Ethan Hawke | Archive

0:00Ethan Hawke:This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

0:04Adam K. W. M. K. J. F. M. A. M. L. K.:TCM and Criterion joined forces for The Plot Thickens Stanley. This season's podcast traces Stanley Kubrick's journey from a curious Bronx teenager, first inspired by a camera gifted to him by his father, to a revolutionary filmmaker who rewrote the rules, featuring a never-before-heard audio interview with Kubrick himself. Go behind the camera with some of Kubrick's closest friends and collaborators to examine his legacy, including Katerina Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, Sofia Coppola, Matthew Modine, and many more. Available Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

0:59Ethan Hawke:on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow Hey Jonas and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

1:05Adam K. W. M. K. J. F. M. A. M. L. K.:Hey Jonas is sponsored by Edible Arrangements. Order yours today at edible.com.

1:13Ethan Hawke:What kind of a show are you guys putting on here today?

1:16Adam K. W. M. K. J. F. M. A. M. L. K.:You're not interested in art? No. Now look, we're going to do this thing.

1:19Ethan Hawke:We're going to have a conversation.

1:23Adam K. W. M. K. J. F. M. A. M. L. K.:Hey Film Spotters, archive drop time and we're thinking about the new Ethan Hawke and Russell Crowe movie coming out, The Weight. We also know that The Next Picture Show is covering this film, and we thought, why not go back to the interview, Josh, that I usually answer when people ask me, what's your favorite interview that you've ever done? I am a little bit hesitant to say it's my favorite, though, because I then have to follow that up by saying, I didn't really have to do much. It's not necessarily an interview where I can point to my incredible skills as an interviewer and all the amazing preparation I did.

2:08All my great questions.

2:10Adam K. W. M. K. J. F. M. A. M. L. K.:Ethan Hawke is just truly one of our most insightful artists and one of the great talkers of our time. And you can pretty much let him go no matter what you throw at him. Yeah, it seems like he's developed that. I wouldn't say it's his second career because he's still very active acting, but yeah, he's developed that reputation, right? As someone who you just bring in, give him a mic, ask him a few good questions about art, and he'll return with some really thoughtful stuff. Yeah, a lot of wisdom here. This is from 2018 when he was doing press for his Blaze Foley biopic Blaze, a movie that he directed.

2:50Adam K. W. M. K. J. F. M. A. M. L. K.:On that same show, we did our top five Ethan Hawke moments with Keith Phipps from The Next Picture Show. Enjoy.

2:57Ethan Hawke:Okie dokie, smoky pokey. This next song is my wedding song. I don't know who Blaise Foley is. It's actually, it's Blaise Foley.

3:08Adam K. W. M. K. J. F. M. A. M. L. K.:You really should know who Blaise was. I'm going to open with kind of a long-winded one, so bear with me here a little bit. I like it already. watching your movie i am immediately thinking about the biopic as a genre conventional ones anyway which i would say your film is certainly not a conventional one and often they're concerned to me they seem concerned with psychology trying to explain behavior of these characters rather than maybe trying to just observe behavior but the other one that really hit me watching blaze and it's something i never really considered before is that biopics on some level are excuses to enact or reenact these kind of signpost moments from characters' lives that we as viewers have some attachment to.

3:49Adam K. W. M. K. J. F. M. A. M. L. K.:They're kind of part of the cultural consciousness. So we care about what's happening. And maybe we only care about what's happening because we have that attachment to it. Biopics then can be a little bit lazy. But when you're making a movie like you did where the subject is someone who's not part of that collective consciousness, we have to be invested the same way we would be with a fictional character. So my question is, How deliberately did you consider those things? How deliberately did you set out to not make a conventional biopic?

4:18Ethan Hawke:Well, I think in the DNA, as soon as you say you want to make a biopic about Blaze Foley, you're shifting the paradigm a little bit. Because almost every musical biopic that's ever been made is about somebody who's famous. Yeah. Who made it. And the subconscious, the subtext of that is that your story is worth telling because you're famous. And when I was working on this Chet Baker biopic, I was interviewing guys who played with Chet and really realizing they would say that, you know, to really know Chet, you really had to play music with him. I mean, that was where his best self was manifest.

