a tough negotiation.

RE: Is it a balance that makes you want to step in? In the same way you control the characters in the book, do you want to write films, or produce films, or direct, and really take control?

EH: What draws me to doing this is that you have complete autonomy. You don't have to go around to get somebody to give you ten million dollars to make it, or cast somebody's cousin. One of the big pivotal scenes in this book takes place at Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and that would be like a five-million project if you wanted to film it, but [in a novel] you've complete freedom. Movies are the art-form of our day; the art-form everybody goes to see, and talks about at dinner; so that's the excitement of being involved in movies. But at least with this you have complete freedom.

RE: So do you not want to write films? Elements of the book are cinematic, though most of the book is 'book'. It would be almost insulting to say it's a proto-movie, because it's a fully-fledged book. But if someone were to make it, how would you feel about that?

EH: Well I think what you're saying is exactly how I feel about it. A lot of people will say about something, 'It's a very good book - and they're making it into a movie', as if it has now reached its fruition. As if it were auditioning to become a movie, and it just got accepted.

RE: Great Expectations was never a book, it was just waiting...

EH: Yes, it was just waiting to be done by Gwyneth Paltrow and I... Basically, if somebody I really loved came up to me and said, 'Ethan, I really want to make this into a movie', I'd probably say 'Yeah'.

RE: Would you really?

EH: Personally, I'm done. I pored over every dumb paragraph, and I feel like I'm done with this book. It's possible - if I was going to make one or two movies... Sometimes I do daydream about my first book [The Hottest State], actually. That has a twenty-year-old protagonist, and I feel like I could maybe even do that better now, if I were to do it. And I wouldn't have any desire to play the part, because I'm too old.

RE: As a writer, are you ever scared that people are buying the book because you're an actor? Or that people are saying nice things about the book because you're an actor? Because we all have egos, and vanities and such, and when we do a project we want people we respect to say, 'I like it'.

EH: My real feeling, the thing I aspire to, whether it's a book or a movie - you've got to give it your all, 100%, and then you've got to give it away. It's not up to you how it's received, or whether people care about it. I worked just as hard on Before Sunrise, if not harder, than I did on Training Day, or even just as hard on a movie that just didn't work at all. You've just got to give these things away, and the less you can concern yourself with how people respond to it, the better you'll be. Because you really aren't in control of it. There's certainly a lot of people who are going to buy the book because they're interested in the actor, and there's going to be a lot of people who won't buy it because they're not interested in the actor. So it's twofold. I find there's no way I can think about this that's helpful to me; so I try not to.

RE: When you say that you put as much into the book as the film, or the film as the book - what actually is it you put into film? Are you deeply Stanislavskian? What's the process for you?

EH: It changes. It's kind of funny tonight that they showed that clip from Before Sunrise, the scene with Julie Delpy and I. That scene was one of the first things I ever wrote. [Richard] Linklater made that movie, and he really encouraged Julie Delpy and I to contribute to the movie. He wanted to make this movie about two young people meeting. He had this funny line he used to say about this. He'd say that nobody ever pulled a gun on him, he'd never been in a helicopter crash, yet he felt like his life had been completely full of drama. And the most exciting thing that had ever happened to him was meeting a woman. He thought, let's try to make a movie about what it's like, what it really feels like, to witness somebody else, to really experience them. So part of his method for doing that was to encourage Julie and I to write. There are a couple of different scenes - one that Julie wrote is probably the best, a scene where they pretend to call each other on the phone. Anyway, that's one way you contribute to a movie. The other way, on something like Training Day, for example - that was Denzel's baby; that was his. Denzel hired me, and we had only one idea for that part, which was to cut as many lines as possible. My character had nothing interesting to say, my job was as the witness to Denzel, and his leer. He has all these monologues, and he'd come to the end of one, while we'd be running lines or something, and I'd say, 'Would you mind if you just kind of kept going there? Because my next line is really bad'. And he'd go 'All right'. He didn't mind. He'd just say, 'You going to cut the next one, too'? 'Do you mind'? 'No, fine'. 'OK''. That's just how that thing worked. He's such a force to be reckoned with. Every movie's totally different. Certain movies require a different kind of work. When you do something like Hamlet, well you're going to have to spend a long time preparing for that movie. Something like Training Day needs less preparation - you've got to spend some time with some police officers, learn about that whole world. But it's mostly about believing yourself. Like on a movie where you play a painter - it's really difficult to be photographed playing a painter if you don't believe yourself. You don't have to be a good painter, or anything like that, but you have to believe yourself that you know something about painting. If you're going to walk around with a badge and a gun, you've got to be able to believe yourself that you could do such a thing.

