Ethan Hawke on the ‘madness’ of Flannery O’Connor

By Adam Davidson

When Maya Hawke was in need of an audition piece for Julliard, the “Stranger Things” star wanted to avoid the generic Shakespearean soliloquies and instead opted to perform a monologue from Southern Gothic writer Flannery O’Connor’s “Prayer Journal.”

Her dad, four-time Academy Award-nominee Ethan Hawke, recalls being “blown away” when she first performed it to the family in their kitchen. From that point on, the novelist has held an important place in the hearts of the Hawke family.

“The most interesting aspect of her was how devout she was,” says Hawk père. “She was a woman of immense faith yet she wrote about all these sinners. She had this really boring life but with one immense crisis point.”

So naturally, when Maya met with Joe Goodman, the rights holder of O’Connor’s life and works, it seemed like a no-brainer that her dad and his partner Ryan Shawhughes would make a movie about her life.

Directed by Ethan Hawke, “Wildcat” follows O’Connor as she was struggling to publish her first novel and had just been diagnosed with lupus at 24. Hawke sat down with Brooklyn Magazine to talk about the movie, which is out in theaters on May 3, how it came about and the “ferocious, Charles Bukowski madness” of Flannery O’Connor.

This interview has been lightly edited for concision and clarity

Hawke (Photo by Francois Berthier)

What was it about Flannery O’Connor that made you want to make a film about her?
There was something so incongruous about everything I had heard about the person Flannery O’Connor and her writing. She looked like she’d be writing books like Louisa May Alcott or Emily Dickinson, but instead, there was all of this ferocious, Charles Bukowski madness that would pour out of her. That always made me really interested about who she was.

Do you have a personal connection to this story?
There’s something about the power of the short story and I found myself revisiting them constantly throughout my life, more so than you would a novel. There’s a great ease in dealing with a short story because you can read them quickly but they can have an immense power. I got hypnotized by her imagination, her faith and her life story was really interesting to me. Maya really wanted to play her, it was Maya’s idea. She had a bee in her bonnet about playing this human being so we needed to know what a movie about her would look like.

The movie takes place before she has written a novel, was it difficult to pinpoint the framing of the
story?
It was pretty easy for me. I thought the most interesting aspect of her was how devout she was. She was a woman of immense faith yet she wrote about all these sinners. She had this really boring life but with one immense crisis point, which was at 24 she was diagnosed with Lupus. She thought this was a death sentence as her father died of Lupus in the 1950s. She spent the next 15 years of her life not knowing whether she was going to see the next Christmas. It brought mortality into a very powerful young imagination. I just wanted to tell the story of that moment of her acceptance of her situation. We end the movie before she’s ever been published.

You open the movie with the quote, “Writing isn’t an escape from reality, it’s a plunge into reality.” Being an actor must feel like this too?
That quote has a lot of meaning to me. People often say that “acting is playing pretend,” yet I find it quite the opposite. You’re diving into your imagination where you can really look hard at reality through other characters and if the imagination is complete enough then you can really learn a lot from it.

It’s also a timeless tale of artists that push the boundaries and aren’t accepted in their time.
That’s the kind of inspiring tale for all of us artists trying to be creative in this world, the great majority of whom are met with massive indifference. A handful of people are heralded but there’s a tremendous amount of people out there working. Whether it’s Henry David Thoreau, Flannery O’Connor or Emily Dickinson, the stories of people who aspire to an extreme high level of excellence and were met with absolute dismissal. All of us can gain power from them.

The next movie you’re adapting is Tennessee Williams’ “Camino Real,” which you performed on Broadway in 1999. Do you need to have that personal attachment to projects before you take them on?
Writing is so time consuming, you have to be all in. I’ve been acting for so long and I know how to do it and I know the craft of it. You can work really hard for a few months and then you’re out. But if you’re going to direct a movie you have to care deeply about it, so all the things that I’ll go on to direct will have something personal about it.

What are the challenges of directing?
To be honest, I find it incredibly relaxing. I’ve spent my life on film sets as an actor where so much of the focus is external and it makes me so self-conscious. I’ve been nervous on film sets all my life so it’s so nice to not worry about what you wear. Let everyone else be nervous and you can just encourage them.

Directors like to have certain rules on set, for example, Tarantino doesn’t allow phones or sleeping on set. Do you have any rules?
People like Tarantino have spent most of their time on film sets, but on their own film sets. But, when you learn about directing as an actor, I’ve been on so many director’s sets like Richard Linklater, Antoine Fuqua, Peter Weir, Sidney Lumet, Alfonso Cuarón. I’ve worked with so many filmmakers all over the world and seen so many different ways of working, all of which can be wildly successful or completely annoying. I picked and chose from what I enjoy. A lot of director’s processes aren’t really conducive to the actor but as I come to this as a performer, I think about what’s going to help the actors.

Liam Neeson has a brief cameo in this movie but has such a powerful impact. He’s like a whirlwind. What was that scene like to direct?
That was the most important scene in the film and I knew I needed that. Everything is working towards that scene and that’s the event of the movie in many ways so I needed it to be great. I love Liam Neeson’s acting, he’s so simple and clear and I’ve known him for years so I’m glad it worked out.

2025 will mark 40 years since your first movie, “Explorers.” Does that feel surreal?
Everything I might say about that is cliche, it’s just gone by so quickly! I remember when I was a little kid and I’d hear somebody say they’ve been doing something for 40 years, I’d think, “How could you possibly do that? It must get so boring.” But 40 years goes by so fast, you realize that one lifetime is not enough to excel at a field, especially in the arts.

What are your memories from that movie?
I remember it very vividly, but it is actually easier to remember. I probably remember “Explorers” better than I do something six years ago. It was such a pivotal event in my life and everything was new and every experience was a huge learning lesson for me. One of the things that I learned from Joe Dante was that he had a contagious passion for movies. He loved intellectual movies, Horror movies and weird movies. He started a way of thinking about movies for me, it was really helpful.

This was just before River Phoenix had his breakout role in “Stand by Me.” It sounds cliche but could you tell that he’d become a huge star?
River had a light about him. He had a magic quality about him that was there from the get-go and that made his passing all the more sadder. It’s hard to articulate but you meet people that just have a glow and he had it always. He was a really wonderful first scene partner because neither one of us knew a damn thing about acting but we were really excited. It was really fun to talk about characters, we were kids but we were both falling in love with and apprenticing this profession.

I remember “Amadeus” came out whilst we were shooting and we went to see it and would talk for hours about Tom Hulce, F. Murray Abraham. He was reading “Catcher in the Rye” and I gave him Sam Sheppard plays. It was fun but we didn’t know what the hell we were doing. We were just feeling out the profession for the first time.

Early in your career you starred with icons like Jack Lemmon, how much did that experience help your development as an actor?
Jack Lemmon was amazing. People don’t often ask me about him but [this is someone] who won an Oscar, was in films like “Some Like it Hot,” “Mister Roberts” and worked with Henry Fonda and Lucille Ball. I would sit in the hair and makeup trailer with him and it was almost like touching the previous 50 years of cinema.

What was your takeaway from that experience?
How humble he was. He was the type of person that if you hung out with him for 30 minutes you could completely forget he was famous. He was so down to Earth and authentic and interested about other people and obviously really funny. It was really inspiring to me that somebody could have his level of success and remain such an authentic and grounded human being.

You also starred alongside Robin Williams in “Dead Poets Society.”
Robin was inspirational in other ways. He was a comic genius, he wasn’t like other people. His creativity was brilliant to witness. Brilliant is an overused word… but he was really brilliant.