5:01Ethan Hawke:and a couple things happened to me which was that wow first of all i want to make a movie about these guys the guys who played with chet rather than chet himself because the story of celebrity and drug addiction and you know the ups and downs of fame it's just a well-worn road and i was like wouldn't it be awesome to see a biopic where the scene where they you know we all know the narrative Right. He struggles. Something bad happens. These draws a great well of creativity from this pain. He gets discovered. He rises to the top. Now he loses what's important to him. He falls from grace, finds self and movie.

5:39Ethan Hawke:Right. And that's a really boring narrative. And it flies in the face of I've spent my life with artists, musicians, and most of them are met with just complete and utter indifference. That's not the story of their life at all. Their story is that of practicing constantly. trying really hard, having some minor little ups and basically, you know, being ignored. That's most people's experience in the arts. And I just thought Blaise Foley, somehow I was like, wow, he's the perfect, you know, vehicle to tell a more true biopic. Because like you said, I find them often extremely lazy because they have a great central performance because there's this very interesting human being at the center of which we already know a lot about.

6:23Ethan Hawke:So a lot of the work of the actor has already been done. All they have to do is imitate this other person. They don't have to do any discovery. And part of what I wanted from Ben Dickey was I cast a real musician, a guy who has cried real salty tears over the way his dreams have been treated by the music industry. Yeah. And he has something to say about that. He's not going to watch some reheated meal. He has something to offer you about his love of music and his love of Blaze and he's lived this life. And I didn't want him to impersonate Blaze. And the great thing about when Blaze isn't famous, nobody would know anyway, even if you did.

7:05Ethan Hawke:You have to make, I want you to put your blood into the movie. Use Blaze's music. Blaze gave us his music. That's where he lives. That's where the, we'll be true to the man by honoring the music. Yeah. Now let's honor the spirit of what's vital about an artist's life when they where their dreams don't come true.

7:27Adam K. W. M. K. J. F. M. A. M. L. K.:Yeah. I was going to ask you about how you settled on kind of the framing device. And that makes it sound a little more mechanical than it is in this film. There's nothing mechanical about it, but honoring the music. The music is really not just the soundtrack. It's what holds the entire narrative.

7:40Ethan Hawke:It holds it all together. I call that a country western opera, you know, which is, you know, a good musical. it tells the story of the characters through song. So I studied Blaze's music and figured out like what's the character inside the song? How could this song speak for the movie? And I had this idea that when people die there's this kind of fight over the narrative. You know, I've seen it happen over, what's the story? And the wife tells one story and the best friend tells another story and the person who worked with them tells another story. And often they don't match, you know, that they don't describe the same being.

8:18Ethan Hawke:And, and I, I think a lot about this, about past, present and future. And that was my idea. What if I made a movie where there really isn't one narrative? It's this braid of the three of them. There's the past, there's the present and the future, and they're always touching and affecting each other. And what if I could tell Blaze's life posthumously, the way people fight over the narrative after they're gone, the way the narrative is being created in the moment and the way that you know the the female point of view his lover's point of view his point of view how they're all dancing off of each other

8:53Adam K. W. M. K. J. F. M. A. M. L. K.:and i kind of just that was my device yeah another touch that i really loved with the movie and it's something i can't really recall ever seeing before is the way you show us characters in life happening outside of the point of view of that main character right so we get these little snippets sometimes where we follow the angry guy in from his truck as he then gets into a fight with Blaze. And then the guy whose job it is to clean up the remnants of the beer bottle from that fight. And then we follow him outside a little bit. And it did reinforce for me anyway, the idea that everybody's the star of their own story, right?