Malaparte

RE: Now at the end of tonight we're going to be watching a clip from Tape, and unlike the other three films shown, none of us will have seen this. Could you tell us a little about what we'll be watching?

EH: Tape is another movie directed by Richard Linklater, who directed Before Sunrise, and it was [originally] a play I had come across. I was working so hard on this book, and this character in the play really reminded me of Jimmy, and I really wanted to play him. The writer's Stephen Belber, a young American writer who's just ice-hot, and I sent it to Linklater and asked, 'What do you think about this'? He said, 'This is great'; and Rick was really interested in experimenting with DV films -- all the stuff happening with technology now -- so we went and shot all this movie in six days. We rehearsed it for four weeks, but we filmed the whole thing in six days, just playing with these toy cameras.

RE: Well, we're going to see a bit of that at the end; but what I'm going to do now is open questions up to the house.

Audience question: Variety of roles undertaken. Why none remotely similar?

EH: A little of it is very deliberate. Because I started acting so young, I figured one of the ways to to try to aspire to longevity in this profession was to try to be in as many different genres of movies as I could. Because if you start doing too much work in one genre, an audience really kind of latches on to it - you start having this sort of cinema personality that people identify with and grow accustomed to. You know, Clint Eastwood does westerns. So when he's playing Dirty Harry, it's kind of like a western Dirty Harry in your mind. And if you do too many romantic comedies, you're the romantic comedy guy; or too much sci-fi, and you're the sci-fi guy. So I've really tried to spin that around. First of all, I try to do things where I like the writing as much as I can. Now Andrew Niccol wrote Gattaca, and 'next time just keep your lashes and your lids', now that's just a great line. Sometimes I'll read something that's a great sci-fi movie, but that's too much like Gattaca to me, so... I wanted to do a cop picture; I'd never done one. There's a million of them; there's ten on television every night. But I'd never done a cop movie. That's part of the thinking.

RE: What about musicals?

EH: I've never done a musical. (Sings:) 'Luck be a lady tonight....'

Audience question: .... re: theatre work.

EH: Theatre work was really my first love of all these things. I started an independent theatre company in New York called Malaparte, where we did new plays by young playwrights for about four years. But when I had kids that was the one thing [to go] ... [it cost] too much energy. I'd still love to do theatre, but I don't want to run a theatre company. I was supposed to do a play here in London, but the producer was really not nice to me. I dropped out and he sued me, he was so bad. But I really would like to come back. I really have a big dream of being in the West End. I love the work that happens here, and the fact that people go to the theatre, and how good the theatre is here. New York is still aspiring to, and failing to match, the work that happens here in London. So I'd love to be a part of it.

Audience question: ... re: main literary influences.

EH: Probably my main literary influences, oddly enough, are movies and music. Though I do have some favourite authors. When I was a kid I never took much interest in reading until I read Catcher in the Rye, so you've got to give Salinger some props there. Then Kerouac is incredibly appealing for making literature sexy. He's the Jim Morrison of literature, making it really rock'n'roll. John Steinbeck, Somerset Maugham, James Baldwin, Milan Kundera: those are some of my favourites; people who make reading really fun. [Larry] McMurtry... just anyone who makes it so exciting and visceral, and at the same time leaves you with something. [Material] that's kind of teetering on the edge of pulp, but not being pulp; probably my favourite kind of stuff.

RE: One of the things that contemporary American fiction does, better than English fiction, is that it doesn't have that veil of irony that's thrown over so much. This is not an ironic book, it's a felt book. That, to me, is really refreshing, being used to middle-class people writing books.

Being Earnest

Audience question: .... re: if it were necessary to give up one form of expression.

EH: I really don't want to have to. So it's a dangerous question, because I feel as though I've worked so much harder to teach myself how to write, and it's very exciting. I've only written two books - I'm still a novice at it - and I've acted in like twenty-five movies or so; so my first instinct is that I'm just so excited by writing... Though I don't know if I'd ever have got the opportunity to write if it wasn't for acting. I just don't know. I was acting professionally at twelve; I don't know life without performing. I have no knowledge of it, so I have no idea what it would be like. Did I effectively answer without answering your question?

Audience question: .... re: where the original idea for the book came from.

