Ethan Hawke Breaks Down His Career, From 'Training Day' to 'Boyhood'

When we were first friends, I was a star,

and he was a reader,

and he was in acting class with some friends of mine,

and now he was Academy Award-winning Philip Seymour Hoffman.

The power dynamic had shifted,

and Sidney Lumet fanned the flames of it.

I'd come in in the morning and Sidney would say,

I saw dailies last night.

Phil is so good.

Not since Marlon Brando have I seen work like that.

At wrap of the movie, I went up to Phil and I said,

This has been a great experience,

but I'm so glad it's over.

Because if I gotta hear one more time

from that old dog that,

'Not since Marlon Brando have I seen work like this,'

and Phil goes, He said that to you?

He said that to me every day about you.

And we walked over to Sydney and we said,

You told us both the other one was like Marlon Brando.

He's like, Eh, you guys are so easy to play.

It's unbelievable.

[gentle music]

Hello, my name's Ethan Hawke,

and this is the timeline of my career.

I get it.

Your people have been visiting our planet for,

well, well, since ancient times

and now you've come back to check up on us

and, and explain everything, right?

It's a very interesting story.

Anybody who's interested in going into this career

should know that it's extremely painful.

I remember River Phoenix and I went to the premiere

of the Explorers at the Ziegfeld Movie Theatre.

This is a big deal.

Ziegfeld was huge.

It was just this massive movie theater,

and the expectations on that movie were giant.

Joe Dante's previous film had been Gremlins,

which would've been, you know, just huge.

They'd spent $30 million on the movie in 1984.

It's like a $100 million movie or something,

you know, it was a big deal.

River and I were so excited.

And we went to the bathroom afterwards,

and, you know, in the years since it come out, we changed,

we didn't look the same as we did in the movie,

and people were just talking about how bad the movie

was with us right there at the urinal.

I heard somebody say, Well, America's voted,

and Ethan Hawke is not a movie star.

Now, I was 14.

It seems like an awfully cruel,

for the votes to be in at 14, that doesn't seem fair.

But it was a great lesson about expectation,

and about why are you doing something.

And if you're doing it to be a big shot,

you're gonna be humiliated.

But if you're doing it because you love it,

they can humiliate you. My name is Steven Meeks.

Oh, this is Todd Anderson.

Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you.

Charlie Dalton.

Knox Overstreet.

Todd's brother was Jeffrey Anderson.

Oh yeah, sure.

Peter was, for lack of a better word, he is,

and I mean this in the best sense of the word,

there's something mystical about him.

He was a true master craftsman.

He thought about making movies with real discipline.

And I'm watching him direct Robin Williams,

not an easy thing to do, 'cause Robin is a comic genius,

but dramatic acting was still new to Robin at that time.

And watching that relationship, like, in the room,

I was four feet away

while they're talking about performance,

and that was something you don't unsee.

O Captain, My Captain.

Who knows where that comes from?

Anybody?

[Spaz blows nose]

Not a clue?

It's from a poem by Walt Whitman about Mr. Abraham Lincoln.

Now, in this class, you can either call me Mr. Keating.

Or, if you're slightly more daring,

O Captain, My Captain.

Robin Williams didn't do the script,

and I didn't know you could do that.

If he had an idea, he just did it.

He didn't ask permission.

And that was a new door that was opened to my brain,

that you could play like that.

And Peter liked it

as long as we still achieved the same goals

that the script had.

They had a very different way of working,

but they didn't judge one another or resist one another.

They worked with each other.

That's exciting.

That's when you get at the stuff

of what great collaboration can do,

is that you don't have to be the same,

but you don't have to hate somebody

for being different than you are.

And then, the collective imagination

can become very, very powerful,

'cause the movie becomes bigger

than one person's point of view.

It's containing multiple perspectives.

Do you have any idea what they were arguing about?

Do, do you speak English?

Yeah.

No, I'm sorry my German is not very good.

Have you ever heard that as couples get older,

they lose their ability to hear each other?

No.

Well, supposedly men lose their ability

to hear higher-pitched sounds,

and women eventually lose hearing on the low end.

