Ethan Hawke Goes Back in Time to Visit His Most Iconic Characters

It doesn't matter what character I play.

You're always your character's lawyer.

You're their advocate.

(upbeat pop music)

Dead Poets Society, directed by Peter Weir,

starring, obviously, the great Robin Williams.

I remember everything about that movie.

Robin was a genius, meaning I've never met anybody like him,

remotely like him.

He was a comic genius.

Take one, two, three, four, five, six,

seven, eight, nine, 10,

11, 12, 13, 14,

15, 16, 17, they'd all be different,

just endless.

But, funnily enough, he wasn't really the master on set.

Peter Weir was a great leader,

and showed all of us how to be serious

about making art, and that doesn't mean like self-serious.

We played around.

He had speakers installed in the classrooms

so you could just crank the music.

I felt I was in the hands of a person

who was a serious craftsman.

It wasn't some airy fairy like art thing.

He was gonna build a movie, brick by brick.

Todd Anderson was my character.

It's an aspect of me that I've visited

in other characters, too,

somebody who has no self-confidence,

and it was funny, because I really wanted to play Neil.

That is the character who killed himself.

He was a really outgoing guy,

and I was a pretty gregarious young man, you know?

So I thought that I was more right for that part,

and Robert Sean Leonard, who played Neil,

thought he was more right for Todd because he was

a very shy and withdrawn person.

Peter had this beautiful notion, Peter Weir,

that you always cast for the final color,

meaning that, at the end of the movie,

my character needed to stand up on this desk

and say, Oh, captain, my captain,

and he wanted to believe that,

so you have to act the shy part,

but so that, when the truth comes out,

your real self is revealed.

Oh captain, my captain.

Sit down, Mr. Anderson.

Do you hear me?

Something I've never forgotten,

casting for the final color.

After Dead Poets Society,

I thought that's what making a movie was like,

working with Robin Williams and Peter Weir.

I had an amazing experience with these people,

and that's what I thought making a movie was like,

and I was continually disappointed after that,

because it's not what making a movie life.

Often, it's business.

Often, people are there for a paycheck.

When things go right, it all seems very easy,

and when things are difficult, then it's like wow,

you see how hard it is to make a good movie.

Explorers, directed by Joe Dante,

my first movie with River Phoenix.

I learned a lot watching River's career.

When he did My Own Private Idaho,

it was incredibly dangerous thing to do as a teen idol,

to play a gay character.

It's very common now, and it's one of the biggest things

that's shifted from my generation to my son's,

is people being comfortable talking about homosexuality.

That was very verboten when River and I were 21.

River was an artist.

He didn't think like that.

He thought outside the box like that.

His whole family, you know, were not ordinary thinkers.

They were revolutionary thinkers, you know?

They were the first vegetarians I'd ever met.

I remember going to sleep over at his house

and I had these, you know, mushroom and avocado burgers,

and I remember thinking what is this?

But they really opened my eyes,

and River was a very beautiful person,

and obviously, you learn that it's a dangerous road,

is the road of a teen celebrity, you know?

Or any kind of celebrity for that matter.

Reality Bites, starring Winona Rider,

directed by Ben Stiller.

So, it was Ben Stiller's first movie.

He was this immensely talented young man.

He was a comic,

but to my mind, he struck me as a comic

the way Buster Keaton is a comic or something.

He's dark and serious and wild

and mischievous and strange and talented.

Of course, it was really Winona's movie.

Winona made that happen.

Winona was the biggest star in the world at that moment,

and that whole movie is her passion project.

You know, that character was another aspect of me, you know?

I mean, pretentious and self-serious and full of himself,

and wildly insecure and I don't know.

It was guys I knew, guys I wanted to be,

guys I didn't like.

If you really do it right,

it doesn't matter who you're playing.

You really get immersed in their point of view.

I love Troy, you know?

Hey, That's My Bike is still the best name for a band.

(upbeat strings music)

The Before Trilogy, Before Sunset, Before Sunrise,

Before Midnight, directed by Richard Linklater.

I met Richard Linklater

before Dazed and Confused had come out,

but I saw an early screening of it

'cause I was running this theater company,

and he came to see the play that night.

He told me about Before Sunrise.

You know, he sent me the script.

It's back, you know, before email and stuff,

so we actually partied all night.

I remember saying goodbye to him

at like 4:10 in the morning, and then I woke up at noon,

and there, in my mailbox,

was a script.

That's the way I remember it, anyway,

you know, with his handwriting on it.

Hey, check this out.

It was Before Sunrise, and I read it,

and don't tell him, but it was a mess, frankly,

but I knew I wanted to work with him,

so I actually thought he was offering me the part,

but he wasn't, I realized.