EH: Well, this book really came out of a desire to write about accountability. Where I started was when I realised I was going to be a father. I found that a much bigger shift in my thought process than I had expected, and I found it much more difficult than I had expected. I felt that it was the only event in my life that had a before and after. It was like I was born one day, then I lived for a while, then I became a father, and then I'll probably live a little while longer, and then I'll die. So I felt, I know it's so common and so humble, and it's what everybody goes through - it's just incredibly not unique - yet I felt it as this kind of profound shift. And I felt that in trying to love somebody else, just one other person, really trying to love them, was the closest thing I had known to what I'd heard other people talking about as religious experiences. So I wanted to do some kind of amalgamation of those ideas.

Audience question: ... re: feelings about Hollywood life.

EH: It's funny. I've just read [aloud] this thing, so I'm thinking about it. This whole thing where [Jimmy's] saying something like, 'I'd be in the blue sunrise, I'd be laughing or talking about guns or cars or boats or so on, and then I'd walk into a bathroom stall and start crying' - that's how Hollywood makes me feel. I know I'm writing about the military and stuff, but.... You know, you go to one of these parties, and you shake everybody's hand, and you're like, 'Check out that girl, she's so hot, and she's so neat'; and you go into the bathroom and you want to shave your skin off. And I don't know why. So really, when we started dating, I desperately tried to get away from my wife. Because I so badly didn't want any more of that in my life. I knew I was going to fall in love with her...

[AUDIO TAPE CHANGE - SECTION MISSING]

... And the irony of it all was that she really taught me how to get my sense of humour about it all back. It's only so disgusting if you take it all seriously. If you have a good sense of humour about it, then it dissipates. Also, in my day-to-day life I don't feel a part of the Hollywood community. Every now and then, someone who you might consider as [part of] the Hollywood community, or the Hollywood elite, like Denzel Washington - well every now and then one of these guys is like a major human being, and really very exciting. I admired him so much. I thought his performance in Malcolm X was the Raging Bull of the 90s, and the only reason I wanted to do that movie [Training Day] was to watch him work. Very rarely do you have someone who's kind of a hero, and then you meet them, and he's even more of a hero when it's over. So if that's the Hollywood community then I'll take it. [However], most of the people are really pretty.... Just for fun, I had a meeting the other day that was so exemplary. (Mimics:) 'I don't know what you're interested in doing. I make movies. Some people make films, some people make cinema. I don't care about that, I make movies. People want to be entertained. And I want to entertain them'. And he's sitting there across the desk, and I'm thinking, 'Good for you'. I didn't say this - I wish I did; but you'll see this in something I write some day. I wanted to say, 'Oh, I get it. People, in their day-to-day life, between work and slumber, have difficulty figuring out what to do with their time, and you waste it'. 'You are a timewaster - good for you', you know. That's kind of the whole mentality. You talked about irony and everything - I do think we live in a time period when being earnest makes people really uncomfortable. You're supposed to be so cool and reserved and think everybody's full of shit. But I really get excited about people who are earnest... I've now totally lost the question...

RE: You've brought us to The Importance of Being Earnest...

EH: ... Yeah, which comes out on Friday...

Audience question: ... re: The Dead Poets' Society

EH: The expression 'it changed my life' is very much overused and, as I said, it doesn't compete with being a father at all. But that movie meant a lot to my generation. To be eighteen, and 'gather ye rosebuds while ye may'; 'we're food for worms, lad', 'carpe diem' and all that stuff ... and I'm sitting there for four months being inundated with this stuff. And not only that, I'm working. I'm just a student. I don't know what I want to do with my life. There's Peter Weir, who's a great film director, and Robin Williams: these real artists who've achieved something with their life; and they're the one's who are saying this stuff to me. So say the movie came out and died a quick death, it still would have deeply affected me. And then put on top of that, that the movie was a wild international success, and changed the course of my life. I really wanted to be a writer when I did that movie. I went into acting school because it was my only way to get a scholarship, and for whatever reason, doors opened when I did that. But I really wanted to be Jack London, or Hemingway, or someone. And all these avenues of opportunity opened up for me. I just started getting movie jobs; and found it really hard to stay in school.

Audience question: ... (inaudible)

EH: (Ironically:) Oddly enough, we're very much in love. And now is as good a time as any, to tell you all.....

RE: [Wraps up conversation with thanks; mentions book-signing; introduces clip from Tape] ..... ends