9:25Ethan Hawke:What I didn't want to do is make another movie that deifies the individual. That, oh, isn't it sad Blaze wasn't discovered? You know what? Blaze lived his life. And there are blazes around you all the time. That's what I wanted to do. Who's the waitress at the club where Blaze Foley works? I bet she's a musician too. Or what does she think about this song? What does the busboy think about it? What is the other person on the bus sitting about it? Hopefully what you take away from that is not that Blaze is special,

9:58Adam K. W. M. K. J. F. M. A. M. L. K.:but that we are special. I do really love that touch. As I said, and you mentioned Born to be Blue earlier, one of my favorite films of that year. Actually, your performance, I think, was my favorite of the year. Chet Baker. And I do want to ask you about one scene in particular. You'll know which one here. My apologies for quoting myself. But on the show, when I talked about that scene in my list of the year's best, I said that it starts with those familiar notes to My Funny Valentine on his horn then switches to vocals. He's there to prove he can play the trumpet the way he used to play. He mostly sings instead.

10:27Adam K. W. M. K. J. F. M. A. M. L. K.:And he's not a particularly good singer, but he commits to the performance. He connects with the music. He internalizes not just the words, but the soul of the song, and then expresses it in his own idiosyncratic way, which is what great artists do. And it's melancholy and haunting and gorgeous and weird and vulnerable and i could go on about that performance that scene what i want to ask is how the performance scenes that one in particular maybe and that entire experience of playing chet baker did ultimately inform your making of this movie there was a review i read of of chet singing that gave me real inspiration which was that it

11:01Ethan Hawke:it wasn't even somebody singing it was the memory of someone having sung already no sooner had it come out of his mouth and there was this detachment that he didn't sing well. You know, he didn't, like Nina Simone sings well. Louis Armstrong sings well. He communicates and he communicates something genuine, that there's a genuine loneliness there and there's a genuine fragility there. And he really liked to sing, but that he really liked to sing because he was so worried about his teeth that he wanted to give his horn playing a break. I found that so interesting. It's kind of like Bob Fosse as it was this amazing dancer.

11:50Ethan Hawke:And then as you study him, you realize, oh, he had a lot of problems with his legs. He was pigeon toed and he developed because he wasn't as good a dancer as he wanted, he developed this real in-step move that people found really sexy and cool, but it came from trying to hide that he couldn't go out. You know? And I find, it's this thing as a parent all the time, you're trying to say, don't be scared of what makes you unique. It's actually what makes you beautiful. And that's why I was like, you know what? I wouldn't normally think I could play this jazz musician, but because his secret was actually an actor's secret, which is you have to actually just show them how scared you are.

12:31Ethan Hawke:And then it can work.

12:33Adam K. W. M. K. J. F. M. A. M. L. K.:And that I thought I could do. Well, I use the word commits there and talking about commitment to a performance. Maybe what I appreciate most about you as an actor is your level of commitment. I was talking with our producer, Sam, about this, that we never doubt that you are 100 % all the way in on whatever it is that you're engaged in, whether it's life or whether it's art, do you think that commitment, the act of committing to something is a choice you make or is it an instinct? Is that just who you are?

13:03Ethan Hawke:Some of us are predisposed to certain things. Um, and some of us, our fears and our insecurities are encouraged by life. And sometimes we have people, I find confidence extremely fragile. you know yeah and the difference between somebody who's good at something and somebody who's great at something often is confidence and in one person it can leave we we see it in sports all the time guys on a hitting streak you know and he can't miss and then that confidence is the talent the body the molecules the parents the practice it's all the same but where's that magic confidence and where does it come from?

13:44Ethan Hawke:And so commitment, I think a lot of confidence can, confidence can come from two places. One is experience and another is commitment. There's a line actually in the movie Blaze about confidence because it's a mystery to me how we, when we're at our worst, it's usually because we aren't confident. When we lie to somebody, when we're hateful to somebody we care about or maybe somebody we just met even, you know, something is we're letting the worst parts of ourselves lead. And Ben Dickey, the lead actor, has this thing that he, you know, one of the things that gives you confidence is knowing that you're alive.

14:29Ethan Hawke:Simply knowing that you actually have air in your lungs and that your heart is beating right now and that it actually won't forever. Yeah. It actually puts your finger on something very tangibly real. Like a sun. You know, one of the things that I think that people love about a sunrise or a sunset is it marks this day. Unlike this is really happening. And from that, you realize that life is passing and that you can't waste these moments. And for some mysterious reason, confidence can be drawn there. Because you can see the melodramas, the little things that shake your confidence aren't real. Oh, she won't like me.

