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The joys, magic and business side of filmmaking, his take on independent and blockbuster movies, including Star Wars and Harry Potter, as well as his collaborations with directors Richard Linklater and Peter Weir, and his lack of work with many female filmmakers, were all part of a Venice Film Festival master class featuring actor-director Ethan Hawke in Venice on Monday.
Early on in the session, which was live-streamed, the star recalled coming to Venice for Dead Poets Society. “It was my first film festival. I was 18 years old. We showed the movie down the street, and it was an incredible experience,” Hawke recalled. “There were a lot of people who made the movie with us there at the premiere, and you could feel the movie cast a spell, and you could feel people’s response to the film.”
He continued that director Weir “was at that time, and still is, one of the very few master craftsmen I’ve ever met, and to work with him as a young person, and to absorb what he had to teach and then to see its effect in action” was impressive. “It was an act of collective imagination…. He was very good at getting a group of artisans to have the same imagination and the same dream, and then to watch that dream be given to others and received. It’s very powerful.”
Hawke then added, to laughs: “It was kind of like how one hears about the joys of doing drugs. You just want to do it again. It’s such a wonderful feeling because you don’t feel alone.” The creative continued: “There’s a strange double-edged sword to being an actor, which is that on the outside, you get celebrated in success, but the true joys of performing are in disappearing…you feel yourself disappear and become part of this dream. And that’s the feeling that’s so wonderful. And you see the dream live in other people, and that’s where the high comes from. And no sooner did I leave Venice at 18 years old that I just wanted to do it again. And as I look out at you, I’m so grateful to be here with you and to get to be a part of this still.” The crowd reacted with a big round of applause.
Hawke noted that he has made a lot of films with many different, but mostly male directors. “I’ve worked with a lot of men from all over the world,” he said. “And I’ve only worked with a handful of female directors, which is, I would say, embarrassing for me, but it’s embarrassing for the industry because I want to.”
In the wide-ranging discussion, the star also shared that he has much respect for filmmakers selling properties, and taking personal financial risks, as Francis Ford Coppola did to self-fund Megalopolis, to make dream projects. “Greed runs our universe,” Hawke said. “If you say you just want to make money, everybody understands what you are going for, and they are fine with it. ‘Great, yeah, good. Oh, yeah, he sold 10 billion Big Macs. Good for him.’ No, you just poisoned the whole world.” Added the actor: “I love it when people keep the great dream alive of making something magnificent, and it’s very hard because the whole industry that runs movie making is designed to make money — and most of all our favorite movies, that’s not what was motivating the project.” Concluded Hawke: “I would never want to not be a person that wouldn’t sell their house to make a movie. I love that. I think it’s cool. I admire the hell out of it.”
Making Before Sunrise was the start of his “adult relationship” with film, Hawke said, followed by his continuing friendship with Linklater. He noted that the two have made nine or 10 films together now, depending on how one counts it.
“Richard was the first great artist that I had met that was of my generation, and he was a friend, but…he doesn’t think about how to be a big shot,” the actor said. “He doesn’t want to impress you. He doesn’t want you to think he’s fabulous. He really loves the medium of what film could be. And he’s really always such a student himself.”
Hawke also shared: “He loves European cinema. He loves world cinema, and he’s really interested, even as a young man he was extremely interested in how this form was going to change over our generation, over this time, and how to contribute to that dialog.”
At some point, Hawke even joked about the continuing education of film creatives. “At 16, I thought I knew everything. At 53, I feel like I don’t know anything,” he quipped.
He also sees himself as a student of the art. “I feel like a student of this profession, and there is a certain geometry to all films,” which differs between movies of different genres and budget sizes, Hawke shared, speaking of “the math of the genre.”