I first met Richard Linklater

when I went to see Slacker.

We're talking about, you know, 1990, 1991,

and I was becoming an adult, and this was a new voice.

It was like a voice that felt like it was my generation.

It was like it wasn't copying old people's movies.

It wasn't trying to be Hollywood.

It was somebody communicating with me and my generation.

It was a movie that I thought about making.

I think, like, a lot of us

had thought about making something like that.

But he did it.

So I was very interested in him.

And he was from Austin, and I was from Austin.

I was like, Who is this guy?

And then, I was starting a theater company

and we were doing a play called Sophistry

by Jonathan Marc Sherman,

and Anthony Rapp was in it.

And so Anthony Rapp invited us to a rough cut

of Dazed and Confused.

When I saw Dazed and Confused,

I thought that there was a great injustice

in the universe that just occurred,

'cause I was supposed to be in that movie.

I wanted to be in that movie.

I didn't understand why I wasn't in that movie.

And then, I heard a couple weeks later

that the director of that movie, the director of Slacker,

this guy Richard Linklater, was coming to see our play.

He came and we all went out to dinner afterwards.

Dinner, we didn't eat, you know, we drank.

Till, like, four in the morning I just talked to this guy.

He brought up that night this idea

for a film he had called Before Sunrise,

and that's how our friendship started.

I wanna keep talking to you, you know?

I have no idea what your situation is, but, uh,

but I feel like we have some kind of a connection, right?

Yeah, me too.

Yeah. Right, well, great.

So, listen, here's the deal, this is what we should do.

You should get off the train with me here in Vienna

and come check out the town.

What? Come on. It'll be fun.

Come on. What would we do?

Um, I don't know.

All I know is I have to catch an Austrian Airlines flight

tomorrow morning at 9:30,

and I don't really have enough money for a hotel,

so I was just gonna walk around,

and it'd be a lot more fun if you came with me.

And if I turned out to be some kind of psycho,

you know, you just get on the next train.

That movie's two people,

and it's a movie about the connection

between what can happen when a man and a woman

really connect emotionally,

you know, what is real intimacy,

real intimacy.

And he knew he wanted to build that movie

around the two actors.

I mean, he would probably tell you

if he didn't find the right two people,

I'm not sure he was gonna make that movie.

You know, he was hunting for co-conspirators.

I was doing the auditions,

and then I got paired with Julie Delpy,

and I don't think I'd ever felt so stupid in my life.

It was incredibly humbling.

She was 21 and seemed like the stuff of a Tolstoy novel

or something, you know?

I mean, she was deep, and wild,

and mercurial, and, you know, I felt like a dumb American.

You know, I just felt like a nimrod.

And somehow Rick liked that combination and cast us both.

And then, we worked on those movies for 20 years.

And we're not gonna call, write,

or-- Nah, it's depressing.

Yeah. Okay. All right.

All right, your train's gonna leave.

Say goodbye.

Bye.

Goodbye.

Au revoir.

Later.

[kisses smacking]

One of the things that I think makes those movies special

is romantic films is they feel genderless.

A lot of romantic movies

feel like it's made with a male gaze

or it feels like it's made with a female gaze.

And Rick's peculiar genius on those movies

is it doesn't have a gender-based gaze.

It's not Jesse's movie, it's not Celine's movie.

He's really using us to create the characters,

to create a landscape where you can actually see them both

like a scientist might see them,

and it makes it really interesting.

We got interested in revisiting

those characters as they aged,

because life gets more complex.

Could we sustain those complexities?

What you think we gon do?

We gon, we gon roll up in a black and white, huh?

Slap the cuffs on him, You're under arrest.

That's a high roller, dawg.

Take the money.

Man, I already told you I'm not gonna take that.

All right? Just take it.

I'm not gonna take that. Okay, don't.

Just burn it, barbecue it, fish-fry it, I don't give a fuck.

But the boys will feel better about--

Fuck their feelings.

Denzel is one of a kind or one of a generation.

It's kind of like playing rhythm guitar really well,

to let somebody solo.

