Ethan Hawke
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Back to One, Episode 212: Ethan Hawke on The Last Movie Stars
Ethan Hawke returns to the podcast (first time was episode 41) to talk about The Last Movie Stars, his epic six-part documentary that chronicles Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward’s iconic careers and decades-long partnership. Years ago, a friend of the couple interviewed Paul, Joanne, and many people close to them for a potential memoir, but Newman burned the tapes. Miraculously, the transcripts survive, so Hawke called on his acting friends to bring them to life. The result is both an intimate portrait of the lives and careers of this great duo and also a constant celebration of the endeavor of […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Jul 19, 2022 -
“It Always Seems That the Film Comes Together When You Just Go About Doing It”: Abel Ferrara on the Ethan Hawke-Starring Zeros and Ones
“Jesus was just another soldier, another war casualty — but on who’s side?” That’s military man JJ, played by Ethan Hawke, in voiceover as he walks the COVID-deserted streets of Rome in Abel Ferrara’s new Zeros and Ones. There’s a terrorist plot to blow up the Vatican but JJ’s got a more personal (and possibly intertwined) mission as well: his twin revolutionary brother, Justin (also Hawke), has been captured, and JJ’s nocturnal journey is an attempt to rescue him and possibly find some sort of spiritual salvation along the way. But the above is just the most reductive parsing of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 19, 2021 -
“Until John Brown Becomes the Messiah of the White Man, Black Lives will Never Matter to White Americans”: Darnell Martin on The Good Lord Bird
“I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.”—John Brown on the morning of his death, December 2nd, 1859 The 1859 public execution of John Brown—the 19th century American abolitionist put to death for taking up arms in an attempt to rid the country of slavery—was attended by men, including Stonewall Jackson and John Wilkes Booth, who would go on to make a much larger dent in textbooks. Yet, […]
by Erik Luers on Nov 11, 2020 -
Back to One, Episode 41: First Reformed‘s Ethan Hawke
Ethan Hawke’s “staying power” is grounded in hard work. He survived being the poster child of Generation X (Reality Bites), and thrived as Richard Linklater’s go-to actor (The Before Trilogy, Boyhood) and always returns to the true home of the actor–the theater (he’s currently starring in True West on Broadway). Now he has delivered one of the most critically acclaimed performances of the year in Paul Schrader’s First Reformed. He generously shares the wisdom and knowledge he’s acquired over the years as an actor, and is extremely eloquent when doing so. In this episode, he talks about the importance of […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Jan 15, 2019 -
James DeMonaco on The First Purge, Test Screenings, Filming Guns in Washington D.C. and the Trump Administration
When I speak to James DeMonaco, The First Purge is only 48 hours from hitting theaters, but the franchise’s creator is otherwise engaged. DeMonaco has two production days left on his latest film, Once Upon a Time in Staten Island. It’s a personal movie, a coming-of-age drama starring Naomi Watts and Bobby Cannavale. The film that exists because DeMonaco wrote and directed 2013’s The Purge, plus its two sequels. His latest is even funded by his boss of the last several years, Jason Blum, the namesake head of horror unit Blumhouse Productions, making it only the second non-genre picture they’ve handled […]
by Matt Prigge on Jul 3, 2018 -
“Like a Long Mosaic Music Video that I Didn’t Want to End”: Editor Jason Gourson on Blaze
The first fiction feature film from actor Ethan Hawke since 2006’s The Hottest State, Blaze tells the story of the relatively unsung country musician Blaze Foley. The film’s star, Benjamin Dickey, won the Special Jury Award for Achievement in Acting at the Sundance Film Festival last week. Hawke hired editor Jason Gourson (The Magicians, Glee) to cut his impressionistic biopic. Below, Gourson speaks with Filmmaker about collaborating with Hawke and growing up as the son of a film editor. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 29, 2018 -
“It’s the Moment of Spontaneity that We Remember”: Director Ethan Hawke | BLAZE
As you made your film during the increasingly chaotic backdrop of the last year, how did you as a filmmaker control, ignore, give in to or, conversely, perhaps creatively exploit the wild and unpredictable? What roles did chaos and order play in your films? This is a phenomenal question. On my very first movie I learned incredibly quickly that the film loves spontaneity – it devours it. One of the things that made Marlon Brando’s career was the beauty everyone discovered in his spontaneity. Cinema is a little bit like jazz that way, where it needs a certain form or […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Jan 21, 2018 -
Five Questions for First Reformed Director Paul Schrader
Paul Schrader returns to form with a deeply introspective film, First Reformed, which, following screenings in Venice, Telluride and Toronto, screens tonight at the New York Film Festival, where it was a late addition to the program. The writer of films including Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and director of films including American Gigolo and Affliction delivers a new work that both contains echoes of his previous pictures depicting “God’s Lonely Men” while also being quite unlike anything he’s ever done. (Plus, argues Vadim Rizov, something of a treatise on the role of Slow Cinema today.) Ethan Hawke stars as a former […]
by Ariston Anderson on Oct 6, 2017 -
Amy Adams and Ethan Hawke to Receive Actor Tributes and Oliver Stone to Receive Director Tribute at 2016 IFP Gotham Independent Film Awards
The Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP), Filmmaker‘s parent organization, announced today that Ethan Hawke and Amy Adams will be presented with Actor and Actress Tributes, and Oliver Stone will receive the Director Tribute at the 2016 IFP Gotham Independent Film Awards set for Monday, November 28th at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City. “We are honored to have Amy Adams, Ethan Hawke, and Oliver Stone as our Actress, Actor, and Director Tribute honorees at this year’s Gotham Awards,” said Joana Vicente, Executive Director of IFP and the Made in NY Media Center. “Each with a remarkable body of work that […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Sep 7, 2016 -
Friend or Foe: Maggie’s Plan
Until filmmaker, novelist, and funnywoman Rebecca Miller weighed in with the invigorating Maggie’s Plan, the history of films addressing the impasse between order and randomness — in theological terms, the conflict between free will and determinism — has rested on the mature products of profound Western European minds. Bresson’s Au Hasard, Balthasar and Dreyer’s Gertrud, for example, are stark, minimalist, and melancholic, with a divine presence at the very least implied. In Miller’s movie, intellectual musings are negligible in the fate debate. Destiny, whether embraced or resisted, is built into something more palpable: the actions of her quirky characters. Her earlier […]
by Howard Feinstein on May 16, 2016