My agent said, No, he wants you to audition,

so I came in and I auditioned,

and I auditioned a shit ton of times,

and I finally got the part,

and we started working on the movie.

It was one of the best summers of my life,

the summer of 1994 in Vienna, with Julie Delpy,

and all I remember is running lines.

We just ran epic lines in that movie,

and we just had to spend every day memorizing writing.

People think, you know,

the movie has the illusion of spontaneity.

It's meticulously rehearsed,

'cause if you watch that movie,

a lot of the movie plays out in single takes,

so it's not a movie you can find in the editing room.

You can't cut anything out,

so Rick would have to rehearse with us

over and over and over again.

We rehearsed that movie for over a month before we shot it,

and that's rare, with movies.

Nine years later, we did Before Sunset,

and nine years after that, we did Before Midnight.

I didn't have an idea there'd be a trilogy

until we finished the third.

We spent months and months

trying to come up with the title, Before Sunset.

You know, the first film had been called Before Sunrise,

and everybody said you're making a sequel,

what's it gonna be called, Before Sunset?

And everybody'd laugh, 'cause it just seemed so obvious,

you know?

We were like no, no, no.

It should be called this, or we'd come up with

some pretentious title or this pretentious title,

and finally, one day, we were like

maybe we should just call it Before Sunset?

People who are fans of it sometimes ask me,

you know, will there be a fourth,

and there's something that feels complete about it to me.

The first one opens with a couple in their forties,

fighting in a train, and the camera pulls back

to reveal these young people,

and then, in the third movie, we are the couple fighting,

in our forties, and there's something cyclical about that.

To revisit those movies, each decade of my life

and getting it to be kind of this shadow self,

an alternate universe where Jesse and Celine really exist,

you know, and Julie and Rick and I,

we grew to love Jesse and Celine.

Still do.

Boyhood, Richard Linklater.

I can't separate Boyhood from my relationship

with Richard Linklater, you know?

I mean, he had this idea that,

how phony most coming of age movies were,

'cause they happened in one moment,

whereas literature, you can tell the whole story

of somebody's childhood.

It's much easier to cover time, but because actors age,

you either have to hire different actors,

which kinda breaks the spell,

or you have to pretend like that a person's life

was changed in one moment,

as opposed to what Boyhood is about

is this accumulation of moments

that come to feel like one thing, called your youth.

It's the one time of our lives,

in America, anyway, we're all in the same grid.

First grade through twelfth grade,

we all kinda know where, you know,

when you're in eighth grade,

you know where you're gonna be in three years.

You're gonna be in eleventh grade.

It's an interesting architecture for a movie,

and I remember him kind of telling me the idea.

He wanted me to do a portrait of fatherhood,

you know, and to really use myself and my experiences

as a child of divorce,

and I had a marriage that was breaking up,

to write about that

and help him, ride shotgun with him

when he did this huge, huge adventure

of trying to make a movie over 12 years,

and it was the most incredible idea I'd ever heard.

I remember, as soon as he said it,

I was like, oh, wow, man, let's do it.

But, of course, who was ever gonna give you money

to make a movie that they're not gonna get return on

for 13 years, and you can't even sign any contracts,

'cause you know, it's not legal to sign a contract

for more than seven years,

so the whole thing was a handshake deal.

I didn't think that we would finish the movie

for five or six years.

I hoped we did, but it wasn't until we were seven

or eight years into it, I was like you know what?

We're gonna finish this thing.

Gattaca, Andrew Niccol's first film.

Yeah, I fell in love on that set, you know?

Uma got pregnant and had Maya,

and that's a great, great time of my life.

Well, you know, people can say that,

but you know, all children look a lot like their parents.

They act like, because their parents are movie actors,

she's somehow different than any other

human being in the planet.

Most people look a lot like their mom and dad.

Gattaca's a meticulously designed film.

The costumes are incredible.

The art direction is incredible,

and it's difficult to do a futuristic movie

without a lot of money.

We really had to design a world,

and Andrew was brilliant.

You know, we got 50s cars and Frank Lloyd Wright buildings,

and he just made this whole hodgepodge of design influences

that was beautiful, and the writing,

of course, is phenomenal.

I've done two really good science fiction,

Gattaca and Predestination.

Predestination is a movie that many people haven't seen,

but it's one I'm really proud of.

The guys who made that movie, The Spierig Brothers,

are big Gattaca fans, and so I think that's why

they wanted me to be in it.

It's Predestination owes, from a design point of view,

it owes some ideas to Gattaca.

Predestination, my second film with The Spierig Brothers.