15:04Ethan Hawke:Maybe I'll fail. failure feels so much better if you know you were committed. Yeah. It's just true. Absolutely. And I think that's the sports fan in me always. I love, you don't ever have to feel bad about losing a game if you gave it your all, if you leave it all in the field. You know, it's the expression I heard watching an athlete once. Somebody said, there's no quitting that guy. I thought what a great expression. Permission to fail. You know, I remember one of my Richard Linkletter directing me one time said, you know, what he didn't like about a certain actor he was talking about is that something happened during the day and he gave himself permission to fail.

15:47Ethan Hawke:That was the reason why I wasn't going to do a good job today. And he said, you just got to never give yourself permission. You're going to fail. We're all going to fail all the time. That's part of living. But don't give yourself permission. You know, go down swinging. Absolutely. And, you know, I try to do that even if it's one of the things that is lousy about the film business. If you're a painter, for example, and you're painting a picture and you get about halfway through it and you're going to go, this is not going to work. You stop and you put it in the, you know, garage or whatever. You paint over the canvas.

16:15Ethan Hawke:You wait two years till you have the idea to fix it. When you're halfway through a movie, sometimes you know it's not going to work. You know, you just know it. You feel it in your mind. But you got to finish it because all these people are being paid. And you're like, damn it, I know this isn't going to work. And what you can't do, you know, I actually heard Paul Schrader speak about this so beautifully. He really believes that a big part of cinema is casting, you know, and if you cast it wrong, you figure it out about two weeks into the shoot and it's just over. And when you cast it right, you can't, you know, then everything starts working all by itself.

16:51Adam K. W. M. K. J. F. M. A. M. L. K.:And that's the way I've come to feel that way. You mentioned Linklater, and I want to talk about him here. We have just a little bit of time left. I kind of hate this trend on social media of parents sharing funny or poignant things their precocious kids supposedly just said, but now I'm going to be guilty of it. I got a text from my daughter Sophie, completely out of the blue, recently, and it said this, it is two weeks from my 14th birthday this is exactly the age juliet fell in love with romeo now she was reading shakespeare in school but my first thought was shoot me you know i'm just i'm not prepared for any of this but my second thought was i think she's ready for before sunrise oh and i'm actually i'm really i'm really now eager to watch that film with her so i want you ethan

17:30Ethan Hawke:hawk to guide me should we dive into that say yeah uh first of all you know everybody does their own thing, but there's this thing that goes around with men that they're supposed to be scared of their daughter's sexuality. And it's like somehow they think it's a good quality. You know, I remember when Maya, my oldest, when she was turning 16, oh, you better keep those guys away, keep a shotgun at the door or something. And I was like, you know what, I'm going to give Maya permission to be her own shotgun. You know? And if you act all scared of her sexuality, then how is she supposed to feel? You know?

18:05Ethan Hawke:And there's a great movie that Chris Christopherson plays a dad and it's called A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries. It's written by James Jones and Chris plays this old war veteran and writer. And, and I saw it really affected me because Chris just, his character just loves his daughter and gives her permission to be a hundred percent human being, meaning you are a sexual person. Julia did fall in love with Romeo and you know what? It's beautiful. And is she prepared to fall in love? No. Were you? No. nobody is. You're never going to do it all right. But you can give her confidence. Confidence to know that she's in charge and she doesn't need to be scared of him.

18:47Ethan Hawke:She doesn't need a dad with a shotgun behind her. She can handle herself and she can go have a good time and she can make mistakes and she can recover from them. That's this idea of innocence and this idea that we're not allowed to make mistakes and that we are allowed to make mistakes and we're allowed to grow up. And if we don't, if we don't, then we're just going to live in a little tiny, tiny glass world. And I've given my daughter permission to make a big fool of herself if she wants. Um, and to break some hearts and to get her heart broken. Um, and I think I was really, I gotta tell you, one of the best moments of my life was Maya was about 18.