Like, you can screw up the rhythm,

you can screw it up.

The only reason this guy's not gonna win the Academy Award

for this movie is if I screw it up,

so I had to be present and use everything I've learned.

And Antoine Fuqua is a wonderful director,

and he loves authenticity,

and he loves things that smell right.

Does it feel lived in?

Does it feel real?

What am I photographing?

And he just gave us a world.

And if your game, you know,

Denzel's imagination is so powerful

that he's gonna bring you into an imaginative universe

where you don't know what's gonna happen,

you can just live it.

And those lines between, are we improvising?

Are these lines of dialogue?

What's happening here?

Get really unclear and it gets really exciting.

Move real slow. Keep your hands where I can see 'em.

I want you put that money in that bag,

take your weapons

and place 'em inside that pillowcase right there.

[money tapping]

Congratulations, son.

You made it.

You passed the test.

You're a narc, you're in.

Please put the gun down

before you give my girl a heart attack here.

Put the gun down. I said take the money

and put it in that bag.

Take your weapons and place them inside that pillowcase.

You can fuck your appointment with the Russians.

You're not gonna make it.

There's a few films that changed my career, you know?

The first most obvious one is Dead Poets Society,

'cause all these things opened up.

But Training Day taught me

that you can make a mainstream Hollywood movie

and it can be great.

I was in my twenties and I had a kind of more

punk-rock spirit

about everything that was successful was phony.

With Denzel, I realized, Oh, wait a second,

this can be done.

You can make meaningful cinema in Hollywood.

You have to be really good.

And so opportunities changed for me dramatically

after Training Day.

Did you touch anything? I don't think so.

You don't think so? I don't think so, no!

No, I didn't touch anything! Think, goddammit.

Now, you think!

Did you touch anything? I don't,

I don't like this, Andy!

All right, shut up! I don't like--

Shut up!

Did you touch anything? No.

Are we good?

Let's go.

Sidney Lumet didn't just direct Dog Day Afternoon,

he directed Marlon Brando in Tennessee Williams'

The Fugitive Kind.

Like, he directed Serpico.

He directed Henry Fonda in 12 Angry Men.

He directed Network.

One of my favorite, Nick Nolte in Q & A

is like this incredible performance.

Even his lesser known films

have the stuff of greatness in them.

So I had been friends with Philip Seymour Hoffman for years,

and Phil brought Sidney to see me in a play.

I was doing Hurlyburly.

That's where I met Sidney.

And then, I got a call the next day, Phil was like,

Yeah, Sydney wants to talk to you.

Read the script. Read the script.

How did it feel being cast by him?

It felt great.

It felt like the way

a pro baseball player might feel

if all of a sudden the Yankees wanna sign you or something,

Wait, I'm gonna play for the Yankees?

Just say it again, I'm in.

What are you talking about?

Just say it again, I'm in.

I'm in.

[both laughing]

What?

I just wanted to see if you were pulling

any of that chickenshit baby stuff

like when we were kids, you know,

It doesn't count, I had my fingers crossed.

I'm in. Phil was great.

And by that, I mean, he didn't suffer fools lightly.

He was one of those people

that it just felt life and death to him

whether or not we did the scene well.

The stakes were very high for him.

And it could be scary.

I remember once we were rehearsing,

and it's when I found the character,

it's gonna sound mean, I think, but it wasn't mean.

We were rehearsing and I was,

I don't know, pouring some coffee on a break,

and I said, I just have no idea who this guy is.

And Phil said, You wanna know why?

I'm like, Why?

He goes, 'Cause you keep trying to play alpha,

and I'm the alpha.

Stop it.

I was like [taps foot].

And for some reason it all just clicked.

It's like he started a dynamic between the two of us

that was right.

Power and status in brothers, in society,

it all plays a game.

And, you know, when we were first friends, I was a star,

and he was a reader,

and he was in acting class with some friends of mine,

but I was already starring in movies, right?

And now he was Academy Award-winning Philip Seymour Hoffman

and he's casting me.

You know, the power dynamic had shifted

and I wasn't letting it shift.