My favorite Predestination story is that the other day,

I had a cop pull me over, and I was like what is it?

He goes, Look, I'm sorry to pull you over,

but I gotta know, Predestination,

I watched it twice, what happened?

Yeah, and he's like, Are they?

And I was like they are,

and then he's like, Wow, thank you.

I love that movie.

I love science fiction.

That's based on a Robert Heinlein short story.

Sara Snook gives one of my favorite performances

I've ever been party to, you know?

People don't really talk about acting.

You know, if you make an indie movie, an art film,

people talk about the acting,

but when the acting disappears inside a genre film,

it gets lost 'cause people,

the movie works, and you get lost in the world

and you just believe the character,

but Sara Snook.

She plays a man, she plays a woman,

she plays in between.

Just an amazing performance,

that also serves a science fiction plot.

Great Expectations, Alfonso Cuaron's first American movie.

He's gone on to be one of the great directors

of his generation, and I feel proud that I knew that

the second I met him.

We met at a diner in Chelsea.

He wanted me to do Great Expectations.

I had no desire to do that movie.

You know, that whole novel is about class,

and I really felt that, if you were gonna make a movie

about class in America, that Pip,

my character, should be Latino or African American.

He should be, you know, a person of color,

but Alfonso completely disagreed,

and he loved Before Sunrise, and he wanted me

to play the part, and he was completely compelling.

An amazing

artist, just the way he talked about movies

was so exciting.

De Niro is, you know, one of a handful of first ballot

hall of famers that I've ever come in contact with.

He's just one of the greatest people of my profession,

and he was just the top,

and then, in the last 20 years,

he's gone on to be one of the greatest comics

of his generation.

I just admire him so much, you know?

And he's a no-bullshit guy.

I learned a lot working with him,

simply because I was still very young,

and I was waiting for people to give me permission

to do the work I wanted to do.

Gwyneth and I were friends before that started,

and we're kind of waiting for directors

to give us permission to do great work,

and De Niro just comes in and does it.

You know, he's in charge of his own work.

I learned a lot.

Ultimately, like I said, they didn't really,

Alfonso was trying to do something new with it.

We all just goofed around,

trying to make a story that spoke to us.

People like that movie now,

and they liked it when it came out,

but it came out a couple weeks after Titanic,

and so nobody gave a shit about anything but Titanic

for about nine months after Titanic came out,

particularly another romance, you know,

that didn't involve a giant ship sinking

and the most incredible effects of all time,

and Leo and Kate and James Cameron,

so we were kind of lost in the, what do you call it,

the aftershock of Titanic.

(gentle music)

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead,

directed by Sidney Lumet.

Sidney Lumet's last film, he was 83.

You know, I've worked with a handful of genuine,

card-carrying masters from the filmmaking department,

but Sidney,

I mean, I was being directed by a guy

who directed Marlon Brando

in one of his greatest performances

in a black and white movie written by Tennessee Williams.

And Henry Fonda's greatest part in 12 Angry Men, you know?

Al Pacino, he directed Al Pacino in Serpico

and Dog Day Afternoon,

but it wasn't just like some doddering old dude.

You know, he was on fire.

He was not going to let his opportunity go by.

He grabbed it by the hair.

If you see that movie, it's a young man's movie.

I mean, it's angry and blistering

and surprising and strange,

and it's not the work of somebody phoning anything in.

I remember sitting on an airplane with him.

We were going to the Toronto Film Festival,

and he said to me, he said,

You know, if we told everybody I was dying,

I'd win the Oscar for this picture.

That's how dumb the Oscars are, he said.

They just need a narrative, you know?

And I remember thinking there,

does he mean that he's sick?

So you don't let yourself think those thoughts

when you're sitting with them.

I mean, you know, you just don't wanna think about it,

if it's his last film.

It seems like bad luck or something like that,

but it's not like it was a surprise

that that could have happened.

Hamlet, directed by Michael Almereyda,

written by a young, aspiring writer

named William Shakespeare.

Hamlet lends itself to reinterpretation more than,

you know, Dickens, I would say,

and Michael Almereyda had a brilliant idea.

This is something,

I remember when he first talked to me about it.

He had this vision of Hamlet

walking through a video store

and not being able to decide what movie to rent,

and that kind of represents an existential crisis.

You know, funnily enough, they don't even have

video stores anymore, but at that moment, in 2000,

now it would be the equivalent

of going online an getting lost.

I felt lucky, because I was one of the,

I'd always had a dream of playing Hamlet young.

You know, so often, on stage, you see older guys,

you see guys my age play Hamlet, you know?

Really, he's

still in school, you know?

