Ethan Hawke is getting candid about his thoughts on some of Hollywood's biggest franchises, including Star Wars and Harry Potter.
During a master class at the Venice Film Festival on Monday, the actor-director compared the films by frequent collaborator Richard Linklater to those of the aforementioned 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 not a Jedi,” he joked. “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.’"
He continued, "It’s kind of 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, is 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.”
Together, the two have made "9 or 10 films together, depending on how you count," Hawke told the audience — including the Before trilogy and Boyhood. The actor said he credits the former with his forming a more mature take on films. "That was the beginning of my adult relationship to movies, making Before Sunrise, and the friendship [with Linklater] that came after that," he said.
The latest Hawke-Linklater collaboration is Blue Moon, a film centered around Lorenz Hart — the songwriter who worked with Richard Rodgers before Rodgers became a successful duo with Oscar Hammerstein II. The film is set in 1943 during the opening night of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s hit musical Oklahoma!
In Venice, Hawke revealed that Linklater showed him the "amazing" script for Blue Moon 12 years ago but told him they needed to wait a while to film it, citing Hawke's good looks.
“‘You’re still too attractive,’” Hawke recalled Linklater saying. “‘We got to wait until you’re a little less attractive.’”
Last year, Linklater saw Hawke on a talk show and decided it was time. Hawke jokingly acted offended.
"'Hey, I saw you on Jimmy Fallon... let’s make Blue Moon, we’re ready,'" he recalled Linklater telling him. "I thought, ‘go to hell.'"
Blue Moon, which was shot this summer, does not yet have a release date.
Elsewhere in the wide-ranging conversation, Hawke brought out his inner film nerd to talk about what he thinks is the “geometry” and “math” behind a good film.
“If you can’t tell, I can’t help it, I just feel like a student of this profession," he told the audience. "There is a certain geometry to all film and the geometry is different for small, indie art film than a horror film. The geometry is different for a western. The geometry is different for a romantic comedy. There’s certain ways and rules that the universe wants these stories to be told in.”
Hawke said he learned to use this geometry to calibrate his own performances, too, once he realized "one of the ways that I could make my work different — in different keys or octaves or whatever — would be to really play with the genres."
"For example," he said, "if you see Anthony Hopkins in a drama it's very different than when you see his work in a horror film, and I think the more of this math that you learn, the more effective of a storyteller you become.”