And there's a similar air

between Andy and Hank,

and Sidney Lumet fanned the flames of it.

I'd come in in the morning and Sidney would say,

I saw dailies last night. [sucks teeth]

Phil is so good.

He's so good.

I've seen you guys are doing it.

You know, not since Marlon Brando

have I seen work like that?

And I'd be like, Yeah, great, great.

And and my stuff was--

Oh yeah, yeah, it was fine.

I mean, it must be a real honor to work with him.

I'm like, Yeah, it is. It's a real honor.

At wrap of the movie, I went up to Phil and I said,

You know, this has been a great experience,

but I'm so glad it's over.

I said, Because if I gotta hear one more time

from that old dog that,

'Not since Marlon Brando have I seen work like this,'

and Phil goes, He said that to you?

And I was like, Yeah.

He goes, He said that to me every day about you.

And we walked over to Sidney and we said,

You told us both the other one was like Marlon Brando.

He's like, Eh, you guys are so easy to play.

It's unbelievable.

You found this at Dripping Springs?

Uh-huh. Wow.

What else you got?

Well, um, these are snake vertebrae.

Snake vertebrae? That's disgusting, huh?

Mason, I don't want you collecting snake vertebrae anymore.

[both laughing]

Is this the feather I sent you?

Yeah! Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, it is. Yeah.

Oh, Dad, um, I forgot to show you these,

um, these basketball pictures.

You're on a basketball team?

Yeah. Wow.

Well, for me, it was absolutely incredible.

I can't wax poetic enough about it.

Linklater came to visit me right after my son was born,

and he told me that he really wanted

to make a movie about childhood,

but he thought that every coming-of-age story

had a little lie to it,

which is that you come of age at one moment,

even the great ones like 400 Blows or something.

There's not a moment a human being comes of age.

It's a series of moments that collect.

And he was like, I really wanna do a movie that basically,

I wanna do it over 12 years,

first grade through 12th grade.

It's like, most of us,

our first memory is somewhere right around first grade,

five or sixth.

As an American, you know, that's the grid

that almost all of us live on, you know, 12th grade,

then our lives kind of become our own.

He's like, I wanna make a movie about that grid.

It's gonna be 12 short films.

And I remember just thinking this is an incredible idea.

Like, but it's basically illegal the idea.

You know, we couldn't sign a contract.

You can't sign anything for over seven years.

You know, so it's a handshake deal,

even with the little kids, you know?

It's like, kids could've quit anytime they wanted to.

At first, it felt like playing in a band

at your friend's house for about five or six years.

And then, once we'd done it for six, seven, eight years,

we all started to really believe in it,

'cause it was incredible what was happening.

By the time it was over,

it felt like it was a part of the fabric of our lives.

We had decade-long memories of making this movie.

You know, it was wild.

Oh, come on Jimmy, man,

you knew the kids were coming this weekend.

Can you just help me out a little bit, just?

I'm sorry, muffin.

Yeah, don't muffin me, all right?

Don't put me in that position, all right?

I'm not your fucking Tony Randall.

One of the things about Boyhood that was so hard

is that I'm all the time being put in scenes with people

who weren't really actors, right?

They're just kids. They're real.

They're just living and behaving.

And so, again, this exercise of non-acting becomes the game.

Because if I start acting with these kids

who are really just talking

about Pineapple Express or whatever,

I just look like a big, phony knucklehead.

So I had to really be present with them,

and it was thrilling.

And it was thrilling to watch them grow up

and start to have more agency

in what they wanted their characters to care about, and say,

and think about.

And, of course, I was growing as a dad,

you know, my kids were growing up,

and I was able use what I'd learned

from that experience as a parent

and put that into the movie.

You're not an actor. Neither are you.

Well, that's true. [laughs]

Don't tell anyone.

I had prepped and worked on a movie with Rick years ago,

like, Chet Baker, at 24, 25.

So Born to be Blue felt like I was making a sequel

to a movie I never made.

You know, 15 years before or whatever,

I'd prepped this movie to where I was learning the trumpet

and thinking about Chet and all this stuff,

reading books about Chet Baker.