Hawke on Monday also compared making independent films with Linklater and others to tentpole movies. “If you go see Harry Potter or Star Wars or something, which I’ve seen a million times, and I love them, but when they are over, I feel slightly disappointed that I’m not a wizard or a Jedi,” he quipped. “And I walk through my life thinking, I wish I were a Jedi. And when you see a Richard Linklater film, you walk out feeling, ‘well, I’ve done that. I’ve met a person, I’ve connected with another human being, and that was important, and that was magic.’ It’s like that old Zen quote: ‘You don’t have to walk on water, you get to walk on Earth’. Isn’t that amazing? I feel that’s what Richard Linklater’s movies do — remind you that it’s a miracle that we walk on Earth and that we breathe at all, and that there’s whales and giraffes and life is unbelievable if you don’t hyperbolize it.”
Hawke shared that he originally never wanted to be in a horror film but likes the genre, partly thanks to Joe Dante, and enjoyed the story behind Sinister. He highlighted that horror movies must first of all be scary and “function” within their genre even if they also address big “socio-political” issues underneath.
Asked about his love for music and directing, Hawke shared that “how to work with the music” is his favorite part of directing. And he said that learning lines as an actor can be dry and boring, but learning them or setting them in connection with music changes that. The star then lauded Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, which wowed Venice on Sunday, including its music.
Hawke on Monday also received an audience question about his new Linklater film Blue Moon, a drama about the final days of Lorenz Hart, half of the famous songwriting team of Richard Rodgers and Hart that is set on the opening night of Oklahoma! “I just finished shooting, so this is the first time I’ve ever been asked a question about the movie,” he said, sharing that he needed to work harder on it than other projects.
He then entertained the crowd with the backstory about how the making of the movie at this time came about. “Richard is such a strange person. He sent me this script about 12 years ago, and I read it, and it was one of the best scripts I ever read,” Hawke explained. “It all takes place in real time. It’s 90 minutes in 1943. It’s an amazing script.” When the actor told Linklater, “We got to make this movie,” the director urged patience. “He said, ‘No, no, yeah, cool, cool. We’re going to make it, but we need to wait a while,’” Hawke recalled. “He goes, ‘You’re still too attractive. We got to wait till you’re a little less attractive. I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ He said, ‘Just trust me, we’ll do is, let’s just put it in a drawer.’”
After that, every couple of years the two would read it again to see if they were ready. “And then he saw me on an interview. I was on the Jimmy Fallon show or something last year, and he called me up and he said, ‘Hey, I saw you on Jimmy Fallon,’” Hawke told the Venice audience. “And I said, ‘Oh, great, yeah. How’d it go?’ He goes, ‘Oh, it was fine. Let’s make Blue Moon. We’re ready.’” Hawke shared his response of “go to hell,” drawing laughs and at least two call-outs from the audience that he was still very attractive.
Hawke also answered an audience question about how he has dealt with setbacks in his career. “Tears have been shed. I have come up against the wall all the time,” the actor-director told the master class. “The world is not built to make our dreams come true. It’s not designed that way.”
He also acknowledged: “I come to these festivals. I’m 53 years old. Sometimes these remarkable movies get made, and I get so jealous. ‘How did they get that movie made? How did they do that? Why doesn’t the world let me do that? I could do that.’ And then you have to wrestle that feeling down and turn it into something positive and realize that there’s not one pie. Because they did it, you are more likely to be able to do it, if you can.”
Hawke will in a few weeks be honored with the Golden Panther Award at the Lucca Film Festival in Italy and present his latest film Wildcat, in which he directed his daughter Maya, on Sept. 26. Hawke will also hold a master class at that fest and present Lucca’s Lifetime Achievement Award to Paul Schrader, who directed him in First Reformed.
Earlier Venice 2024 master classes have featured Sigourney Weaver, who discussed the legacy of her Ripley character in Alien and the rise of Kamala Harris, legendary Australian director Weir, who joked about having to step in to fix Mel Gibson and Weaver’s “bad” kissing when filming The Year of Living Dangerously, and Richard Gere who quipped that he and Julia Roberts had “no chemistry” in Pretty Woman.