He's supposed to be a student, I always thought,

and I was proud to be,

you know, be in my 20s and playing Hamlet.

Training Day, Jake Hoyt was a great character,

but he existed in relationship to Alonzo, you know?

I mean, I got to sit shotgun on

one of the greatest actors of our time

creating one of his indelible portraits,

as he worked on that.

Getting to watch, you know,

we did ride arounds with cops,

and we saw some crazy things, you know?

And Antoine Fuqua is an amazing director,

and he was young,

and he had something to say.

Denzel had something to say,

and that script was ice hot,

but I'd really gotten a lot of confidence.

The first 10 years or so of my career,

I would say I might have had some talent,

but I didn't have any confidence.

You can't have real confidence without experience.

You're kind of faking it when you start, everybody is.

You've got to, and I was just starting to get confidence,

enough confidence to act with Denzel

and not, you know, be a shrinking violet.

You know, anything that I had learned from De Niro

and stuff, you know, went to another level with Denzel,

'cause it was just a much more all-encompassing experience.

Magnificent Seven, Antoine said that he and Denzel

were making Magnificent Seven,

and I said that means there's six other parts, dude,

and I'd better be one of them,

and there we were, all deciding to make a Hollywood western.

Antoine had every toy.

We had Gatling guns and 100 horses and careens,

and it's the biggest budget movie I ever made.

It was an event, making that movie.

It was 107 in the shade and raining.

We'd spent the day on a horse.

I'd be in like this wool suit,

and just, I'd have to change my suit like four times a day,

just dripping in sweat.

We had the best stunt team in the world.

This guy, Jeff Dashnaw, was old-fashioned.

There's none of the new computer tricks.

These guys, they were out there,

it was like the stuff of legend, these guys.

I told Antoine, I was like,

one day we're walking down the street,

I was like, my character had this lame death,

and I was like, I'm the sniper.

I'd be up there.

I should be in the church tower, you know?

I should get shot up there and fall down,

and then I looked over, 'cause Jeff was the lead stunt guy,

and his son, Nick, was my stunt guy,

and he goes, That means Nick's

gotta fall from that church,

and I was like, oh, yeah, it does.

Nick'll do it, won't ya, Nick?

Hell, yeah, Dad.

And you know, they did a beautiful, beautiful stunt.

Maggie's Plan, written and directed by Rebecca Miller.

It was wonderful to be directed by a woman, you know?

95% of the movies that I've done have been directed by men.

I mean, it's just, I'm a symptom of my era,

but Rebecca Miller,

she's this fabulously dressed,

funny, witty, smart, and you know,

kinda all over the place, but then secretly brilliant.

Greta Gerwig is, you know,

I'm working with some of the best women of my generation,

you know, Julianne Moore.

I haven't been in very many comedies,

and when I started acting,

I really thought that's what I'd do.

I remember when I started, my favorite actor,

one of them was John Cusack and Warren Beatty,

so Maggie's Plan was fun for me to channel

my inner Warren Beatty.

One of my favorite lines, like you know,

I don't want you to fall in love with the pickle man,

something like that, I can't remember it exactly,

but I liked working with Greta.

She comes at acting from a similar vantage point that I do.

And so does Julianne Moore, actually.

You know, we all, well, particularly both of them,

they think like filmmakers.

Julie really understands the way movies work,

and how storytelling looks,

the actual geometry and math of making a good movie,

and what an audience wants to see.

She has a great awareness of that.

Greta is a writer.

I like being on set, acting with people who write,

like myself, I like people like me.

First Reformed, written and directed by Paul Schrader.

I had never worked with Paul before.

Paul, for people that don't know,

you know, he wrote Taxi Driver,

and when I got the script,

I knew it was one of the best characters

I'd ever been offered.

He's a great writer, and great writers speak to their time

and speak to their moment.

And First Reformed, I think, speaks to right now,

in much the same way.

When you think about movies and the history of movies,

you know, you don't really see very many movies

that deal in a grown-up,

serious way with your spiritual life.

Most of us wonder why we're born and why we die

and wonder what we're doing here.

What is it all for?

Why do we go through all this?

And there's a certain community of the world

that spends their life thinking about this,

which is the religious community,

and you don't see very many of them in movies.

If you do, it's like in The Exorcist or something,

or they're bad guys, or they're comics.

You don't see a serious portrait

of somebody who's dedicated their life

to some of the toughest questions,

and Paul is smart enough and well-educated

to write such a part.

The movie, in a lot of ways, is like a scream.

It's like a roar from an old lion, you know,

who's kind of roaring at his own generation

and roaring at young people.

He's just asking questions,

and I think that that's like one of the jobs of movies.