And now, all of a sudden, here I was 40

and being asked to revisit this character.

A very, very interesting moment to meet him,

which is after he'd been beaten up really badly

and he lost his teeth.

And for most trumpeters, if you lose your teeth, it's over.

And Chet Baker did a remarkable thing,

which is he just taught himself

to play the trumpet over again.

He had to use his mouth in a totally different way

than he ever had before.

And he did it, and he put himself back together.

And, of course, it was a great opportunity

for him to become sober,

which he did not take.

What I loved about the movie is it's like,

it's the perfect definition of bittersweet,

which is that it's a real victory,

which is that he learns to play again.

And it's a real defeat,

because, you know, the same trappings

that existed when he first played,

still existed and he fell into the same trap again.

Sorry, Reverend Toller didn't understand

the implications here.

May I ask a question? Yeah, go ahead.

Will God forgive us?

Will God forgive us for what we're doing to his creation?

That's what Mensana asked me when I visited him.

There's, there's been a lot of loose talk

about environmental change.

There is scientific consensus, 97%.

The thing I'll first say about First Reformed

is it's probably the best script I ever read.

It was just finished.

The script itself was a finished work of art.

I remember saying to my wife,

like, I'll make this movie on a phone.

And I think Paul felt very deeply the crisis that we all

feel about what's happening with our environment.

How can we do anything about it?

And how can we be a better person?

And what good is our faith

if it doesn't make us better citizens?

And, you know, all these really,

really sophisticated questions.

♪ My Lord so near ♪

♪ Leaning ♪

♪ On the everlasting arms ♪

♪ Leaning ♪

♪ Leaning ♪

I know some things about it

that I'm not sure are helpful to say,

but I think that

that ending

is a cinematic expression of a thought

that is articulated earlier in the film,

was that wisdom is holding two opposing thoughts

at the same time.

And that that shot is an attempt

at the continuity of opposites,

like, how do you express it?

It's real, it's not real.

He's dead.

He's finding life for the first time.

It's a symbol.

So to answer it is to rob it of its power.

The thing that I know is how much thought

Paul put into that,

and that I read multiple drafts with multiple endings,

and I watched him arrive at that as the right ending.

And I found it incredibly satisfying,

it does exactly what Paul,

even if you don't like it, it's doing what he wants to do.

So it's fine.

And I know Paul has said before that,

A great movie starts as you walk out of the theater

after it was over.

A great film should be like a bell,

and it's not the ringing of the bell that's important.

It's the vibration and what it awakens in you

that's significant.

And so the the end of that movie is a bell ringing,

and it's designed to walk you out of the theater

thinking about the themes of the film,

rather than finishing a story.

I say to not assert yourself

for the rights of the oppressed is to fall down

and worship at the Moloch of Despotism!

Yes, sir. We hear you! That's right.

We must, we must join together

and form an anti-slavery movement.

Black folks, white folks working together,

committed for the violence necessary to end slavery!

Yes, sir! James McBride,

who wrote the book The Good Lord Bird,

is one of the kindest, wisest,

funniest, deepest artists I've ever met,

and I admire him wildly,

and there's a lot of James McBride in that character.

And John Brown, a lot of things are said about him,

but I just admired him.

I admired John Brown, and I admired his faith,

and I admired the courage of his convictions.

And we were doing it right in the time period

when, oh, there's a lot of, you know, warring thought

about whether these statues

from the Civil War should come down.

Then, they came down,

and now people are putting 'em back up,

and, you know, all the kind of madness

that is the United States' relationship with its past.

It was a limited series.

So I got to play the character for eight hours of film,

which was just months, and months,

and months of playing him.

I think so many of us feel inert and inept

in that we can't do anything about injustice in the world.

And to get to play a character who's like,

Dammit, I'm gonna go down swinging.

I'm pulling the sock out of my mouth, you know?

And just admired it.

And the fact that McBride,

the way McBride tells the story of John Brown

is with so much wit, and humor, and love.

It's a lot like if Redd Foxx or Richard Pryor

told you the story of John Brown.

It's not self-serious, it's not maudlin.

It's talking about great, great pain and suffering,

and does it, you know, laughing its ass off the whole way.

So it's complicated and I just loved it.

And I do also think, sidebars,

the pandemic happened right after it,

so I played that part,

and then went into the oblivion,

you know, and I felt like I wanted to go back to the set

when there was no pandemic.

I am a Tulsa truth-storyian.

A truth-storyian?

What exactly is a truth-storyian?

I'm glad you asked.

I read stuff.

I research stuff.

I drive around, and I find stuff,

and then I write about stuff.

Some people care, some people don't.

I'm chronically unemployed, always broke.

But let's just say that I am obsessed with the truth.

I just felt I understood him

as, you know, I was a young man in the nineties

and was in love with bookstores, and LPs, and zines,

and, you know, articles written in The Village Voice

and Hunter S. Thompson,

and I just felt like I understood Lee.

Sterlin was already a friend.

We'd had this weird relationship.

We'd actually met through a friend.

And we started writing a movie together,

and then we were becoming friends writing together.

We have a shared sense, a love of history,

and a love of being playful with it,

and with humor, and we just really got along.

I didn't feel like there was any reason

why I couldn't play the guy,

and so I did.

Elizabeth.

Larry. My irreplaceable Elizabeth.

I'm so happy to see you.

Do you like the hair? I love it.

It's much better than the red.

I think so. I mean, I like the red, too,

but this is much more otherworldly.

I have to go set up for the party.

No, no, no, no, I got you some flowers.

Aw, I'm overwhelmed.

Well, I have that effect on people.

The thing about Larry Hart's height

is it's a big part of his personality.

So to avoid it, the world is heightist.

People ignored him.

If he didn't talk all the time,

nobody would pay attention to him.

And he wanted to be seen,

and so I knew it was a big part of him.

And, you know, it was really fun.

We got a guy who's a toy inventor

and an old Stagecraft magician

to start working on how we could do this,

'cause I knew the history of movies.

I mean, how they make Bogart and Redford,

and all these other people look tall who weren't tall.

Like, Well, couldn't you make somebody

look a lot shorter than they were?

And it's gotta be ways to do that.

What was fun about it

is we used 80 million different tricks.

No digital effects, no nothing.

Linklater's movies are about realism.

So, like, the idea that we do something,

We'll shrink him by 8% and let the computer do it,

you know, it's like we didn't do any of that.

We just did all these old-school tricks about perspective

and where the floors are,

and it was really, really fun.

If you see the beauty in everything,

you're going to cry all day.

You know, it's the Tennessee Williams line

about the tick of the clock,

it says, Loss, loss, loss, loss all day long.

If you're that sensitive,

you know, you're gonna cry salty tears.

Another point, not dissimilar to Chet Baker,

Chet Baker was a huge Rodgers and Hart fan.

Alcoholism helps for the day and destroys a life, right?

And this person is just,

his intelligence and his sensitivity,

he's like an open nerve walking through the world

and alcohol is the only thing that feels like a jacket.

So his great superpower is language,

insight, wit,

and that's how he arms himself.

But it's not enough.

This guy is going to the best friend's Opening Night party,

he's basically going in front of a firing squad.

This is a movie about a man who dies of a broken heart.

What a complex, great role.

Sterlin and Linklater offered me two of the best parts

of my career that I got to do in one year.

I secretly worry that I'll be vibrating off this year

and that, like, it's all downhill from here.

But, you know,

but so be it.

As soon as you start trying to build a character,

before you can even ask that question,

you have to ask, Who is my character?

Who is Ethan?

There's an aspect of self-knowledge that has to take place

before you can attempt the shamanistic process

of changing yourself.

And that can be extremely confusing.

Children do it with ease, because they do it playfully.

And as you get more mature,

you start hanging onto your identity in a different way.

Most of us are so much more expansive than we think.

It's very flexible in our experiences

that we think are so unique,

are a part of the human experience.

And so the process of acting a lot,

it starts to expand what you call the self.

That's where the deep end of the pool

of acting I think lives.

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